cornelia d. j. pearsall
trying to get hold of ‘From Alemain [sic]to Zem-zem’ for three years.’^18 )The
living resemble corpses, as is the case with the first dead body Douglas encounters
inAlamein to Zem Zem: peering into the ‘murk’ of a trench, he sees what he calls
an ‘object...as long as a man and in a pose which suggested limbs. I stretched a
tentative and reluctant hand down into the pit, wondering whether I should touch
a stiffened arm, shoulder or leg.’^19 But the dead body escapes his grasp, as his
reluctant hand fastens instead on what is simply another soldier’s bedding. His first
dead body is a living man’s kit. While the living resemble the dead, the dead are like
the living in their capacity for movement. What really is the first corpse Douglas
sees assumes the easy posture of the ambient, appearing merely as ‘a man in black
overalls who was leaning on the parapet’. The shape of the duffle which Douglas had
mistaken for a corpse reclines ‘in a pose which suggested limbs’, while corpses array
themselves in various postures, one ‘leaning on the parapet’, another ‘taking up
his position’.^20 Displaying an inexhaustible capacity for lyric self-positioning, these
corpses and variants of corpses stand, and move, as figures of incarnate poetry, as
Douglas had defined it—that is, like a man whose movements and appearance had
been familiar, now rendered unfamiliar, perhaps even suddenly unknowable, by an
unexpected shift in the position of his limbs.
Hughes’s ‘Out’ catalogues the dismayingly littered ground of a domestic battle-
field, with its ‘jawbones and blown-off boots’, but in Douglas anything that remains
has value—not surprisingly, perhaps, given Douglas’s numerous lively accounts
of the necessity and serendipity of battlefield looting. ‘Loot is one of the most
important things,’ Douglas asserts, in the last collected letter he wrote before his
death. ‘It is the thing that makes all that exhilaration in fighting...simply rumma-
ging in the glorious brantub provided by any battlefield.’^21 The battlefield detritus
so overwhelming to the submerged 4-year-old of the Hughes household is what
exhilarates or at least temporarily compensates survivors. In ‘Enfidaville’, Douglas
writes of displaced townspeople, ‘already they are coming back; to search|like ants,
poking in the debris, finding in it ́ |abedorapianoandcarryingitout’.^22 Viewing
this retrieval of objects (bed, piano) connoting sensuous and sensual pleasures of the
sort the war has interrupted, the poet asks of the scavengers, ‘Who would not love
them at this minute?’ All residue may be reclaimed, which is to say looted, as human
or material remains remain and find new uses. ‘Dead Men’ describes how from the
‘shallow graves’ of the buried soldiers ‘the wild dog|discovered and exhumed a
face or a leg|for food’.^23 The poet comes to find this scavenging image consolatory,
as the dead remain, after their fashion, vital presences. Douglas reflects, ‘the wild
dog finding meat in a hole|is a philosopher’. The pariah is a philosopher, and also
(^18) Hughes to Marie J. Douglas, n.d., British Library Manuscripts, Add. 59833.
(^19) Douglas,Alamein to Zem Zem, ed. Desmond Graham (London: Faber, 1992), 31.
(^20) Ibid. 34 and 38. (^21) Douglas to Jocelyn Baber, 28 Apr. 1944, inLetters, 342.
(^22) Douglas, ‘Enfidaville’, inComplete Poems, 116. (^23) Douglas, ‘Dead Men’, ibid. 100.