The Price of Freedom
By Doug Talley

During this recent 4th of July I vacationed in the Wasatch Mountains with my family and had occasion to attend the Stadium of Fire as part of the annual Festival of Freedom in Provo, Utah, celebrating American independence. It was a wonderfully garish, and typically American, affair. Approximately 65,000 people filled BYU’s football stadium. The popular entertainer Reba McIntyre, and others, sang and performed. During the fireworks display that concluded the celebration, huge gas burners placed in the south end of the stadium were lit and then cranked up at intervals to literally set the stadium on fire. As I experienced the intense heat while seated only fifty yards away in the east stands, it occurred to me I was celebrating the 4th in true American fashion, with a wiener roast, offering myself as one of the hot dogs!

The commemoration was sobering for me, but perhaps not in the way intended by its organizers. As a tribute to war veterans who have died in the current Iraqi conflict, a moment of silence was observed, squeezed in between three hours of loud music and fireworks. I found myself wondering if we should have observed three hours of silence instead, and then afterwards enjoyed a moment of music and fireworks. Of course, meditating in silence for three hours, and really contemplating the awful price of war, is much harder work, and more sobering, than being entertained. But I wondered if greater silence, and less noise, would not have been a more fitting tribute to our honored dead.

When preparations for the Iraqi war were underway last year, I offered four columns about the poet’s perspective on war. I received a number of responses from readers. Because I have been vacationing over the past several weeks, it was convenient to skimp somewhat on the column this month and publish a letter I received from a British reader, Rosalyn Lawrance. I found her perspective quite interesting and with her permission, offer it here as a catalyst to contemplate our hard won freedoms and the price of war that freedom so often requires.

One Reader’s Response

Dear Brother Talley, After two recent trips to the U.S. where I received a fair amount of flak for speaking and writing about the conflict in Iraq amidst the warmth and generosity I have come to expect whenever I visit America, it has been good to return home to the peace and comfort of home and family and to the common sense and sanity of your columns. Many thanks!

I grew up on the Aeneid, at a time when properly educated English girls had to have a little Latin, and we were also introduced to Homer, Catullus, Juvenal and Horace, all of whom fired my imagination and added immeasurably to my appreciation of syntax and understanding of language in general. Of less interest were the fifty chapters of Caesar's Gallic Wars we had to learn to pass our Ordinary Level exams, but they were an education in the realities of warfare, along with some of the more brutal passages in the Old Testament, and War and Peace, both of which I read a little later.

It was then I saw at first hand the appalling savagery of war and terrorism as I worked as a nurse in London at a time when the IRA was targeting English cities. We heard the bombs go off as we lay in bed at night, one of which blew in the front of our nursing school when the building next door was attacked, and the victims often came to our hospital for treatment. We also looked after men injured in conflicts in the Middle East - those fighting with the Christian militia in Beirut, Iraqi soldiers and Kurdish freedom fighters. It was a shocking awakening for a girl from the kind of sheltered, privileged background I had known. As they shared with me their experiences, and their passion, or otherwise, for the causes for which they were fighting, I began to be aware of the impact we in the West have on the rest of the world. I learned that what I do has far reaching repercussions for those I do not know, and whose lives I will never directly touch. The complexities of the global community in which we live started to dawn on me, and since then I have never been able to look at myself as simply English, or Western, or LDS. I am, of course, all of these, but I also share this planet with billions of my spirit brothers and sisters, whose lives are as precious as my own, and who are just as deserving of the same freedoms and advantages I am able to take for granted. I have done nothing to earn the life of ease and security I enjoy. Do I not, therefore, have an obligation to share and reach out in meaningful ways to those whose lives are not as blessed? There should surely be no place for the kind of bigotry and hatred we have seen so much of over recent months among those of us who have everything, whatever the cause we espouse.

The war poets give voice to these ideas. You say that [Wilford] Owen's poetry was 'decidedly not patriotic', and, of course, during his short life, it was not popular at a time when we were so caught up in jingoism and all things anti-German. What Isaac Rosenberg called the 'begloried sonnets' of Rupert Brookes were much more to the public taste. Still, we would not go so far as to call Owen unpatriotic, especially since he gave his life for the cause he questioned.

For us, democracy not only gives the right to freedom of speech, but the obligation to think deeply and to articulate clearly our views. How can we make democratic decisions when only one view, or a narrow few views are openly expressed, and all others are denigrated, or dismissed as negative or subversive? What Americans call patriotism, we would be inclined to call nationalism, and Owen was certainly no nationalist. He said in the preface to his collection of poems,

“This book is not about heroes. 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. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no way consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful. If I thought the letter of this book would last, I might have used proper names; but if the spirit of it survives - survives Prussia - my ambition and those names will have achieved themselves fresher fields than Flanders.”

For me, Owen's poetry is exquisitely moving because of the simple truth it tells. It speaks against war, hatred and killing, but I find nothing anti-British in it. To question popular views and government policy and yet to be willing to uphold those democratically made decisions and to do one's duty, even when it means sacrificing one's life, seems to me to be heroism and patriotism of the highest order.

I have not been able to access the web sites of either poets for or against the war, but was interested to hear about them. I think one of the great strengths of poets lies in their independence of thought and spirit, and their willingness to tell the truth as they see it. As soon as they align themselves, as poets, to a particular movement, they lose that independence, and therefore that strength. If any of us is associated with a cause that operates by maligning those whose views oppose it, we are diminished by that association. Poets, I believe, cannot afford to put themselves in that position.

As far as W. B. Yeats is concerned, as an Irish Nationalist he had very strong political views, but was more concerned with the situation in Ireland than in Europe. He was more or less obliged to maintain a neutral position on World War I because of his prominence. He was not silent, though. This is a poem from 1918:

An Irish Airman Forsees His Death I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is the Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds.
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced it all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seem waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

Of men's inclination to fight, Yeats said in 1921, when the Anglo-Irish treaty was signed:

“I am in deep gloom about Ireland...I see no hope of escape from bitterness, and the extreme party may carry the country. When men are very bitter, death and ruin draw them on as a rabbit is supposed to be drawn on by the dancing of the fox.”

And on revolution by force, Yeats wrote the following: The Great Day

Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!
A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.

There seems little reason to be optimistic that we will learn much from the plentiful experience we have had of war. We nod our heads in agreement with all that has been written in the past about the ultimate futility of violence and imposing our will by force, but then a situation arises to outrage us, and we find ourselves justifying, yet again, sending young men to their deaths and killing the innocent as we put things right. Perhaps all poets can do is to keep speaking the truth, even when it is unpopular and goes against fashionable opinion, as it usually does. The words of Frank Thompson, a soldier writing in the Second World War are chillingly appropriate today.

Epitaph on a Christian Nationalist
With Moorish troops I sacked the towns of Spain;
With German planes I ground the Basques to dust,
And bombed their Holy City - why complain
About the means? My ends were right, I trust.

Now, as ever, materialism is our icon, and as long as it remains so, we will continue to rule the world by economic, if not by military, force. If poets can influence people to be more gentle and to value individuals above things, then that is a good thing to do and a worthy ambition to pursue.

Experience suggests it will be a thankless task, and that there are many tears yet to be shed before the Saviour comes again and puts an end to suffering. One senses the weariness of Mary Webb, that most sympathetic and intuitive of poets and novelists, when she says:

''But what is waste of time? Eating and sleeping; hearing grave, sedulous men read out of grave, sedulous books what we have heard a hundred times; beseiging God (whom we end by imagining as a great ear) for material benefits; amassing property - these, the world says, are not a waste of time. But to drink at the stoup of beauty; to lift the coverlet of earth and seek the cradled God (since here, if anywhere, He dwells), this in the world's eyes is waste of time. Oh, filthy, heavy-handed, blear-eyed world, when will you wash and be clean?”

If the answer, in the words of Vivaldi's motet is, Nulla in mundo pax sincere - 'True peace is not to be found in this world' - poets are nevertheless not excused from playing their part in making sure the truth is heard by as many as possible, and that peace is promoted by all available means.

I didn't mean for this to be quite such a mission for you to read! I feel very strongly that we should all be ready to stand up and be counted when occasion demands and have been shocked over recent weeks to discover how dangerous that can be. I'm not a campaigner by nature, and my views are not strident or militant - for a Briton, and especially for a European, they are fairly moderate. I do think we should do all we can to understand where we are right now, and how we came to be here, even if that means re-examining our values and preconceptions. That, surely, is what our commitment to truth is all about, is it not?

I expected my opinions to be challenged, and to hear well-reasoned arguments to oppose them. I did not expect the kind of vitriolic hate mail I received, to be accused of being anti-American, (which I am absolutely not,) or to find that my views were only invited because it was assumed they would concur with coalition policy. It is disturbing to me that such intolerance should exist in any free nation, especially among Latter-day Saints.

All the best,
Roslyn Lawrance

The Virtue of Tolerance

In subsequent correspondence, Sister Lawrance stated that when she wrote her initial letter to me she was simply trying to come to terms with being part of a war, the morality of which was strongly questioned in Britain as well as in the rest of Europe. “I was then a single mother of eight children,” she wrote. “And working from my home as a free lance writer, I often felt a sense of isolation, especially at a time when I was reporting a British perspective on the situation in Iraq to an American readership. I certainly wasn’t flavor of the month, although my older children congratulated me on the hate mail I received – ‘You’re a proper writer now, Mum!’”

Perhaps more than any other artistic medium, poetry is one genre in which intense feelings and perspectives can be communicated in a spirit of elegance and love and not contention. Through poetry, particularly through the poetry of other languages and cultures, we develop not only a tolerance for, but also an actual appreciation of, differing perspectives. What a dull, dull world it would be, if we all believed and thought in the same fashion.

Sister Lawrance’s views about war and the Iraqi conflict are not offered here as those of Meridian Magazine. I haven’t spoken with the magazine’s editors to know if they have a position. Nor do her views necessarily reflect mine. I continue to be embarrassingly ambivalent about the Iraqi conflict. But I do appreciate the intelligence and the clarity and the liberality of her articulation and the tolerance it inspires. In addition, she cited at least one first-rate poem – I’ll leave it to each reader to decide which one it was! As always, let us hear from you – letters and submissions are welcome.

 

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