‘death’s proletariat’ grim, of army life: ‘We get gobbets of meat, and veg to eat|Thattaste like sweaty
socks,|And when we shit, we’re afraid to sit|For fear of getting the pox.’^26
He carried this practice into the desert war, often on a more serious note, and
collected soldiers’ songs from the enemy camp whenever he met Italian or German
POWs. Henderson had a distinguished and unusual war career. As an intelligence
officer attached to the 51st Highland Division, he saw action throughout the desert
war, taking part in the invasion of Sicily and going on to operate in the mainland of
Italy in liaison with communist partisans. (In the 1980 BBC television programme
‘The Innocent and the Dead’, he remembered entering Rome on his own in a
jeep well ahead of the Allied forces.) Songs such as ‘The 51st Highland Division’s
Farewell to Sicily’ and poems like ‘Ballad of Snow-White Sandstroke’ and ‘Ballad
of the Simeto (For the Highland Division)’ are eloquent testimony to an event-
filled war and the poet’s capacity to mix English and Scots idiom in robust verse
reportage—as is ‘Anzio April’, with its villanelle-like recurring refrain:
Kenny’s bomb-happy: I’m a ruddy poet.
By Christ, my case is worse and that’s a fact.
Maybe I’m nuts. Maybe I’ll start to show it.
Sometimes I think that all the rest are cracked.
They’re on the spot, and hell they hardly know it
...Or so you’d think, the damfool way they act.
Spud’s writing home, and Eddie thinks he’s Bing.
Over the grave all creatures dance and sing.
Snap out of that. Brigades of battered swaddies
Have got to stay and shoot—or lose their pants;
While strange to say our Jocks (the muckle cuddies)
Have still an inclination to advance.
Down Dead-end Road, and west among the wadis
They’ll pipe and make the Jerries do the dance.
Next month the race. Today we run the heats,
And numskull death his little tabor beats.^27Henderson’s finest achievement, however, is the sequence of ten poems,Elegies
for the Dead in Cyrenaica, which were written between Autumn 1942 and December
1947, and first published complete by John Lehmann Ltd. in 1948.^28 This long
poem, more than any other in the literature of the period, catches something of the
strangely spectral nature of the desert war. In his Foreword to the 1948 edition, the
poet reflected on the genesis of the sequence, and since the North African campaign
(^26) Henderson, ‘Pioneer Ballad of Section Three’, ibid. 37.
(^27) Henderson, ‘Anzio April’, ibid. 110.
(^28) ‘First Elegy’ was first published in the winter of 1943–4 as ‘Fragment of an Elegy’ inNew Writing
and Daylight, ed. John Lehmann. In a letter to Henderson from Cairo on 1 Jan. 1945, G. S. Fraser
admired this poem, recognizing something of its loose and expansive force: ‘like Whitman, the whole
thing will be even more impressive when you have it in bulk. It’s like a broad river carrying a lot of
gravel along with it’ (Fraser, inThe Armstrong Nose,6).