The typical WW1 soldier was not an intellectual like Ernst Jünger or Wilfred Owen, but was a peasant draftee from Galicia or Bavaria or Sicily, with all the traditional religious ideas. The hothouse atmosphere of war brought everyone into a supernatural-oriented universe of ghosts and apparitions.
War continues to divide people, to change them forever, and I write about it both because I want people to understand the absolute futility of war, the 'pity of war' as Wilfred Owen called it.
I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir "Goodbye to All That," and a civilian memoir "Testament of Youth" by Vera Brittain .
I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir 'Goodbye to All That,' and a civilian memoir, 'Testament of Youth,' by Vera Brittain.
Before we understood that houses shift just over time because the ground is moving, the creaks in a house were assumed to be apparitions, or ghosts. Before we understood that we live on a planet, and there are others, the only answers to where we came from had to be something supernatural.
I studied Wilfred Owen for my English A Level, and that led me to Sassoon and Blunden, Rosenberg and Thomas.
As I crawled out of the abyss of combat and over the rail of the Sea Runner, I realized that compassion for the sufferings of others is a burden to those who have it. As Wilfred Owen's poem "Insensibility" puts it so well, those who feel most of others suffer most in war.
I don't think it's possible to c-call yourself a C-Christian and... and j-just leave out the awkward bits.' -Wilfred Owen
With supernatural things, I have heard ghosts, but I've never seen ghosts. I do seek ghosts and I would love to see one, but I would crap my pants.
The World War I, I'm a child of World War I. And I really know about the children of war. Because both my parents were both badly damaged by the war. My father, physically, and both mentally and emotionally. So, I know exactly what it's like to be brought up in an atmosphere of a continual harping on the war.
In war, discipline is superior to strength; but if that discipline is neglected there is no longer any difference between the soldier and the peasant.
I am not scared of ghosts. I don't believe in ghosts or in the supernatural.
Supernatural entities simply do not exist. This nonreality of the supernatural means, on the human level, that men do not possess supernatural and immortal souls; and, on the level of the universe as a whole, that our cosmos does not possess a supernatural and eternal God.
I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.... Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier.
It is with sincere affection or friendship as with ghosts and apparitions,--a thing that everybody talks of, and scarce any hath seen.
Shakespeare also introduces the supernatural into some of his tragedies; he introduces ghosts, and witches who have supernatural knowledge.
I was brought up as Christian, and while my ideas have changed, I have always felt myself religiously oriented.