Friends Among the Soldier Poets                      9

They want to call No Man's Land 'England' because we keep su¬
premacy there. It is like the eternal place of gnashing teeth; the Slough
of Despond could be contained in one of its crater-holes; the fires of
Sodom and Gomorrah could not light a candle to it—to find the way
to Babylon the Fallen. It is pock-marked like a body of foulest disease
and its odour is the breath of cancer. I have not seen any dead. I have
done worse. In the dank air I have perceived it, and in the darkness,
felt. . . . No Man's Land under snow is like the face of the moon
chaotic, crater-ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness.
To call it 'England'! I would as soon call my House (!) Krupp Villa,
or my child Chlorina-Phosgena. . . . The people of England needn't
hope. They must agitate. But they are not yet agitated even.

Owen and Sassoon were independently reaching the same conclu¬
sion concerning the insanity of the war. Equally important to the
literary historian in these letters are the detailed descriptions, the
indignation, the Biblical references and the sense of pity—all char¬
acteristics of his war poems.

On the night of March 11 Owen suffered a concussion as a re¬
sult of a fall into a cellar or shell-hole at Le Quesnoy-en-Santerre.
Intense fighting at Selency, St. Quentin, Savy Wood and Qui-
veres left Owen shaky, tremulous and confused, and in no condi¬
tion to command troops, according to his Commanding Officer,
Lt.-Colonel Luxmoore. On May 2 he wrote to his mother, "The
Doctor suddenly was moved to forbid me to go into action next
time the Battalion go, which will be in a day or two. I did not go
sick or anything, but he is nervous about my nerves, and sent me
down yesterday—labelled Neurasthenia. I still of course suffer
from the headaches traceable to my concussion ... in Action I
bear a charmed life and none of woman born can hurt me, as
regards flesh and bone, yet my nerves have not come out without
a scratch." The opening stanzas of "Exposure," written in Feb¬
ruary of 1917, poignantly portray Owen's state of mind at the
time: