The 20th Century is marked by the loss of voices cut short in mid-song by war.
There have been so many dark centuries in the history of Christendom that one hesitates to call any particular century the darkest of all. Some have been as dark as the 20th century, but none have been as deadly. In terms of the sheer body count, the 20th century, with its wars of irreligion and its access to industrialized weapons of mass destruction, is the most murderous in human history.
World War I was the first great war of the machines in which millions of human persons were butchered by new technology. The British brought the newly-invented tank to the fray. The Germans used chemical weapons in the form of mustard gas. Both sides employed the recently discovered flying machines. Barbed wire barred the way through no-man’s-land, and more efficient and effective machine guns and artillery ensured carnage on a scale beyond the wildest imaginings of previous generations of warmongers. By the end of the war, it is estimated that more than eight million combatants had been killed and a further 20 million wounded.
It is impossible to fathom how many great and good men were snubbed out before their presence was felt and their voice was heard by anyone other than their own grieving families and friends. We might be reminded perhaps of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy,” in which he muses upon the silent graves of those who died without making their mark on history. “Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,” Gray had pondered. Such thoughts might also lead us to lament the deaths in World War I of those poets whose songs were sung and whose voices were heard, albeit all too briefly, before their singing was silenced.
We might think of British war poets, such as Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen, whose poetry about the war is still read and revered. Who knows how they might have matured and what songs they might have sung had they lived beyond the ages of 27 and 25 respectively? The same mystery is not attached to another great war poet, Siegfried Sassoon, who survived the war and became a convert to the Catholic Faith, writing some sublime religious poetry in his final years.
Crossing the Atlantic, we should think immediately of the American poet Joyce Kilmer, a convert to the Catholic Faith whose literary reputation was very much in the ascendant when he enlisted in the Army upon the United States’ entry into the fray in 1917. Although he had only been a Catholic for four years, he had already gained a reputation as one of the finest religious poets of his generation and was compared often to G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, both of whose work he admired.
Shortly before he enlisted, Kilmer had been commissioned to compile a volume of verse that would be published as Joyce Kilmer’s Anthology of Catholic Poets. In his introduction, written from Camp Mills in New York prior to his deployment to the killing fields of Europe, he had written beautifully about the connection between a poet’s faith and his work:
A Catholic is not a Catholic only when he prays: he is a Catholic in all the thoughts and actions of his life. And when a Catholic attempts to reflect in words some of the Beauty of which as a poet he is conscious, he cannot be far from prayer and adoration.
Within a year of these words being written, he would be killed by a German sniper during the Second Battle of the Marne. He was 31 years old.
Moving back across the Atlantic, our thoughts should turn to French essayist, poet, and playwright Charles Péguy, who would be killed in the First Battle of the Marne, four years prior to Kilmer’s death on the same field of battle. As with Kilmer, the cause of death would be a single shot to the head.
Péguy’s conversion to Catholicism in around 1908 impacted everything he wrote thereafter, echoing Kilmer’s assertion that a Catholic “is a Catholic in all the thoughts and actions of his life.” Perhaps a couple of epigrammatic quotes will help us understand Péguy’s tradition-oriented spirit. First is his understanding of politics: “It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been committed for fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.” And then there’s his preference for the great conversation of Western civilization over the gossip of the zeitgeist-driven news media: “Homer is original this morning, and nothing is perhaps so old as today’s newspaper.”
We will conclude our song of remembrance to the singers silenced by the First World War with the German poet and playwright Reinhard Sorge, who was only 24 years old when he was killed in the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Astonishingly for one so young, Sorge has left a formidable legacy. As a 19-year-old disciple of the anti-Christian iconoclastic philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Sorge wrote The Beggar, an egocentric surrealist drama in which, in a series of violent scenes, he expresses disgust with various types of people whom he deems unfit to warrant the ideal of the Nietzschean Übermensch (“Over-Man,” i.e., Superior Man or Superman). Sorge was awarded the Kleist Prize for this avant-garde and truly pioneering work which is credited as laying the foundations for surrealist theater.
By the age of 21, Sorge had outgrown both the ideas of Nietzsche and the faddishness of modern art. To the dismay of his modernist admirers, he and his new wife were received into the Catholic Church in September 1913, the ultimate act of rebellion against the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. The decision had been precipitated by the spending of Holy Week on his knees in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, during which he immersed himself in the liturgy, observing every detail with his artist’s eye for beauty. “Thenceforth my pen has been and forever will be Christ’s stylus,” he proclaimed, “until my death.” He was true to his word. Everything he wrote in the little time he had left prior to his death was fervently Catholic.
In addition, he was tireless in his efforts to evangelize others. Two of his friends were convinced by his persuasive defense of the Faith, converting shortly after Sorge’s own reception into the Church. Then his mother and brother followed him into the Church. Undaunted by his own youth, he even wrote to two famous neo-pagan poets, Richard Dehmel and Rainer Maria Rilke, both of whom were well-established writers and much older in years, to make the argument for the Faith. Neither was convinced, but both wrote back sympathetically.
As tragic as is the loss of young poets such as Brooke, Owen, and Kilmer, the loss of Reinhard Sorge is perhaps the most poignant. Who knows what he might have achieved had he lived. As for his meteorically short and brilliant life, we’ll let the Jesuit Fr. Bernard O’Brien have the last word. In an article published in the December 1932 issue of Irish Monthly, Fr. O’Brien offered the following eulogy to the young genius who had been snatched away by the wickedness of war: “Words are useless to praise him. His early faults were covered up by his ardent love. If we made a search among our young writers today, whom should we find to put up against Sorge?”
Republished with gracious permission from Crisis Magazine (May 2025).
This essay is part of a series, Unsung Heroes of Christendom.
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The featured image is a photograph of German writer Reinhard Sorge, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.