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in the songs an ‘ironic method of outwitting misfortune’ which can be traced back to
Williams,a foot-soldier inHenry V.^51 ) To find the Privates’ use of Shakespeare, one
might have to look for different, less literary uses. Some of these were more or less
liturgical; as Fussell noted, there were the soldiers who went over the top repeating
endlessly to themselves lines of Shakespeare, as reassuring tokens of a pre-war
culture.^52 In Owen’s poem, quoted above, the soldier’s categorizing of his blood as
a‘damn`ed spot’ allows him the dignity of self-observation, as well as insisting on
a comic perspective. Such dark humour could itself seem Shakespearean. Edmund
Blunden, in ‘Trench Nomenclature’, celebrated the ‘sharp Shakespearean names’
the troops gave to the trenches. ‘Genius named them, as I live!’, declares the poem’s
speaker in opening, since ‘What but genius could compress|In a title what man’s
humour said to man’s supreme distress?’^53 Alistoftrenchnamesfollows,such
asJacob’s Ladder,Brock’s Benefit,andPicturedome.GeoffreyHillhasnotedhow,
when Cymbeline bids ‘the crooked smokes climb’ from the altars to the gods, he
is attempting to suggest a control he does not have, for whether the smoke rises
straight or crooked is not within his command.^54 The naming that Blunden’s poem
observes makes a similar attempt to control the uncontrollable. For, as well as the
ironic recontextualization of the horrors that the names provide—in which the
comedy is a measure of the individual’s freedom from his material situation—there
is the suggestion that it is the act of naming itself that has produced the horrors.
This is logically incoherent; no one, after all, would want to call such horrors upon
their own heads. Yet it is emotionally helpful, since it may be better to be the master
of one’s own destiny than to be the passive sufferer of what one is subjected to.
War, in fact, is not only about the dead and the processes of dying; it is also a
celebration of life. Often that is seen best in the comedy of juxtapositions; Gurney
is particularly good at giving the comedy of these bathetic contrasts: ‘True, the size
of the rum ration was a shocker|ButatlastoverAubersthemajestyofthedawn’s
veil swept.’^55 For David Jones, the celebration of life becomes something very close
to the celebration of language; readingIn Parenthesis, one gains the sense of how
lovely language is, and how lovely it is to live in language and so within history. At
one point in the poem, a sergeant responds to one Watcyn’s complaint that he is
soaked through (and bound for pneumonia, piles, and disorders of the juices) with
a brisk command to wring his shirt dry, and an order to the corporal to get hold
of some Veno’s medicine. Or thus goes the summary; the words themselves are
much richer, for in amongst the sergeant’s commands nestle lines from Amiens’s
(^51) John Brophy, inidemand Eric Partridge (eds.),Songs and Slang of the British Soldier: 1914–1918
(London: Eric Partridge at the Scholartis Press, 1930), 7.
(^52) See Fussell,Great War and Modern Memory, 198–9.
(^53) Edmund Blunden, ‘Trench Nomenclature’, inThe Poems of Edmund Blunden(London: Cobden-
Sanderson, 1930), 173–4.
(^54) Geoffrey Hill, ‘ ‘‘The True Conduct ofHuman Judgment’’: Some Observations onCymbeline’, in
The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas 55 (London: Andre Deutsch, 1984), 65. ́
Gurney, ‘Serenade’, inCollected Poems, ed. P. J. Kavanagh (Manchester: Carcanet, 2004), 240.