‘others have come before you’ tone of ‘Cervieres’` demonstrates Keyes’s need to find some measure of justification
for the War; the hope of a ‘better orchard’ exists as compensation for the grief that
Keyes predicts.
Douglas’sself-elegy,‘OnaReturnfromEgypt’,offersandrequestsnoconsolation;
he relished the opportunity to participate in the conflict, thinking of Alamein as ‘an
important test, which [he] was interested in passing’.^14 His final poem features both
the poppy and the lily, but Douglas removes the floral imagery of war poetry from
one aspect of its traditional mythology, and recasts it in an atmosphere of ‘depleted
fury’.^15 Douglas presents a reflective persona; separated temporarily from battle, he
has a sense of connection to a more distant past, and thus to an implicit future:
the specimens, the lilies of ambition
still spring in their climate, still unpicked:
but time, time is all I lacked
to find them, as the great collectors before me.Thesefloralsymbolsareneitherinnocentnorregenerativeinthetraditionalway,and
although resilient in their continued springing, they are almost a mirage, a distant
prize that remains just out of reach. Douglas’s reflection on the lilies does not allow
for nostalgia or issue a call for remembrance. His persona reveals that ‘cold is an
opiate of the soldier’, gesturing towards, yet transforming the poppy in, an allusion
to opium. The flower has been replaced. Its presence-in-absence acknowledges the
earlier conflict, whilst suggesting that the poignancy of its role in the 1914–18 war
is redundant for a soldier about to participate in the Normandy landings.
As he prepared for the events of 6 June 1944, Douglas believed that he was being
‘fattened up for more slaughter’.^16 His choice of phrase has sacrificial implications:
he presents himself as a potential offering to the enemy on behalf of the English
Army. During the First World War, the sheer multiplicity of the deaths interpreted as
sacrificial offerings resulted in the creation of a new mythology specific to the context
of that war. In Hilda D. Spear’s words, ‘the symbolic sacrifice of the One is redefined:
it is no longer symbolic; it is no longer a single sacrifice.’^17 However, this new
mythology is not simply context-specific to the war of 1914–18; it is also resonant
within the work of some soldier-poets of the Second World War. Lewis, for instance,
in ‘Lines on a Tudor Mansion’, writes of the soldiers’ inescapable knowledge:
Weknow
Violence terrible and degrading,
Beauty disfigured,(^14) Douglas,Alamein to Zem Zem, ed. Desmond Graham (London: Faber, 1992), 15.
(^15) Douglas, ‘On a Return from Egypt’, inThe Complete Poems, ed. Desmond Graham (London:
Faber, 2000), 132.
(^16) Douglas to Edmund Blunden, n.d. [Mar./Apr. 1944], inLetters, 328.
(^17) Hilda D. Spear,Remembering, We Forget: A Background Study to the Poetry of the First World War
(London: Davis-Poynter, 1979), 103.