‘others have come before you’ Douglas nevertheless keeps the iconography as a peripheral feature in ‘Landscape
withFigures 1’: instead of dead soldiers approximating Christ crucified, he writes
of ‘vehicles|squashed dead...stunned|like beetles’. He continues to defeat the
reader’s expectation: the doubters in Douglas’s text do not, like Thomas, find
evidence of resurrected life. On the contrary, the anti-pastoral imagery, similar
to that at the end of ‘Cairo Jag’, intensifies the denial of regeneration. William
Scammell suggests that ‘The Doubting Thomas who comes to ‘‘poke fingers in
the wounds’’ is perhaps the poet himself as much as it is the reader, fascinated to
know what death looks and feels like’;^35 like Thomas, Douglas seeks confirmation of
death’s immutability. Whereas Thomas is confronted by the miracle of resurrection,
Douglas is rewarded with a less complicated answer. According to George Parfitt,
in First World War poetry, ‘If the soldier is actually identified with Christ, he has
‘‘put on the armour of God’’ and is fighting to save mankind. His death will be
followed by resurrection and victory.’^36 The Christ figure is absent from Douglas’s
poem, and the possibility of rebirth is denied in a world in which the natural and
the unnatural form a destructive partnership.
The soldier poetry of the First World War led the reading public to expect a
certain response from combatant poets between 1939 and 1945.^37 Although very
different in nature, in landscape, and in weaponry, the two conflicts inevitably have
points of contact, some of which are reflected in the re-emergence, in Second World
War soldier poetry, of these aspects of the poetic iconography (flowers, crucifixion)
of 1914–18. Such images maintain a sense of continuity with the past; the war
poetry genre, altered by the experiences of the soldiers in the trenches, remains
recognizable in spite of the Second World War’s difference from the First. One
aspect of the iconography, however, is almost entirely absent from the poetry of the
later conflict: homoeroticism. Fussell, recognizing this absence, asks:
Were writers of the Second War sexually and socially more self-conscious than those of
the First? Were they more sensitive to the risks of shame and ridicule? Had the presumed
findings of Freud and Adler and Krafft-Ebing and Stekel so diffused themselves down into
popular culture that in the atmosphere ofstrenuous ‘democratic’ uniformity dominating
the Second War, one was careful now not to appear ‘abnormal’?^38
These questions, which remain unanswered inThe Great War and Modern Memory,
form an important basis for an exploration of how homoeroticism manifests itself
(^35) William Scammell,Keith Douglas: A Study(London: Faber, 1988), 171–2.
(^36) George Parfitt,English Poetry of the First World War: Contexts and Themes(London: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1990), 89. 37
See Cyril Connolly, ‘Why Not War Writers? A Manifesto’,Horizon, 4/22 (1941), 236–9. Articles
such as this illustrate the weight of expectation exerted by British magazine and newspaper editors.
Questions were raised when writersdid not respond in the same way as those involved in the First
World War, and solutions were proposed: ‘Creative writers should be used to interpret the war world so
that cultural unity is re-established and war effort emotionally co-ordinated 38 ’ (p. 237, italics original).
Fussell,Great War and Modern Memory, 280.