Visit to Centrale Supélec

Spent a thoroughly enjoyable morning with Centrale Supélec students last Tuesday 20th January. Many thanks to English lecturer Divya Madhavan for organising everything and for her warm welcome. After my talk, it was great to have a question and answer session with the students who also offered an interesting analysis of Wilfred Owen’s poem, “Anthem for Doomed Youth”:

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.

The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Written around September / October 1917, the poem offers a moving portrait of those soldiers who are cut down in their prime in battle. Not for them the traditional ceremonies we associate with death, their passing will be signalled by the sounds and sights of the fighting itself, and especially by the speeding bullets and falling shells. And for every day of this seemingly never-ending war, the approach of night is seen as a means by which Nature herself shows respect to these fallen men.