helen goethals
mass deportations, imprisonment without trial,forgery, assassination, the bombing of
civilians—which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.^26
The moral colour-blindness was often a question of distance, ‘judging distances’, as
the title of a poem by Henry Reed very suggestively put it. Whatever the reasons for
the fight, hand-to-hand combat could always be justified as self-defence, but how
to judge the actions of ‘an aircraft waging war|Inhumanly from nearly five miles
height?’ What about ‘this damn inhuman sort of war’, in which ‘A man who is too
squeamish to kill a rabbit can launch a rocket’?^27
Keith Douglas, in his much-discussed poem ‘How to Kill’, did address this central
moral question:
Now in my dial of glass appears
the soldier who is going to die.
He smiles, and moves about in ways
his mother knows, habits of his.
The wires touch his face: I cry
now.Death,likeafamiliar,hears
and look, has made a man of dust
of a man of flesh. This sorcery
Ido.Beingdamned,Iamamused
to see the centre of love diffused
and the wave of love travel into vacancy.
How easy it is to make a ghost.^28But even here, though the war poet is brutally honest, he is not telling the truth
about the War. The injunction ‘and look’ involves the reader in the moral question,
but the soliloquy form of the poem inhibits judgement by focusing attention on the
doer, not the deed. As so often in the poetry of the Second World War, the staging of
a theatre of war makes the action of the play seem inevitable. The poet manœuvres
the reader into feeling that the plot cannot be altered, it can only be watched with a
kind of helpless fascination.^29 What is being enacted in words—however finely—is
thepoet’spsychologicalstateofmind.Thetragic-comicfigureofthemurdering
poet is not an actor in the play, but part of the audience, and the murderous act he
would denounce remains forever off-stage. W. H. Auden, whose physical distance
from the war led to his being branded ‘unpatriotic’, was acutely aware of this moral
danger: ‘It is terrifying to realize that even great and real suffering can be turned
into a theatre and so be no help.’^30
(^26) Orwell, ‘Notes on Nationalism’, 419.
(^27) R. N. Currey, quoted in Ian Hamilton,The Poetry of War 1939–45(London: Alan Ross,
1965), 161.
(^28) Keith Douglas, ‘How to Kill’, inThe Complete Poems, ed. Desmond Graham (London: Faber,
2000), 119.
(^29) For a study of Keith Douglas’s ‘extrospective style’, see Tim Kendall, ‘ ‘‘I see men as trees
suffering’’: The Vision of Keith Douglas’,Proceedings of the British Academy, 117 (2002), 429–43.
(^30) W. H. Auden, quoted in Edward Mendelson,Later Auden(London: Faber, 1999), 244.