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Cause of Death: The Effect of Nationalism on the Justification of Violence

The incredible death tolls of the Great War horrified those who survived to see its
aftermath. As a generation of Europes young men was lost to the bombs, gas, and bullets of the
modern battlefield, people began to question the nationalistic justifications of war that had long
glorified such violence. This shift in the interpretations of war is reflected in the literary works of
those who experienced World War I. Whereas poetry written at the onset of the war was fueled
with nationalistic sentiment, such as Rupert Brookes Nineteen-Fourteen: The Soldier, works
written after the conflict show a disillusionment with the supposed glories of battle, as seen in
Wilfred Owens Dulce et Decorum Est and Siegfried Sassoons Glory of Women. Based on
the gruesome depictions of war in the latter two of the aforementioned pieces it could be
assumed that it was the suffering of the soldiers that swayed public opinion away from
nationalism. While this assuredly played a role, the poems use the horrors of the battlefield to
highlight the lack of purpose that was felt by those fighting in the war. This lack of a unifying
cause weakens the nationalistic argument that was found in Brookes piece, leading to
nationalisms later evolution into a farce after the war. However, contemporary poetry of the
period, such as William Butler Yeats Easter, 1916, shows that violence and death could still be
justified using nationalism if there was a unifying cause. A comparison between these works
shows that nationalism cannot be used as a tool to justify death without a clearly understood
cause behind said violence after World War I, changing the literary and governmental rhetoric
regarding war in the modern era.
At the outbreak of World War I nationalism was enough in and of itself to justify dying in
combat. This sentiment is reflected in Brookes The Soldier. The speaker of the poem states
that if he dies during the war that his death is acceptable because there will be some corner of a

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foreign field That is for ever England (Brooke 2-3). There is no mention of the reason for his
death or why the speaker was in the foreign field to begin with. The poem continues with
references to the importance of Englands air, water, and sunlight as being particularly impactful
on the physical being of the speaker, with the final line concluding that England is a form of
heaven on Earth (Brooke 14). The idyllic language Brooke uses is a powerful persuasive tool.
One does not have to die for the salvation or protection of England to achieve glory in war; the
mere fact that a soldier is English means that wherever they die they are helping to improve the
world by spreading their inherent Englishness into the Earth. The frequency of the use of such
tactics during the early years of World War I shows that ardent nationalism was the only means
to justify the United Kingdoms involvement in said war, as the complex web of alliances that
pulled the country into the conflict was not sufficient in arousing public sentiment.
Many anthologies of literary works were compiled during the first few years of the war
with pieces written by both civilians and soldiers. These pieces were concerned with raising
funds, recruiting soldiers, memorializing the fallen, and improving morale. However, few raised
any question about the essential rightness of the war, or doubted the wisdom of its continued
prosecution (Norgate 516-17). Without a rallying cause to be expressed in the poetry, the only
way to justify the rampant death was through the common nationalistic motifs of Courage,
England, Home, God, Victory, Mother, etc, which needed only to be deployed, not explored or
explained (Norgate 518). These motifs asserted that each soldiers death was individually
significant and meaningful, allowing for a persistentalmost willfulidealizationof the
mechanized mass-slaughter that was not merely approved of but actively sought by the public
during the war (Norgate 518). Such poetry, some of which was written by soldiers on the front
lines, sanctioned the continuation of the war to a public that was uncertain of its cause

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(Norgate 519). However, as the war entered its final years many poets who had served on the
front lines saw the obvious disparity between the rhetoric and the realities of the conflict and
sought to express their own sentiments.
Owens Dulce et Decorum Est highlights the aforementioned disparity. Rather than
placing the focus on the meaningful nature of the death of an Englishman like Brooke, Owen
spends the majority of the piece describing the painful and horrific deaths of his comrades, as
well as the misery and demoralization of those who survived. The soldier speaking in Brookes
poem, who claims that if he dies he wishes for people to think only of the glorious spread of
England, is replaced by a soldier yelling out and stumbling And floundring like a man in fire or
lime who plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning (Owen 11-16). Owen asserts that if
people could see these gruesome scenes they would not propagate the old Lie that it is sweet
and fitting to die for ones country (Owen 27-28). This view of the war lacks both a cause for
the violence, like Brookes, and also disavows nationalism as a justification for it by claiming
that it is cruel to lie to a child so as to trick them into throwing away their life for the glory of
England. Without either of those facets to give reason to the conflict, Owen exposes the futility
of present circumstances during World War I (Norgate 520). Dulce et Decorum Est can thus
be read as an attack upon the ignorant belligerence of civilian non-combatants as well as a call
to other soldier-poets to stop glorifying their experiences (Norgate 521). Owen and Brooke form
a contrast between the mythology typical of nationalistic and propagandistic conceptions of
war and the narratives of soldiers that show their skepticism toward nationalistic and
militaristic culture (Lieberfeld 572). By pointing out the rampant cultural-political
mythmaking of earlier soldier and civilian poets, Owen works to inform the public of the
dangers of blindly believing nationalistic justifications of death and war (Lieberfeld 572).

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Owens argument is furthered by one of his major literary influences, Sassoon. Sassoons
Glory of Women mocks the idealization of war by women and civilians. The worship of
soldiers and delight that women find in tales of war are proven unrealistic as they create an
idea of combat that leaves said women in disbelief when they hear of a solider retreating
(Sassoon 3-6). This retreat is not caused by any lack of heroism that the women idealize in the
soldiers, but is prompted by the soldiers eventual breaking by the horrors of war that forces them
to run, Trampling the terrible corpsesblind with blood (Sassoon 10-11). Sassoon directly
inverts the earlier soldier-poet rhetoric used by Brooke, taking the motifs of religion, nation,
duty, and sacrifice, and substituting them with hypocrisy, arrogance, stupidity, and futility
(Norgate 529). This rejection of traditional nationalistic rhetoric is not blamed solely on the
English either. Sassoons final lines refer to a German mother who dreams by the fire as her sons
face is trodden deeper in the mud (Sassoon 12-14). The justifications of violence and death
given to women as they offer up their sons and husbands to war are shown to be universally
meaningless, as civilians on either side of the conflict have as little understanding of the reasons
for the fighting as the men who are dying on the frontlines.
The evolution of poetic idealization of war to the open condemnation of violence is
centered on the issue of causation. Traditional nationalistic rhetoric, by which earlier wars had
largely been defined and given meaning, was not sufficient in filling the void of purpose
created by the lack of the United Kingdoms involvement in any of the direct causes of the war; a
conflict prompted by the assassination of a foreign Archduke by a foreign combatant in order to
further a foreign cause in a foreign land. Though nationalism became ineffective in motivating
the English to sustain their efforts during the war, it was effective in Ireland.

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Yeats Easter, 1916 regards the violent deaths of those involved in the Easter Rising in
Dublin as explicitly glorious in the same manner as the soldier-poets during the onset of World
War I. Yeats writes that A terrible beauty is born out of the sacrifice of the Irish people (Yeats
16). The sacrifices caused by the violence threaten to turn the heart of Ireland to stone, and Yeats
questions whether the rising was needless death after all (Yeats 67). However, unlike Owen
and Sassoon who find nothing to refute the needlessness of the death they see, Yeats writes that
the Irish people are united with one purpose alone (Yeats 41). This singular purpose was a
nationalistic push toward independence from England. The Irish people viewed their enslaved
position under British rule as worse than shedding blood, justifying violence (Malins 271). The
Easter Rising resulted in the deaths of 103 British soldiers with 357 wounded, as well as the
deaths of 450 Irishmen with 2,600 wounded (Malins 274). The majority of the Irish population
did not support the rampant violence of the Rising, but the overtly harsh response of the British
military allowed for nationalism to become substituted for causation. By painting the violence as
nationalism, the cause of the hundreds of dead Irishmen became justifiable and glorified in a way
that the deaths of World War I soldiers could not, even though both conflicts were happening
simultaneously.
Nationalisms long held place as a tool to justify governmental goals was denounced after
the First World War. The notion that it was honorable to throw away a life in service to ones
country simply because a leader said it was necessary was ridiculed in the face of the death tolls
that had never been seen before in war; a transition evidenced by the works of Brooke, Owen,
and Sassoon. After the war, Reality had changed, in fundamental ways that called into question
the assumptions on which art, and civilization itself, had been based (Norris 136). Public
disillusionment of the justifications of violence was spread through the literary works of the

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period, altering the ways that governments would approach wartime rhetoric in the proceeding
decades. However, Yeats proves that this disillusionment with nationalism can be overcome with
sufficient causation. The continued appeasement of Germany by Great Britain and France in the
lead up to World War II, as well as the refusal of the United States to enter the war until a direct
attack by Japan sparked national outrage, reflects the precarious position that policymakers
found themselves in after the conclusion of the First World War. Only a clearly defined national
cause was enough to overcome a cultures aversion to senseless violence, whereas mindless
nationalistic rhetoric sufficed during the pre-war years. The aforementioned authors thus stand as
literary markers of the shift in the value of nationalism as a justification for war and death in the
early twentieth century.

Works Cited
Brooke, Rupert. Nineteen-Fourteen: The Soldier. Poetry (1915). Poetry Foundation. Web.

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Lieberfeld, Daniel. Teaching about War through Film and Literature. PS: Political Science and
Politics 40.3 (American Political Science Association: 2007): 571-574. JSTOR. Web.
Malins, Edward. Yeats and the Easter Rising. The Massachusetts Review 7.2 (1966): 271-284.
JSTOR. Web.
Norgate, Paul. Wilfred Owen and the Soldier Poets. The Review of English Studies 40.160
(1989): 516-530. JSTOR. Web.
Norris, Margot. Teaching World War I Poetry: Comparatively. College Literature 32.3 (2005):
136-153. JSTOR. Web.
Owen, Wilfred. Dulce et Decorum Est. Poems (Viking Press: 1921). Poetry Foundation. Web.
Sassoon, Siegfried. Glory of Women. Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918). Bartleby. Web.
Yeats, William Butler. Easter, 1916. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989). Poetry
Foundation. Web.