‘death’s proletariat’ ‘The Wire’ draws more directly on Garioch’swartimecaptivity, with an allegorical
vision of the world as a vast moor crowded with people, webbed with barbed wire
and surrounded by guard towers:
A man trips up; the Wire gaes ding,
Tins clash, the guaird lifts up his heid;
Fu slaw he traverses his gun
And blatters at him till he’s deid.^69Only a few in the most remote parts of the moor manage to survive, by finding
an eerie joy in ‘pure despair’ as they shrink their life to the tiniest, almost invisible
spark:
Outwardly they seem at rest,
binna the glint of hidden fires.
Their world shaks, but they bide still
as nodal points on dirlan wires.Such was the survival strategy of the camps. It is a terrible oppression.
These are among the darkest of Garioch’s poems, quite at odds with the modest
and dryly sceptical spirit of most of his work, which tends to reflect on the
pretensions of the world in the persona of an ordinary working man, or the
schoolteacher that he became, standing on the sidelines of high culture and low
ambition alike. Garioch lost his copy of Jaroslav Hasek’sˇ The Good Soldier Schweik
when he was captured at Tobruk; his later work shares something of Schweik’s
disingenuous but canny instinct for survival. Yet ‘The Bog’, ‘The Muir’, and ‘The
Wire’ come from another place altogether, a place visited, alas, by thousands of
people in a uniquely global conflict, a place prophetic, even, of threats to come in
the post-war atomic age. Behind the symbols of precious victory, behind the bells
ringing and the ticker-tape parades, lie the long shadows of the death camps, total
war, mass conscription, millions dead, and cities in flames around the world. The
poets were there to see it and to speak it, not without despair, not without hope:
And aye the reik bleeds frae the warld’s rim
As it has duin frae Babylon and Troy,
London, Bonn, Edinbro, time eftir time.
And great Beethoven sang a Hymn to Joy.^70(^69) Garioch, ‘The Wire’, ibid. 50. (^70) Garioch, ‘During a Music Festival’, 67.