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in the decade and a half following the cessation of actual hostilities.
    So it comes about that the war seems, to us, to have been fought less over territory than the way it would be remembered, that the war’s true subject is remembrance. Indeed the whole war
– which was being remembered even as it was fought, whose fallen were being remembered before they fell – seems not so much to be tinted by retrospect as to have been fought
retrospectively.
    Owen’s famous preface insists that his ‘subject is War, and the pity of War’ (rather than honour or glory), but his subject might also be termed Memory, and the projection of
Memory. His poetry redefines rather than simply undermines Binyon’s words (‘We will remember them’) which also work by projected retrospect. Despite their apparent
inappropriateness Owen’s poems are now invisibly appended, like exquisitely engraved graffiti, to memorial inscriptions in honour of ‘The Glorious Dead’.
    In Wanlockhead in north Dumfriesshire, the village memorial takes the form of a mourning soldier atop a marble plinth. Beneath the statue’s feet is written ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est Pro
Patria Mori’, a phrase whose meaning has been wrenched by Owen’s poem irrevocably away from the simplicity of the intended sentiment. The old lie has acquired a new ironic truth. By the
time Sassoon concludes his 1933 poem ‘An Unveiling’, a mock-oration for London’s ‘War-gassed victims’, the Latin has been so Owenized as to render further satirical
twisting superfluous.
    Our bequest
    Is to rebuild, for What-they-died-for’s sake,
    A bomb-proof roofed Metropolis, and to make
    Gas-drill compulsory.
Dulce et Decorum est
. . .
    R. H. Mottram hoped the
Spanish Farm Trilogy
might be seen as ‘a real Cenotaph, a true War memorial’; Richard Aldington wanted
Death of a Hero
to stand as ‘a
memorial in its ineffective way to a generation’ – but it was only Owen who succeeded, as Sassoon, Blunden, Graves and the rest could not, in memorializing the war in the image of his
work. The perfect war memorial – the one which best expresses our enduring memory of the war – would show men bent double, knock-kneed, marching asleep, limping, blind, blood-shod.
Either that or – and it amounts to the same thing – it should be a statue of Owen himself.
    Owen addressed the issue of his own legacy in ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, a poem which anticipates the time when it will stand as the response to its own appeal: ‘What
passing-bells for these who die as cattle?’ Sassoon made a vital contribution here, substituting ‘Doomed’ for ‘Dead’ in an earlier draft so that his friend’s
poem, like Binyon’s, is about those who
are going to have died
. Blunden wrote a poem entitled ‘1916 seen from 1921’ – Owen had written a dozen poems like that four
years earlier.
    The final line of ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ refers to the custom of drawing down household blinds as a sign of mourning – of displaying loss – but it is
also a disquieting image of concealment, of the larger process whereby the state and themilitary hid their culpability from scrutiny. These blinds stayed firmly down until
Cabinet papers and War Office records became available to researchers in the sixties. Only in the last couple of years, however, have we learnt how Haig, for example, in another telling instance of
the way the war seems to have been fought retrospectively, systematically rewrote his diary to make his intentions accord with – and minimize his responsibility for – what actually
resulted from his command. Denis Winter, whose controversial endeavours have cast damaging light on the way the state colluded in perpetuating Haig’s preferred version of events, concludes
that ‘the official record of the war – political as well as military – [was] systematically distorted both during the war as propaganda and after it, in the official
history’. The amount of material