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‘othershavecomebeforeyou’ 

Today he struck a final gesture,

Armsakimbo against the sky,

Crucified on a cross of fire

With all the heroic age magnificent in him.^22

The soldier’s crucifixion here serves the common good through its magnification of
a generation’s heroism. There is a sense of triumph and glory in this man’s death.
Similarly, Keyes, in ‘The Foreign Gate’, writes of glorious deaths, not alluding
explicitly to sacrifice and crucifixion, but attesting to their struggle and their role in
‘the future’s keeping’ in his insistence that ‘A soldier’s death is hard’ and that ‘the
death|Of these is different, and their glory greater’.^23
In ‘Lines on a Tudor Mansion’ and ‘Finale’, Lewis explores the polarities of the
sacrifice iconography which emerged from the poetry of the First World War. He
neither focuses exclusively on the vision of a soldier’s crucifixion as a triumphant end
which creates another saviour, nor wholly adheres to the belief that a careless older
generation continues willingly to sacrifice its sons without noticing that such offer-
ings fail to affect the course of history. However, in a later poem, ‘The Crucifixion’,
he emphasizes the futility of a ‘surrender of self to a greater statement’, concluding,

he knew this awful hanging

Obscene with urine, sagging on a limb,

Was not the End of life, and improved nothing.^24

Here, his proximity to the spiritually disillusioned poets of the First World War is at
odds with the fact that he was writing without direct experience of battle. Inevitably
though, prior to his departure for India, Lewis reflects on life and death, and
these reflections are manifestly influenced by his awareness of what his soldier-poet
predecessors experienced.
Douglas approaches the imagery of sacrifice and crucifixion from a different
perspective, trying neither to justify the War, nor to explore its impact on an
established system of belief. His war poetry insists on the inextricability of life from
death, and persistently presents imagery of death’s finality, suggesting that Douglas
would not endorse the possibility of a worthy sacrifice: if, as in ‘Dead Men’, the dead
are ‘not capable of resurrection’,^25 then it is unlikely that death, even in wartime,
is able to serve some greater purpose. As early as 1935, in ‘Famous Men’, Douglas
envisages the buried dead:

And think, like plates lie deep

licked clean their skulls,

rest beautifully, staring.^26

Such portrayals of death become more brutal eight years later in ‘Dead Men’: ‘All
that is good of them, the dog consumes.’ Intensified by the War, these images leave

(^22) Lewis, ‘Finale’, inCollected Poems, 36. (^23) Keyes, ‘The Foreign Gate’, inCollected Poems, 63.
(^24) Lewis, ‘The Crucifixion’, inCollected Poems, 107.
(^25) Douglas, ‘Dead Men’, inComplete Poems, 100. (^26) Douglas, ‘Famous Men’, ibid. 10.