war poetry and the realm of the senses mud. The mud there wasn’t liquid, it wasn’t porridge, it was a curious kind of sucking kind
ofmud. When you got off this track with your load, it ‘drew’ at you, not like quicksand, but
a real monster that sucked at you.^8
What was traumatically modern about the war, as is evident from the first extract,
was its mechanized nature: the triumph of material over men, the invisibility of the
enemy and randomness of death. The conjunction of underground trench warfare
and industrial weaponry severed the link between space, vision, and danger which
has been used to structure perception in conventional warfare: life now depended
on the arbitrary direction of a shell, robbing the soldiers of any sense of agency or
purpose. Arthur Graeme West describes the front line soldiers cooped up in their
subterranean ‘funk-holes’ as ‘hens in cages’, ‘shivering a little as a shell draws near’.^9
If Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, with its combination of chivalry,
motion, and spectacle, underpinned notions of warfare for a particular class, the
soldiers soon realized that they were not, as Brooke had envisaged, ‘swimmers into
cleanness leaping’ but rather, as Wyndham Lewis noted, ‘houseflies on a section of
flypaper’.^10 The constant barrage by the artillery tore up the Western Front, and
combined with rain, turned it into a giant cesspool amidst which the soldiers stood,
floundered, and occasionally even drowned. Owen refers to ‘an octopus of sucking
clay’.^11 But there lay a deeper anxiety that the second extract hints at: the world
might not only regress into primordial slime, but might actually draw man into its
glutinous ooze.
The absence of vision is a source of bewilderment in war writings. Burgoyne in
hiswardiariesdescribesthetrenchesas‘darkasHadesandwet’.^12 InThe First
Hundred Thousand(1915), Ian Hay notes, ‘The day’s work in the trenches begins
about nine o’clock the night before’; Ferdinand C ́eline corroborates: ‘Everything
that’s important goes on in the darkness.’^13 As I have argued elsewhere, the visual
topography of everyday life was replaced by the haptic geography of the trenches:
in the dark, subterranean world of the Western Front, men navigated space not
through reassuring distance of the gaze but through the tactile immediacy of
their bodies.^14 Creep,crawl,burrow,wormare regular verbs in trench narratives,
(^8) J. Dillon, Imperial War Museum Sound Archives, AC4078.
(^9) Arthur Graeme West,The Diary of a Dead Officer(London: Allen & Unwin, 1919), 67.
(^10) Rupert Brooke, ‘Peace’, inThe Poetical Works of Rupert Brooke, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London:
Faber, 1960), 19; Wyndham Lewis,Blasting and Bombardiering: An Autobiography (1914–16)(London:
John Calder, 1982; 1st pub. 1937), 161.
(^11) Owen to Susan Owen, 16 Jan. 1917, inCollected Letters, 427.
(^12) Gerald Achilles Burgoyne,The Burgoyne Diaries, ed. Claudia Davidson (London: Thomas
Harmsworth, 1985), 10.
(^13) Ian Hay,The First Hundred Thousand: Being the Unofficial Chronicle of a Unit of ‘K 910’(London:
William Blackwood, 1915), 245; Ferdinand C ́eline,Journey to the End of the Night,trans.Ralph
Manheim (London: John Calder, 1988; 1st pub. 1932), 62.
(^14) I have argued this point at length in my bookTouch and Intimacy in First World War Literature
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). I have drawn on some common material here.