Disability in British poetry of the First World War

Abstract

In 2005, K.D. Laird published an abrasive critique of the poem ‘Disabled’ by Wilfred Owen. This iconic trench poet of the First World War was accused of portraying his impaired veteran as a tragic victim of loss. However, 50 years before the modern disability movement, Owen lacked the language to interpret impairment as oppression. What ‘Disabled’ requires is a contextual analysis that integrates its literary qualities with the historical conditions. This article applies such an approach. Firstly, the technical devices used to tell the story are examined: for example, rhyming, verse structure and allusions. Secondly, the experience of impairment represented in the poem is related to early-twentieth-century British society: in particular to the initial patriotic enthusiasm for the War, to the influence of gender roles and to the limitations of state provision. In this way, we see how Owen’s literary image is situated within a historical time frame.

Keywords:

• disability
• poetry
• First World War
• Wilfred Owen
• literary context
• historical context

Acknowledgement

Anne Borsay^†

1954–2014

Professor Anne Borsay worked at Swansea University from 2002 until August 2014 when she sadly died following a short illness. Anne was a highly respected member of the Editorial Board of Disability & Society for several decades. Not only was she a pioneer of disability history, she was also held as a lovely person and a much-loved friend and colleague to many across our world wide journal community. Anne will be remembered as an outstanding scholar whose work established the place of disabled people within history. Her work made major contributions to the study of nursing history, disability and the humanities. Professor Borsay was in the final stages of editing this powerful and moving paper on Disability in the British Poetry of the First World War when she died. The poetry at the heart of the paper lends poignancy to the importance of Anne’s work and voice. Her analysis reveals to the full the brilliance and testimony of her contribution to disability studies. I am immensely grateful to Anne’s husband Professor Peter Borsay, Department of History and Welsh History at Aberystwyth University, for confirmation that publication of this paper for as wide dissemination as possible, would be Anne’s wish.

Professor Michele Moore

Editor, Disability & Society

Introduction

In 2005, K.D. Laird published an abrasive critique of the poem ‘Disabled’ by Wilfred Owen.¹ Writing in Disability Studies Quarterly, he accused this iconic, First World War trench poet of portraying the impaired veteran as a stereotypical victim of tragic loss (Laird 2005; see also Markotić 2007). But just as mid-nineteenth-century novelists had no socialist ideology to explain the social deprivation they depicted (Guy 1996), so Owen lacked the theoretical insights that were to emerge with the disability movement more than 50 years later (Campbell and Oliver 1996). What ‘Disabled’ requires is not an anachronistic assessment against our own contemporary criteria, but an interdisciplinary interrogation that situates the poem within the literary and historical environment of early-twentieth-century Britain. In applying such an approach, this article will pursue four main themes: disability in literary criticism, the literary representation of disability during the First World War, and the interpretation of ‘Disabled’ from both a literary and a historical perspective.

Disability in literary criticism

Disability was slow to arrive in literary studies, which itself lagged behind the humanities disciplines as a result of an association with belles-lettres; or works produced and consumed primarily for their aesthetic effect. From the early 1920s, however, a new ‘practical criticism’ emerged that focused closely on the text and examined it through a process akin to the laboratory experiment (Richards 1926). This emphasis on literary quality established an elitist canon of famous writers against whom literature was judged (Leavis 1962). From the 1960s, Marxist critics debunked this canon, arguing that all texts were cultural artefacts inseparable from historical processes (Moran 2002). After 1980, however, what increasingly challenged the dominance of ‘practical criticism’ was ‘New Historicism’: a methodology with history at its heart, which read texts as products shaping as well as shaped by a unique culture in a particular society at a specific point in time (Brannigan 1998).

With all texts admitted to the literary fold, the concept of an exemplary canon was discredited. And it is to these democratizing effects of ‘New Historicism’ that we owe the appearance of rich seams of analysis around social disadvantage, minority status and the body. In the United States, disability also started to benefit from this juncture (Snyder, Brueggemann, and Garland-Thomson 2002). In Britain, however, where the focus of disability studies has been more on the social sciences than the humanities, disability perspectives on literature have been slower to arrive. Therefore, although the poetry of the First World War has generated studies of nation (Marsland 1991), community (Kerr 1993), class (Hynes 1998), gender (Reilly 1981) and sexuality (Caesar 1993; Campbell 1997), disability passes largely unnoticed, with even discussions of the body not directly confronting physical impairment (Comer 1996). Only in the last 15 years has British literary disability studies taken off with the work of Stuart Murray at Leeds University and David Bolt at Liverpool Hope University; the launch of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies in 2006; and the foundation of two book series ‘Representations’ published by Liverpool University Press and ‘Literary Disability Studies’ published by Palgrave Macmillan.

But bringing the missing dimension of disability to the poetry of the First World War asks for more than simply importing literary perspectives because the interdisciplinarity promoted by the new British research draws on film and cultural studies, medicine and sociology, but not history. Only the most recent Palgrave Macmillan series aims to explore ‘the ways in which the literary imagination intersects with historical and contemporary attitudes towards disability’ (Literary Disability Studies n.d.). In many respects, therefore, New Historicism and its limitations persist. There are two main problems. New historicists tended, first, to downplay the formal analysis of texts whose construction is crucial to the conveyance of meaning (Barry 2007); and, second, to ‘consider all historical events the subject of an elusive, but generalized and universal condition of power’ (Brannigan 1998, 205). Peter Barry is thus compelling when he calls for us to ‘reopen negotiations’ with practical criticism and to build a ‘New Contextualism’ in which formal analysis of the text is retrieved and melded into an interdisciplinary composition where history is not reduced to a monolithic set of power relations but is recognized as a diverse and variable spectrum of influences (Barry 2007, 1–4). In the remainder of this article, we attempt such a renegotiation for disability in the poetry of the First World War.

Literary representations of disability and the First World War

Between 1914 and 1918, the First World War manufactured disability on a massive scale. In Britain alone, more than 41,000 servicemen underwent amputation, whilst serious physical injury was inflicted on a further 272,000 (Ferguson 1998, 437). Literary representations of the war that brought about these losses were initially heroic but, as casualties grew with no sign of peace, they acquired a critical edge that stressed the brutality of the fighting. Yet amongst these images, poems devoted to disability were few and far between. This cultural invisibility can be explained – at least in part – by a ‘polarity between the living and the dead’ (Barlow 2000, 10). Dead soldiers had paid the ultimate price, whether that was romanticized as a glorious sacrifice or lamented as a deplorable waste. Disabled soldiers, on the other hand, had paid only a partial price; indeed, they were lucky to have survived. Sentimental government propaganda portrayed their mutilations as badges of honour (Bourke 1996). In practice, however, they occupied a no-man’s-land between life and death, serving as an embarrassing reminder of the costs of the conflict as well as an unnerving testament to human frailty (Williams 1993). Subsequent scholarship has perpetuated this bifurcation (Winter 1995). Therefore, the liminal status that is war-induced disability slips from view. As a 13-year-old student commented after visiting a recent exhibition on ‘Conflict and Disability’ at the Imperial War Museum in London: ‘yes it has changed the way I think as I didn’t think there [were] so many people being disabled through war, as you don’t hear of them, just the dead’ (Potter and Ballard 2008, 71).

For the most part, the few poems that did address disabled veterans were of limited range, even when the genre was opened to include popular verse. Among the women poets ‘discovered’ in the 1980s, Margaret Postgate Cole tackled disability in 1916, describing how young recruits were too easily reassured by ‘The Veteran’, ‘blinded by war’ at the age of 19 (Reilly 1981, 22–23). Cole used a traditional style to express traditional attitudes. Conversely, the canonical trench poets – cauterized by combat – were more abrasive. In ‘Does it Matter?’ from 1917, for example, Siegfried Sassoon was unequivocal in attacking the hypocritical sympathy offered to maimed veterans:

Does it matter – losing your legs …

For people will always be kind

And you need not show that you mind

When the others come in after hunting

To gobble their muffins and eggs. (Sassoon 1983, 91)

Blindness and madness were treated with equal venom in the second and third verses (Sassoon 1983, 91).

‘Disabled’ in the literary context

Sassoon’s poetry was a vital element in the literary context for ‘Disabled’, which encompasses not just a narrow preoccupation with language and structure, but the poetic environment, the biography of writers and the influences that shaped their work. Wilfred Owen met Sassoon at Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh when he was being treated for shell shock in 1917. It is important not to exaggerate the importance of this relationship because other events also shaped his poetry and his attitudes to war. After failing to win a university scholarship, Owen spent two years as an assistant to the vicar of Dunsden near Reading and was acting as a language tutor in France when war broke out in 1914. In both these environments, he encountered human suffering (Williams 1993). Moreover, Owen had also witnessed at first hand the ‘Ugliness’ of war after joining up in 1916: ‘Hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language’, he wrote to his brother, ‘everything unnatural, broken, blasted: the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dugouts, all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth’ (Bell 1985, 217–218). However, inspired by the criticism, encouragement and recognition that Sassoon offered, Owen learned from the older man’s ‘ironic and robust satire’ (Day Lewis 1963, 27) and forged ‘a language for his experience’ that went beyond ‘early influences’ (Stallworthy 1994, xxxi). As Sassoon put it: ‘I stimulated him towards writing with compassionate and challenging realism’ (Murray 2010, 152).

The outcome was portrayals of the conflict that were no less forceful than Sassoon’s but were considerably more subtle. Owen’s appraisals of disability were no exception. Shell shock was tackled to devastating effect in ‘Mental Cases’, with the afflicted occupying a ‘twilight’ of ‘purgatorial shadows’. In ‘The Chances’, written for the ranks, ‘losin’ both ‘is props’ was the fate of one of the comrades talking about their prospects on the night of a major attack; whilst in ‘A Terre’ blindness was combined with the amputation of all four limbs, leading the dying officer to describe his body as ‘three parts shell’ and his life as a ‘mummy-case’ (Day Lewis 1963, 64–66, 69–70 and 71). However, Owen conducted his most sustained exploration of the experience of long-term impairment in ‘Disabled’ (Day Lewis 1963, 67–68).

Drafted just before ‘Mental Cases’ whilst Owen was still at Craiglockhart (Hibberd 2002), ‘Disabled’ was written in the third person. It told the story of an underage recruit who, ignorant of the causes of the War, signed up to fight after a football match, intoxicated by alcohol, the military uniform and the capricious women (or ‘giddy jilts’) who egged him on. Badly wounded at the Front, he returned home to a wheelchair existence, in sharp contrast to his previous life as a handsome and much-admired young sportsman. Owen may have seen such disabled ex-servicemen at the Netley Military Hospital in Southampton en route for Scotland but his reference to ‘jewelled hilts | For daggers in plaid socks’ suggests that Edinburgh was the more probable source; indeed, Princes Street has been named as the likely location of the gardens in which the soldier sat, waiting to be picked up for bed (Blunden 1963).

Although not among the five poems published before Owen’s death in November 1918, ‘Disabled’ did appear soon afterwards in an issue of the literary anthology called Wheels, which was dedicated to his memory (Hynes 1990). It also appeared in the first collection of his poems published in 1920 (Owen 1920), and was retained in the enlarged edition issued 11 years later (Blunden 1931) after a revival of popular interest kindled by three autobiographies from trench poets (Blunden 1928; Graves 1929; Sassoon 1930). Historically, these works fuelled an orthodox view that the First World War had been futile: a message that gelled with the pacifist sentiments of the 1930s (Todman 2005). But among literary circles, war poetry was becoming increasingly unpopular. The Irish poet W.B. Yeats, whose reputation was already high before 1914, led the opposition (Parfitt 1990). So strong were his objections that war poems were excluded from his edition of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse in 1936. Yeats was especially scathing of Owen, rejecting his work as ‘blood, dirt and sucked sugar stick’ (Swinden 1994, 316).

In the backwash of the Second World War (1939–1945), the literary establishment continued its attack on First World War writers, blaming them for encouraging the appeasement of Nazi Germany by stirring up sentiment and hysteria that were conducive to passivism (Evans 1948). The more radical political environment of the 1960s and resistance to the Vietnam War joined forces to promote war poetry in general, and Owen’s poetry in particular (Robb 2002). Yet although this escape from obscurity was marked by a new edition of the Collected Poems (Day Lewis 1963), it did not resurrect Owen’s commitment to disability, evident in the title of the volume that he was planning when he died. Under the editorial control of Sassoon, Disabled and Other Poems became merely Poems (Owen 1920). Only in 1995 was Owen’s original collection reconstructed (Owen 1995).

The longstanding poetic indifference to disability is at odds with its coverage in the novel. For although nineteenth-century fiction did not explore impairment ‘in its own right’ (Mitchell and Snyder 1997, 12), disabled people did function as both ‘an opportunistic metaphoric device’ and ‘a stock feature of characterization’; they were ‘a crutch on which literary narratives lean[t] for their representational power, disruptive potential, and social critique’ (Mitchell 2002, 15, 17 and 25). Furthermore, the capacity of disability metaphors ‘to extrapolate the meaning of a bodily flaw into cosmological significance’ encouraged the use of disability to ‘underscore the devaluation of marginal communities’ based on ‘gender, class, nationality, and race’ (Mitchell and Snyder 1997, 21). Therefore, for Mitchell and Snyder, disability served as ‘the master trope of human disqualification’ (2000, 3).

The disparity between the representation of impairment in the novel and in poetry is due at least in part to the differential impact of the Romantic Movement. From the late eighteenth century, this Movement challenged the rationalism of the Enlightenment, giving free reign instead to the powers of the imagination (Butler 1981). Whilst the Victorians did not entirely reject this ideal, it was increasingly difficult to sustain in the face of wide-ranging economic, social, and intellectual changes: industrialization and urban growth, religious doubt and evolutionary theory, Marxist philosophy and psychoanalysis (Dentith 1998). As a newer literary form, the novel adapted first. Over time, however, the content, form and politics of poetry also started to change.

Content

By the early twentieth century, modern poets were abandoning the heroic set-pieces whose content Romanticism had inspired (Wordsworth and Coleridge 1969). Of particular significance for war poetry was the Georgian Movement, which from 1910 sought ‘to make poetry accessible to a wide audience, to celebrate ordinary – particularly rural and suburban – life rather than the grand poetic themes and to do so in a diction that was neither clichéd nor grandiose’ (Barlow 2000, 15). The Georgians’ focus on ordinary lives opened the door to realistic as opposed to heroic representations of war. Moreover, disability was not alien to their agenda; indeed, one of their number, W.W. Gibson, is said to have influenced Owen’s ‘Disabled’ through the inclusion of ‘cripples’ in his ‘descriptions of the poor and unfortunate’ (Hibberd 1979, 38). As soldiers applying themselves to the conflict, however, the Georgian trench poets promoted a narrow range of images that were masculine and almost exclusively concerned with combatant experiences. Consequently, the emphasis fell on the fighting and the alleged indifference of civilians to the situation at the Front. Little attention was paid to the complex causes of the war, the broader issues of strategic planning, the pain of bereavement suffered by family and friends at home or – critically – the fate of soldiers who survived with physical and/or mental impairments (Parfitt 1990).

Form

The diversification of content was accompanied by new forms of writing – related to imagery and the patterning of language. Trench poets have been accused of holding back the modernist poetry that by the early twentieth century was dropping conventional rhyme and metre (Marsland 1991). It is true that they wrote their most impressive work by adapting the traditional lyric or short poem, typically used to express personal sentiments (Clausson 2006). Nevertheless, the message from the trenches was of the universal human significance to which modernist writers aspired; and innovation in form also occurred. Indeed, Owen himself was declared a progenitor of British modernism on account of his use of half-rhymes, where ‘instead of changing the initial consonant while retaining the vowel sound as rhyme does …, the consonantal framework is retained and the vowel changed’ (Welland 1960, 104). In ‘Disabled’, however, he relied on pure rhyme (Kendall 2006), reserving the ‘haunting uneasiness’ (Barlow 2000, 25) of half rhyme for his depictions of the Front.

Although the rhymes were orthodox, the modernist credentials of ‘Disabled’ were apparent in its structure: six stanzas of unequal rather than equal length. The opening stanza of six lines is followed by two stanzas – each of seven lines – which juxtaposed the soldier’s former carefree lifestyle with the present reality of his war-torn body. A long stanza of 16 lines ensues, explaining how he had come to enrol. Next, the central message – the indifference of the civilian population to the fate of military personnel – was expounded in a short stanza of just three lines:

Some cheered him home, but not as crowds cheer Goal.

Only a solemn man who brought him fruits

Thanked him, and then enquired about his soul. (Day Lewis 1963, 68)

The last stanza reverted to seven lines, anticipating a bleak future for a young man who could only reminisce about what he had lost and worry about whether his nurses had forgotten to collect him for bed.

The imagery as well as the patterning imposed by rhyme and stanza distinguished ‘Disabled’ as a modernist poem. Jon Stallworthy has identified two main literary references. The first was to a poem by A.E. Housman called ‘To an Athlete Dying Young’, who had also descended from the glory of being carried shoulder-high after victory. The second reference was to ‘the mocking echo of a slogan of a recruiting poster … which shows soldiers in action and in need of reinforcement’. Now nursing rather than military back-up was required (Owen 1994, 63–64). The most powerful images, however, were derived from Romanticism (Hibberd 1979; Silkin 1979). Craig Raine (1990) has insisted that Owen never escaped from its excesses. It is true that before leaving for the trenches he articulated a ‘linguistic patriotism’ (Stallworthy and Potter 2011, xxxvi) in which he anticipated that ‘perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote’ would be one of the English values – along with ‘land and people’ – that held him ‘together on a battlefield’ (Bell 1985, 130). In his mature work, however, Romanticism was harnessed to articulate the fallout of war. First, the perceived living death of the veteran in ‘Disabled’ was captured by placing him between day and night in the ‘generic historical twilight that so often bathed … late Romantic poetry’ (Kerr 1993, 297 and 300). But second – and more vehemently – Owen trounced Romanticism by ‘trumping its glorious illusions’ (Kendall 2006, 57). Therefore, the crucifixion and the guilt embodied in the blood of Christ were used to capture the sacrifice of the disabled soldier maimed on the battlefield:

He’s lost his colour very far from here,

Poured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry,

And half his lifetime lapsed in the hot race,

And leap of purple spurted from his thigh. (Day Lewis 1963, 67)

Politics

In addition to being modern in its content and form, ‘Disabled’ was modern in its political motivation. The Romantics themselves had embraced politics wholeheartedly, at first adopting a radical agenda after the French Revolution before taking up a more reactionary stance as unrest brewed in England after 1815 (Butler 1981). Between 1914 and 1918, however, the timeless quality that had characterized the Romantic lyric was breeched by using personal experience to address a particular historical moment and deduce political messages from it (Comer 1996). Yeats – adamant that poets ‘have no gift to set a statesman right’ (Yeats 1919) – thus condemned Owen as a ‘sandwich-board Man of the revolution’ for not only depicting the effects of the current conflict but also attributing political responsibility to those who drummed up patriotic zeal with little thought for the repercussions (Welland 1960, 138).

But to what extent were Owen and his fellow trench poets aware of this politics? In the late 1970s, Jon Silkin identified four ‘stages of [political] consciousness’ in relation to the First World War: patriotism; anger; compassion; and ‘an active desire for change’ in which ‘anger and compassion are merged … [to] realign the elements of human society … [and] make it more creative and fruitful’ (Silkin 1979, 26–29). Owen’s famous but incomplete ‘Preface’ to Disabled and Other Poems made him a prime candidate for the ‘compassion’ category (1963, 31). ‘This book is not about heroes’, he wrote:

English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.

Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War.

Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.

My subject is War, and the pity of War.

The poetry is in the pity. (Owen 1963, 31)

Yet even before the War – as a lay assistant in Dunsden from an Evangelical Christian background (Murray 2010) – Owen’s political ideas were evolving, influenced by the bitter industrial disputes that were gripping late Edwardian Britain (Hinton 1983) and by the poverty and social deprivation of the rural poor (Gazeley 2003). Concern for this hardship has been identified as an origin of the compassion for which his war poems – including ‘Disabled’ – were renowned. However, it also strengthened a pre-existing liberalism, which the experience of war accelerated as his poetry subjected the philosophy of social progress to critical scrutiny.

‘Disabled’ in the historical context

Disabled veterans have featured prominently in the emerging field of disability history (Anderson 2011). This work has been informed by a broader corpus of literature that – drawing inspiration from the disability movement – has challenged the tragic, passive image of impairment as individual pathology and promoted an alternative socio-cultural approach in which disability is associated with social structures and values (Oliver 1990; Stiker 1999; Kudlick 2003; Shakespeare 2006). But Wilfred Owen, of course, lived in an earlier era. For whilst the Georgian Movement had made disability an acceptable subject for poetry and provided literary forms to protest about war, the historical context from which he drew his material remained wedded to the traditional, dependent view of impairment. Therefore, the disabled veteran lacked autonomy, later defined by the renowned ethicists Beauchamp and Childress as ‘self rule that is free from both controlling influences by others and from limitations such as inadequate understanding that prevent meaningful choice’ (Beauchamp and Childress 2001, 57). First, his decision to enlist was based on patriotic fervour rather than a reasoned assessment of the merits of going to war. But, in addition to having an ‘inadequate understanding’ of the event that led to his impairment, the veteran’s ‘self rule’ was undermined by his transgression of gender roles and by the welfare services that his disability triggered. In short, he was an ‘object’ not a ‘subject’, acted upon by external forces beyond his control (Berlin 1969, 178).

Patriotism

By 1914 there had been no war between the European powers for over 40 years. As A.J.P. Taylor observed: ‘No man in the prime of life knew what war was like.’ ‘All imagined’, he went on, ‘that it would be an affair of great marches and great battles, quickly decided’ (Taylor 1963, 22). Strong group loyalties fed this mythology through an extensive network of organizations such as the boy scouts and the Officer Training Corps (Bristow 1991). So too did poetry. Not all war poems of the late nineteenth century were jingoistic. In ‘Drummer Hodge’, whilst not adopting a pacifist position, Thomas Hardy (1899) deplored the unnecessary death of young soldiers during the Boer War. However, it was work like ‘Vitai Lampada’ – ‘The Torch of Life’ by Henry Newbolt – that best caught the national mood: ‘The sand of the desert is sodden red’ and ‘The river of death has brimmed his banks’, ‘But the voice of the schoolboy rallies the ranks: | “Play up! Play up! And play the game!”’ (Newbolt 1892). Some – if not all – poets of the new conflict echoed these patriotic sentiments, making the connection between war, duty and sportsmanship so cherished in the public schools. Indeed, even Owen, who delayed joining the army until 1915, avowed that ‘I now do most intensely want to fight’ (Bell 1985, 357; original emphasis).

Recent historiography has qualified this enthusiasm for war with evidence of opposition. Resistance came from diverse quarters: from socialist and pacifist organizations; from intellectuals like the ‘Bloomsbury’ group; but also from less exalted members of the general public whose letters were published in the press. With opinion divided, politicians were cautious. Yet despite this hesitancy, almost ‘2.5 million men volunteered to fight in the British army’ during the First World War and 29% of them ‘joined in the first eight weeks’ (Ferguson 1998, 177). Narratives from officers suggest that patriotic motives were laced with the sheer excitement of fighting; and for men from the ranks there was the added incentive of escaping unemployment (Hynes 1998). In ‘Disabled’, Owen acknowledged the appeal of war. However, in rebuking the rampant patriotism that it generated, he cast the disabled veteran as powerless in the face of overwhelming socio-political forces.

Gender

For the trench poets, women were complicit in this attack on men’s autonomy, urging them to take up arms and display the masculine ideals of ‘bravery, strength and courage’ (Robb 2002, 36). But they were fickle. In ‘Glory of Women’, Sassoon castigated those who only ‘love us when we’re heroes, home on leave, | Or wounded in a mentionable place’ (1983, 100). Owen was less aggressive but, abandoned in a park, his disabled veteran did notice ‘how the women’s eyes | Passed from him to the strong men that were whole’. Never again would he feel ‘how slim | Girls’ waists are, or how warm their subtle hands’ because they all touched him as if he had a strange disease. Men’s endorsement of masculine norms compounded the enfeebling effects of women’s behaviour. Accused with Sassoon of staying ‘submissive to the high-minded macho ethic of the English officer’ (Kazantziz 1981, xviii), Owen’s letters showed a repression of emotional trauma. ‘My senses are charred’, he wrote in October 1918; ‘I don’t take the cigarette out of my mouth when I write Deceased over their letters’ (Bell 1985, 353). In ‘Disabled’, there was acute sensitivity to the young man’s suffering. Nevertheless, masculinity and sport were equated without question, and the young veteran was haunted by the memory of how ‘One time he liked a blood smear down his leg, | After the matches carried shoulder high’ (Day Lewis 1963). The implication was that a dependent life – not lived through the fully functional, sporting body – spelt marginality in interactions with other men as well as women (Markotić 2007).

Both the denigration of women and the celebration of masculinity were products of historical circumstance and not simple misogyny. The First World War drove men into positions of passivity previously characteristic of women, both at the Front where the ‘dominance of long-range artillery, the machine gun and barbed wire had immobilized combat’ and at home when they returned with disabled bodies that no longer conformed to sexual and physical norms (Campbell 1997, 829). Although patriotism halted the suffrage campaign when war broke out, some men had difficulty in reconciling women’s quest for electoral equality with exemption from combat and particularly resented their part in exhorting men to fight (Kerr 1993). Such indignation was misplaced. Not all civilians – male or female – supported the war; and the women who did were aided and abetted by vociferous government propaganda. Furthermore, ‘the male suffering of the trenches’ also caused women suffering as they struggled to cope with the death and maiming of sons and brothers, partners and friends (Kazantziz 1981, xv). Nevertheless, the anger against them continued to fester. It was aggravated by the greater personal freedoms and opportunities that women enjoyed. In particular, military service was creating job vacancies for female workers, whose employment destabilized traditional socio-economic roles and generated fears of post-war male unemployment (Braybon 1987; Bruley 1999). Therefore, in berating the nurses who neglected the ‘petulant’ disabled veteran waiting for nightfall (Markotić 2007,16), Owen exploited contemporary anxieties about role reversal in which men became reliant upon women who – no longer bound by a duty to care – were deserting the feminine ideals of ‘compassion, nurturing and virtue’ (Robb 2002, 36).

Welfare

For the prosthetic industries, the solution to this disruption of gender roles was the artificial limb, which enabled the rehabilitation of veterans, both sexually and economically. In reality, this technology was less than perfect in restoring the ‘ideal-body-now-flawed’ (Markotić 2007, 13). Artificial limbs were no answer to paralysis, for example; they were impractical or painful for some amputees to use; and they were out of bounds for the majority, whom the government abandoned to charitable aid (Carden-Coyne 2009; Arthur 2009). This resort to charity was indicative of welfare policy towards disability in general. Britain was no longer the first industrial nation, and from the end of the nineteenth century faced stiff commercial competition from abroad. International politics were conceived as a racial struggle for the survival of the fittest. Poverty, social deprivation and, especially, urbanization led to anxieties about physical and moral degeneration that were confirmed by the poor quality of recruits for the Boer War (Pugh 1994). Therefore, the Liberal reform of public policy – implemented from 1906 to enhance Britain’s ‘National Efficiency’ at home and abroad – embodied eugenic principles in an effort to improve the physical and mental condition of the nation’s stock (Harris 2004, 150–165). Active, productive citizens were rewarded with insurance benefits as of right to tide them over temporary periods of illness and unemployment. Disabled people – unless entitled under the Workmen’s Compensation Act of 1897 – were taught their inferiority by being forced to endure the stigma of charity or means-tested poor relief (Borsay 2005, 155–156).

The War introduced a new category of disability: the maimed soldier, whose mutilations were seen not as deficits but as emblems of courage and patriotism. Joanna Bourke has argued that this arrival of ‘the potent man rendered impotent’ brought about ‘a shift in the balance of … responsibility for disablement from the individual to the collective’ (1996, 37–43; original emphasis). But this was not borne out by welfare policy. Although war pensions were available from 1915, they were meagre to limit the state’s liability. Payments were thus based solely on the degree of ‘physical disablement rather than on ability to obtain work’ and fixed below the cost of living so that claimants were pressurized to augment their income through a job (Meyer 2004, 122). Yet, paradoxically, governments were reluctant to invest in employment services, relying on charitable initiatives, closing state training programmes prematurely and refusing to make compulsory the King’s National Role Scheme that encouraged the recruitment of disabled veterans in the public and private sectors (Kowalsky 2007).

Owen’s soldier ‘shivered in his ghastly suit of grey’, not the blue uniform worn by military personnel in hospital during the First World War. Like employment support, long-term residential accommodation for disabled veterans was also a charitable provision. Deborah Cohen has argued that German ex-servicemen – granted legal entitlement to assistance – were less effectively reintegrated than their British counterparts because the dense network of voluntary organizations that supplied charitable services not only ‘mediated between the individual and the state’ but also conveyed a sense of public conscience (Cohen 2001, 4). This may have been so in the community and after the war. However, Owen had no such cosy perception for his disabled veteran, who was to ‘spend a few sick years in institutes, | And do what things the rules consider wise, | And take whatever pity they may dole’ (Day Lewis 1963, 68). Institutional care was the culmination of his dependency. From the perspective of 1918, this insight was prescient; for it was in response to the restrictions and indignities of residential care that the disability movement emerged in the 1960s to press the case for independent living (Hunt 1966).

Conclusion

During the 2011 Proms Season, the City of London Sinfonia performed the world premier of a piece called ‘No Man’s Land’, composed by Colin Matthews using a dialogue between the ghosts of two soldiers written by the contemporary poet Christopher Reid (BBC Proms 2011; Reid 2011). This performance is just one manifestation of an enduring cultural fascination with the First World War, which the 2014 centenary is intensifying. Owen’s tragic image of the footballer turned disabled veteran also continues to resonate. From a political disability studies standpoint, this depiction is socially oppressive. But images of impairment need to be interrogated rather than taken at face value. Unpicking the literary dimension has shown how the erosion of Romanticism affected the content, form and politics of poetry, and opened the door to the realistic depiction of war and impairment. However, it was the historical conditions and values of late Victorian and Edwardian society that Owen used to shape his representation of the disabled veteran – denied autonomy by the euphoric patriotism stirred up by the War, the rigidity of gender stereotypes, and the enfeebling effects of health and social care. Although literary criticism paid increasing attention to history during the twentieth century, this emphasis tended to reduce society to the transaction of power and back-pedal on the formal analysis of text. What this article has attempted is an interdisciplinary contribution to Peter Barry’s ‘New Contextualism’ (Barry 2007, 3) in which ‘Disabled’ has been interpreted from an integrated literary and historical perspective.

Acknowledgements

The author has presented versions of this article to various conferences and seminars. The author is grateful to the participants, and to Disability and Society’s anonymous referees, for their comments.

Notes

1. The poetry of Wilfred Owen, including ‘Disabled’, is easily available online. See, for example, http://www.poemhunter.com/wilfred-owen/.