war poetry and the realm of the senses See the gibbering shadows
Mixedwith the battled arms on the wall.
See gargantuan hooked fingers
Dug in supreme flesh
To smutch the supreme littleness.The exaggerated theatricality of the scene pushes it towards the mock-heroic,
infectingthegrotesquewithhumourandendangeringourrelationtothegrimnessof
the situation. While the poem is predominantly visual, reiterated by the epanaphoric
‘See’, the magnification lends it almost a tactile quality, the bodies evoked by words
such as ‘flesh’, ‘fingers’, ‘hooked’, ‘pluck’, and ‘smutch’. Discussing modernist visual
technology, Walter Benjamin notes:
With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlarge-
ment of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible,
though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations.... The camera introduces us
to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.^104
Through size and projection, a daily trench ritual becomes an exposure of the
murderous impulses of the soldiers—a reading of war psychology that we come
across in Freud’s ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’: ‘If we are to be judged
by our unconscious wishful impulses, we are ourselves, like primaeval man, a gang
of murderers.’^105 Moreover, for the son of Eastern European Jews, the imagery of
delousing might have an added charge, being part of the contemporary anti-Semitic
discourse. In 1882, German regulations were introduced, requiring the delousing
of Eastern Jews before they entered the country; train carriages bringing them had
to be steamed after every journey.^106 In France,Le Rappel, the organ of the radical
Left, noted in November 1920: ‘We must, as we have said, prohibit barracks where
twenty Jews spread their lice and their blemishes.’^107 Given his general education,
his ‘cosmopolitan’ exposure, and his acute consciousness of racial discrimination,
it is unlikely that the symbolic undertones of ‘louse hunting’—for the menace
of the pogrom is not too far away—would be lost on him: in any case, as he
himself once wrote, in a ‘vital composition’, ‘one’s own private thought, too secret
even to reveal to ourselves, were suddenly shown to us from outside’.^108 Yet, the
symbolic ramifications are never allowed to intrude into the poem, where comedy
and menace are held in fine balance.
However, it is ‘Dead Man’s Dump’ that inhabits most fully the geography
of the trenches—flames, corpses, explosions—but develops it into a profound
questioning of the relation between the living and the dead. In a letter to Marsh
(^104) Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, inIlluminations, 238–9.
(^105) Freud, ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’, inStandard Edition, xiv. 297.
(^106) See Jack Wertheimer,Unwelcome Strangers(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 25–6.
(^107) Le Rappel,quotedinLeonPoliakov,The History of Anti-Semitism: Suicidal Europe, 1870–1913,
trans. George Klin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 289. 108
Rosenberg, ‘Art’, 291.