156 chapter 5
“[t]hat night we marched back again. . . . The men were singing. Being mostly
from the Midlands, they sang comic songs... : Slippery Sam, When we’ve
Wound up the Watch on the Rhine, and I do like a S’nice S’mince Pie, to a con-
certina accompaniment. The tune of S’nice S’mince Pie ran in my head all next
day, and for the week following I couldn’t get rid of it.”^22
In the ten pages after his first introduction of this song, Graves describes in
vivid detail a brutal disaster of communication, resulting in thousands of casu-
alties: “the barbed-wire entanglements protecting [the old front line] had not
been removed, so that the Highlanders got caught and machine-gunned be-
tween their own assault and support lines” (129); “We went up to the corpse-
strewn front line” (132); “I was surprised at some of the attitudes in which the
dead stiffened—bandaging friends’ wounds, crawling, cutting wire” (134).
The survivors eat meat pie and deaden their nerves with whiskey before they
line up to wait for the next stage of attack, and the menacing song about meat
pie returns:
We waited on the fire-step from four to nine o’clock, with fixed bayo-
nets, for the order to go over. My mind was a blank, except for the recur-
rence of S’nice S’mince S’pie, S’nice S’mince S’pie . . . I don’t like ham, lamb
or jam, and I don’t like roley-poley . . .
The men laughed at my singing. The acting C.S.M. said: “It’s mur-
der, sir.”
“Of course it’s murder, you bloody fool,” I agreed, “But there’s noth-
ing else for it, is there?” It was still raining. But when I sees a s’nice s’mince
s’pie, I asks for a helping twice... (137)Amid descriptions of corpses souring on the front—“I vomited more than
once while superintending the carrying. . . . The colour of the dead faces
changed from white to yellow-grey, to red, to purple, to green, to black, to
slimy” (137)—the song manically repeating in the officer’s head takes on the
connotation of murder, the soldiers’ decomposing bodies in direct contrast
to the whiskey and meat pie that the survivors eat. The joking expression, “it’s
murder, sir,” expresses what they have just carried out, and are about to repeat.
The expression also proves that the song, on endless repetition in their minds,
is agitating rather than calming or ordering. Graves’s character dismisses the
complaint by continuing to sing, and as such, anticipates that this song and
this war will continue by the refrain, “I ask for a helping twice.” The irony of
this passage is that the officer has assimilated the view of the troops; even the
simplest forms of comfort have lost meaning here and have come to symbol-
ize the brutal and empty goals of battle. The endless repetition, both of the
tune’s recurrence in his mind and his performance of it, signifies form’s inabil-
ity to console or even distract the soldier from his circumstances. Repetition