shakespeare and the great war ‘Under the greenwood tree’ inAsYouLikeIt. The sergeant says: ‘Wring your vest
man, there is no enemy here.|Veno’s corporal—cures for rough weather’ (IP, 71).
And faintly the echo is heard: ‘Here shall he see|No enemy|But winter and rough
weather.’^56 Amiens’s song may sound from within the sergeant’s words in part
because ‘cures for rough weather’ was an advertising slogan of Veno’s; if that is so,
it does nothing to lessen, but rather increases, our appreciation of the thickness
and liveliness of a culture in which Shakespeare’s words constantly recur like an
unchecked and unchosen wind (in Hardy’s terms). In Jones’s poem, death becomes
more than anything the loss of a linguistic community; our sorrow at the death
of Corporal Aneirin Lewis is in large part a sorrow at his loss of voice. Gurney
remembers the ‘Infinite lovely chatter of Bucks accent’ of one ‘Who died on the
wires’;^57 Jones is very good at giving us the chatter itself, and so the sense of language
as a personal possession, something carried up to the front line along with, perhaps,
a photograph, and some luxury like a candle, and a final letter. Shakespeare was a
part of that language, part of the issue of kit to the British, to be used as the situation
demanded, and sometimes sounding out by chance.
The individual’s relationship with tradition, and with Shakespeare, may have
suffered a crisis, but there was no general rupture in the Great War. Shakespeare
was used in many ways—analytically, liturgically, expressively, politically, in
commemoration and celebration. Those outside direct experience of the war, and
those experiencing the war directly, both used Shakespeare to orientate themselves
and to try to understand how the Great War was affecting their lives and their
world. It could not have been otherwise, as Britain’s own picture of itself and its
history was strongly Elizabethan and Shakespearean. Tradition, and Shakespeare,
are a vital part of the experience of the Great War, and need to be part of our
attempt to understand that mental landscape and the art that constitutes part of
that landscape. For Paul Fussell, such attempts would be pointless, as they would
be pursuing ‘bad’ or ‘false’ art. Fussell wanted to deny poets recourse to tradition
because, when poems sited themselves within literary tradition, one question above
all others thrust itself upon him. What frightened Fussell about David Jones’s
allusions was the possibility that soldiering was a universal experience. To Fussell,
this was unacceptable, because it was immoral: ‘But the problem is, if soldiering
is universal, what’s wrong with it?’^58 One might praise Fussell’s intention here,
but the logic of his argument is confused. Soldiering obviously is a fairly universal
experience. The hopeful fantasies spread by Margaret Mead and others about
the pacific nature of tribal societies have been thoroughly rejected by subsequent
studies; in the long anthropological view of history, twentieth-century Europe is a
time of abnormal peace.^59 The point is that universality, normality, and naturalness
(^56) Shakespeare,As You Like It,ii.v. 6–8. (^57) Gurney, ‘The Silent One’, inCollected Poems, 250.
(^58) Fussell,Great War and Modern Memory, 150.
(^59) See Stephen Pinker,The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature(London: Penguin,
2003), 56–7. Pinker is here quoting the work of Lawrence Keeley.