cornelia d. j. pearsall
Billie Hughes was awarded Britain’s Distinguished Conduct Medal, the nation’s
secondhighest honour, after the Victoria Cross, for heroism in action, for repeatedly
carrying the wounded at Ypres from the battlefield back to the trenches. Yet, while
he and the blood-flickering fire ‘Moved into strong and stronger possession|Of
minute by minute’, the passage of time in ‘The Dream Time’ renders the father’s
actions passive, ineffectual. The clearing of his limbs, dramatized formally by
the poem’s insistent enjambment, is directly associated with the ‘slight, gingerish
movement’ of the clock, so that his hands and feet appear to move with its faintness
and caution. Although he had again and again dragged the wounded away from
battle, clearing their limbs, the distinguished veteran is here depicted as dragged
away himself, a body incapable of physical volition or self-propelled momentum.
Billie Hughes is all too literally demobilized, the term used for discharged soldiers
after the First World War. (We recall the snatch of pub conversation inThe Waste
Land: ‘When Lil’s husband got demobbed’.^8 ) While the poet’s father ultimately
made his way home from the front lines, there to be passively subjected to recovery
and ‘valiant’ healing, his son is now paralysed by the war. ‘Small and four’, as
diminutive a time-keeper as the ‘clock’s tiny cog’, his identity may be more directly
associated with the war than that of his father. Certainly, the time he keeps to is
wartime, as his four years are coterminouswith the ‘four-year mastication by gunfire
and mud’, and the ‘four-year strata of dead Englishmen’ he belongs to still more
than his father. The child is felled by his father’s military action, and can only lie on
the carpet, ‘buried, immovable’, abandoned, unlike his father’s comrades, amid the
wreckage of the battlefield. The father is associated with functional domestic objects
(hearth-fire, biscuit-bowl, piano, table-leg), the son with the spent and useless
debris of war, sprawled out ‘Among jawbones and blown-off boots, tree-stumps,
shell-cases and craters’. His father’s immobility is contagious and inescapable, as
all his family now inhabit a place and condition in which ‘nobody|Can ever again
move from shelter’.
Part of what Keith Douglas offers Hughes is a precise and energetic antidote
to paralysis. While his father inhabits a ‘Body buffeted wordless’, Hughes sees
in Douglas a body buffeted into graceful and effective articulation. The physical
movement of the poetry itself was much remarked by Ted Hughes. In his 1964
introduction, Hughes calls Douglas’s language ‘extremely forceful...afeatofgreat
strength’, while ‘As for technique’, ‘there is nothing numb or somnambulist in it.’
Hughes admires especially in Douglas ‘the essentially practical cast of his energy, his
impatient, razor energy’.^9 And mobility is what Douglas himself found distinctive
about his own war, which he considered otherwise a grim repetition of the previous
World War. In his essay ‘Poets in This War’ (1943), Douglas poses a question asked
by others, then and since, ‘Why are there no poets like Owen and Sassoon?’, and
(^8) T. S. Eliot,The Waste Land,inThe Complete Poems and Plays(London: Faber, 1969), 65.
(^9) Hughes, ‘Introduction’, 11.