While all the poets in "War is Kind", "Dulce et decorum" and "The Charge of the Light Brigade"make war their main theme, their attitude to war varies. Do you agree?

 

There are two premises in the question:

·       The main theme of all three poems is war

·       The poets’ attitude to war varies

With regard to the above, I agree with the statement that the three poems - “War is Kind” by Stephan Crane, “Dulce et Decorum” by Wilfred Owen and “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson – deal with war as their main theme and that the attitudes the poets display towards the theme vary. While Crane and Owen considered war evil, Tennyson offers war as an opportunity for men to show their heroic spirit. In this essay, I would be looking at how the tree poets deal with the theme war and how their attitudes differ from one another.

Stephan Crane in his poem “War is Kind” deals with the suffering of both the soldiers and civilians.  In the first stanza of the poem, he shows how a cavalryman, shot at, falls off his horse and the horse runs off without him. The victims of this incident are the soldier and a young woman, probably his fiancée. In the third stanza, the poet takes the reader to the trenches of the First and the Second World Wars. The soldier the poet is focusing on dies probably from a gas attack. The victims are the soldier and his child. In the fifth stanza the poet takes the reader to the funeral of a soldier. Many of the soldiers who die in the battlefield are buried in their uniforms in mass graves without any ceremony. The family would not even get to see their bodies. Here, the poet shows us the body of such a soldier and his mother who has been made destitute by his death. According to Crane, wars are waged by “[l]ittle souls who thirst for fight” and they “drill and die” with little ceremony. However, the little souls do not arrive at the conclusion that war was the only option on their own. They have been shown “the virtue of slaughter” and “the excellence of killing” by those in power. The implication is that, people with great souls do not see wars as a way to settle disputes.    

In “Dulce et Decorum”, Wilfred Owen shows the horrors of war from the point of view of a participant. Owen was an officer of the British Army in the WW I and died during the last days of the battle. In his poem Owen shows the agony of a soldier subjected to a gas attack as well as the horror and guilt experienced by his comrades who escaped his fate. Unlike Crane who keeps his descriptions of the battle field and the situation of the soldiers to the bare minimum, Owen gives us a graphic picture of what he had surely witnessed:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;  

 

The tragic death of his fellow soldier leaves such a lasting effect on the poetic persona, he has nightmares long after the incident: “In all my dreams before my helpless sight,/He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.” Similar to Crane, Owen, too, believed that the soldiers were mere pawns in a power game. They had been taught that it was sweet and decorous to die for their fatherland by those who had sent them to the battle field. 

Lord Tennyson, in his poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” describes the heroic charge made by a group of 600 cavalrymen during the Crimean war in the late 1800s. In the poem, the poet glorifies the discipline of the soldiers and their commitment to their task. He commends their heroism in following the command even knowing all of them were going to die were they to obey that command:

    Not tho’ the soldier knew
Some one had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:

He is critical of the short-sightedness of the commanders who risked the lives of the soldiers similar to the other two poets. However, he is not critical of war itself or of choosing the life of a soldier. In contrast, he urges the entire world to respect the soldiers who died upholding the heroic code when he says:

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder’d.
Honor the charge they made!
Honor the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!

In conclusion, yes, all three poems deal with war as the main theme of the poems. However, while Crane and Owen look at war as an evil that is promoted by the power hungry people who have very little regard for the lives of the soldiers who die terrible deaths on the battlefield or their loved ones who would suffer because of their deaths or the soldiers who survived the actual war but would be forever marked by their terrible battlefield memories, Lord Tennyson glorifies war as an occasion where soldier get to show their heroic spirit.