santanu das
‘parois de l’ombre’ inClart ́e(1919)and David Jones’s ‘walled darkness’ inIn
Parenthesis (1937), Rosenberg goes one step further as he describes not the
congealed darkness but the breaking of light.^98 The core of the poem, however,
is the touching of the narrator’s ‘English hand’ by the ‘queer sardonic rat’ which
will soon cross no man’s land and ‘will do same to a German’. The action accretes
intensities of meaning as different impulses jostle with each other: realism and
satire, wit and wish-fulfilment, comedy and pathos. The abject creature of the
trenches is exalted to an enlightened emissary of peace, joining the warring hands
in a phantasmatic handshake as Rosenberg subverts a standard anti-semitic trope
through brilliant irony. A few years later, we haveT. S. Eliot’s notorious lines: ‘The
rats are underneath the piles.|The jew is underneath the lot.’^99 If the link between
the migratory rat and the immigrant Jew is hard to deny—one of the first poems
Rosenberg wrote after joining the Army was ‘The Jew’—it is also just possible
that the two emphatically differentiated hands in fact beat with common Jewish
blood. For, like the ‘cosmopolitan rat’ or the ‘rootless’^100 poppy, the homeless Jew,
as Rosenberg would surely have been aware, could be found on both sides of no
man’s land, making this European war a horrible fratricide for them. In Germany,
when war was declared, around 96,000 Jews volunteered to fight for the country:
12 per cent of these were volunteers, 77 per cent served at the Front, and casualty
rates ran at 12 per cent.^101 In France, by August 1914, 8,500 out of 30,000 Jewish
immigrants had joined the French Army.^102
In ‘Louse Hunting’, on the other hand, a daily trench activity is turned into a
grotesque pageant: ‘Nudes—stark and glistening,|Yelling with lurid glee’.^103 These
statuesque figures are soon evolved into a phantasmagoria of movement and action,
but we see only their projection on the walls of the dug-out:
Then we all sprang up and stript
To hunt the verminous brood.
Soon like a demons’ pantomime
The place was raging.
See the silhouettes agape,(^98) Henri Barbusse,Clart ́e(Paris: Flammarion, 1919), 106; David Jones,In Parenthesis(London:
Faber, 1963; 1st pub. 1937), 16. 99
T. S. Eliot, ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’, inTheCompletePoemsandPlays
(London: Faber, 1969), 41. See also Anthony Julius,T. S. Eliot: Anti-Semitism and Literary Form
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 22. 100
The word occurs in the typed draft of the poem, reproduced in Rosenberg,Poems and Plays,
129.
(^101) The statistics are taken from Ulrich Sieg, ‘Judenz ̈ahlung’, in Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich,
and Irina Renz (eds.),Enzyklop ̈adie Erster Weltkrieg(Munich: Ferdinand Sch ̈oningh, 2004), 600. See
also George L. Mosse,The Jews and the German War Experience, 1914–1918(New York: Leo Baeck
Institute, 1977).
(^102) Emmanuel Le Roux, ‘Exhibition honours Jewish soldiers in First World War’, inLe Monde(rep.
inThe Guardian), 24 Oct. 2002,http://www.aftermathww1.com/parisexpo.asp
(^103) Rosenberg, ‘Louse Hunting’, inPoems and Plays, 136.