Bugle salute for war poet Wilfred Owen
WHEN the telegram Wilfred Owen’s mother dreaded arrived at her Shropshire home, church bells rang in celebration of peace.
Regarded as the greatest First World War poet, Owen was killed on November 4, 1918 – a week before the Armistice – in Northern France. The tragic news took seven days to reach his family.
Today, to commemorate his death exactly 100 years ago, Owen’s battlefield bugle – taken from a German soldier – will be played in public for the first time since he was killed, at a ceremony attended by Elizabeth Owen, the widow of his nephew Peter, at his graveside in France.
There is a reference to bugles in Owen’s famous sonnet Anthem For Doomed Youth: ‘The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells/And bugles calling for them from sad shires.’
Fiona MacDonald, of the Wilfred Owen Association, said she hoped the commemoration would draw attention to the central message in Owen’s renowned poetry about the brutal reality of war.
Soon after reaching the front in 1916, Owen was blown into the air
by a shell, landing on the remains of a dead comrade. While convalescing at Edinburgh’s Craiglockhart Hospital in 1917, he met fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon, who tried to dissuade him from returning to the trenches. But in the summer of 1918, Owen went back.