British soldiers from the Royal Welch Fusiliers and the Cheshire Regiment in a Belgian town on their way to Mons in 1914. The ranks of the Royal Welch Fusiliers later included the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves. It’s a bitter paradox that even the most virulently antiwar of the famous soldier poets of World War I felt the lure of battle.
Korda’s group biography takes its title from Shakespeare’s “Henry V” and its invocation of “a muse of fire, that would ascend/ The brightest heaven of invention.” Starting with Rupert Brooke’s naive glorification of military service and culminating in Owen’s grim, gorgeous verses about the effects of poison gas, “Muse of Fire” is richly detailed, elegantly written and at times idiosyncratic.
The subject is, by now, well-plowed territory. But Korda, keenly attuned to the nuances of Britain’s class system and its overlapping literary circles, excels at tracing the bonds of acquaintance, collegiality, amity and sometimes physical attraction that knit these men to one another. The British verse of World War I reflected two linked developments. It embodied, first of all, the national turn from exhilaration and idealism to antiwar protest and cynicism, fueled by devastating casualties, stalemated trench warfare and the whole endeavor’s apparent pointlessness. One persistent drumbeat in Korda’s book is his battle-by-battle accounting of the killed and wounded, an unbearable toll on an entire generation.
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