Untitled

‘death’s proletariat’ 

Slowly tawny, slowly ashy, the desert and the day

suddenlygulp the plum of darkness. Rays

of indigo spill down the wadis. Tents are cheerful

with lights-out laughter but the round of things is the

night. On guard, I climb the water-tower. Strengthening

stars are thick in absolute black. Who ever mourned

the sun? A universe unbroken

mends man and the dark. No northern mists envelop

me...^19

There is a certain liberation in distance and darkness as Morgan recalls the ‘buzz’
of Cairo—‘Domes, shoeshines, jeeps, glaucoma, beads—’ (stanza 97)—and the
friendship of comrades and lovers. Here, as in all his work, the credo is: ‘There is
no other life,|andthisisit.’^20 But other memories are not so kind. He ‘dreaded
stretcher-bearing...my muscles not used to the strain’, but—

The easiest trip of all I don’t forget,

In the desert, that dead officer

Drained of blood, wasted away,

Leg amputated at the thigh,

Wrapped in a rough sheet, light as a child.^21

In the evocation of an urbane Cairo ‘full of characters’, G. S. Fraser can still
sometimes lose his ironic composure: ‘And Europe stinks|Of the perverted human
will, is tortured|Just as our guts are tortured by our drinks.||And Europe spews
up Europe, as we spew|Cairo on Cairo....’^22 News of the winter war in Russia and
the Battle of Rostov was particularly disturbing. Over more than two years that city
was to be defended, lost, and retaken by the Russians against the German Army’s
efforts to break through to the oilfields of the Caucasian plains. In the opening
onslaught alone, at the end of 1941, the Wehrmacht was turned back with losses
of 14,000 at the cost of more than 140,000 Russian lives. The utter ruthlessness of
the Soviet sacrifice, of death ‘hammering, hammering, hammering home’, moved
Fraser to produce his most powerful war poem, ‘Rostov’, a cry of anguish at the
terrible slaughter:

That year they fought in the snow

On the enormous plain, the rivulets

Thick with the yellow thaw, and darker, dark

With what at distance might be blood or shadows:

Everything melted, everything numbed, broke.

Every hand was pawing at desolation

And the huge, stupid machine felt a shudder.

It did not matter about all the dead

(^19) Morgan,‘TheNewDivan’,inCollected Poems, 328. (^20) Morgan, ‘London’, ibid. 251.
(^21) Morgan, ‘New Divan’, 329–30.
(^22) Fraser, ‘Monologue for a Cairo Evening’, inPoemsofG.S.Fraser, 113.