Essay 21-C: – World War I Soldiers’ Poetry and Founding Documents

Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner

When the United States entered the First World War in April 1917, it did so in part under the banner of its founding principles. In his war message to Congress, President Woodrow Wilson echoed the universal aspirations of the Declaration of Independence: “We shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts, for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own Governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.” These ideals furnished the public language through which many Americans, including Wilson and a broad spectrum of intellectual opinion, understood and justified the nation’s entry into the war.

Among the most enduring literary responses to the Great War was the conviction that industrial warfare had exposed a profound disjunction between public language and lived experience. Writers who had endured the trenches returned with a vision of war whose scale and destructiveness defied inherited notions of honor, courage, and glory. Heroism had not disappeared, but it had been thrust into an environment dominated by machine guns, heavy artillery, poison gas, barbed wire, and mechanized logistics, where individual valor could no longer overcome the impersonal machinery of industrial war. To be sure, the aftermath of the war produced a certain amount of disillusionment.  But, more constructively, there arose a requirement that the language of sacrifice, duty, and freedom be made answerable to reality.

How did the principles of the American Founding fare under this new mode of warfare? Among the most influential literary responses to the Great War is a tradition often remembered chiefly for its disillusionment. Such a reading captures something important but not enough. The writers considered here affirmed the ideals of liberty, equality, or the dignity of the human person. They rejected the public language that invoked those ideals while accommodating the realities of industrial slaughter. Their work sought to restore the moral seriousness of those ideals by making them answerable to historical reality. If the Declaration proclaimed the equal dignity of every person and government by consent, then the Great War posed a deeper question: whether modern civilization still possessed the moral and spiritual resources necessary to sustain those truths. The first and most penetrating answers came not from statesmen but from poets.

Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1917) shows what the public language of democratic purpose looked like from inside a gas attack: a soldier “guttering, choking, drowning,” while Horace’s dictum that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country became, in Owen’s verdict: 

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Alan Seeger, a Harvard graduate who enlisted in the French Foreign Legion before American entry into the war, approached the same reality differently. His “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” (1916) accepts the soldier’s bargain with a gravity no slogan could manufacture.  Seeger was killed on the Somme on July 4, 1916. Together, Owen and Seeger insist that words such as duty, honor, and democracy retain their meaning only when they remain answerable to the realities they profess to describe.

R. R. Tolkien, a signals officer at the Somme who lost nearly every close friend in the war, responded not with memoir but with myth. The Great War was transfigured rather than retold. In The Lord of the Rings, the Dead Marshes form a desolate battlefield whose stagnant pools hold the faces of the fallen. When Frodo looks into the water, he sees faces, not corpses. The dead remain persons rather than anonymous casualties. Read in light of Tolkien’s wartime experience, the scene preserves what industrial warfare threatened to erase: the irreducible dignity of the individual. Against the will to dominate, embodied in Mordor’s factories and forges, Tolkien contrasts the quiet virtues of friendship, fidelity, mercy, and the willingness to carry a burden one did not choose.

S. Lewis, wounded at Arras in 1918, sought to recover the philosophical foundations on which moral imagination depends. In The Abolition of Man (1943), he warned that modernity was dissolving what he called the Tao, the objective moral order that grounds the language of duty, rights, and human dignity. The danger was a degraded intelligence that reduces moral judgments to subjective feeling, producing “men without chests”: people educated out of the moral affections that sustain genuine conviction. Once the Tao is abandoned, the elevated language of the Declaration of Independence becomes available for conscription into what Owen had called “the old Lie.” By defending objective moral truth, Lewis defended the conditions that make the Founding’s appeal to self-evident truths intelligible.

Tolkien and Lewis did not defend the American Founding directly. They defended the moral inheritance from which it sprang: a Christian understanding of the person, a natural law tradition, and the conviction that human dignity is objective rather than conferred by the state. Without that inheritance, the Declaration’s self-evident truths gradually lose their intelligibility. Together they suggest that a free society is sustained not by institutions alone but by a truthful account of the human person. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution remain among the noblest political expressions of that account, and the literature of the Great War reminds us that their promises endure only insofar as each generation renews the moral imagination, memory, and reason upon which they rest.

Dominic A. Aquila is a professor, historian, musician, and academic leader whose career bridges the arts, business, and higher education. A graduate of The Juilliard School, he also holds an MBA from New York University and doctorates in history and higher education leadership, and currently serves as a tenured Professor of History and Chair of Studio Arts and Art History at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. His scholarship explores the intellectual history of the Enlightenment, the relationship between faith and culture, and the recovery of polymathy as a model for leadership and learning in the modern world. He is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, where he is completing several book projects, including studies on the renewed interest among American intellectuals in the Natural Law following the Second World War and the principles and practices of Polymathic Leadership.

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