santanu das
suggesting the shift from the visual to the tactile. After three weeks at the Front,
Owenwrites to his mother, ‘I have not seen any dead. I have done worse. In the dank
air, I haveperceivedit, and in the darkness,felt’ (Owen’s emphases).^15 Touch, for
Owen, becomes the ground of both testimony and trauma. Eric Leed in his studyNo
Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I(1979) has explored the changes
in the perceptual processes of the soldiers resulting from ‘war in the labyrinth’,
focusing on the exaggerated role of sound and how it broke down rational structures
of thought.^16 ‘You couldn’t; you can’t communicate noise,’ noted Robert Graves in
an interview; ‘Noise never stopped for one moment—ever’; and we have Sassoon’s
soldier ‘going stark, staring mad because of the guns’.^17
Darkness, guns, mud, rain, gas, bullets, shells, barbed wire, rats, lice, cold, trench
foot: these images which have formed the ‘modern memory’ of the war are largely
culled from the trench poetry of Owen, Sassoon, Graves, and Rosenberg—to name
only a few—just as discussions of war poetry have tended to be assimilated into a
historicaldoctrineexpressingthe‘truthofwar’.Indeed,Owen,inhisfamouspreface,
actively sought this conflation. Consequently, historical and literary narratives often
become interchangeable, as if war poetry was the transparent envelope of sense
experience: the seared senses of the war-torn soldier which become the most
powerful form of testimony, altering the very meaning of the term ‘war poetry’ in
the twentieth century. Consider ‘A Working Party’, ‘written while in the Front Line
during my first tour of trenches’^18 on 30 March 1917:
Three hours ago he blundered up the trench,
Sliding and poising, groping with his boots;
Sometimes he tripped and lurched against the wall
With hands that pawed the sodden bags of chalk.
He couldn’t see the man who walked in front;
Only he heard the drum and rattle of feet
Stepping along barred trench-boards, often splashing
Wretchedly where the sludge was ankle-deep.
Voices would grunt ‘Keep to your right—make way!’
When squeezing past some men from the front line:
White faces peered, puffing a point of red;
Candles and braziers glinted through the chinks
And curtain-flaps of dug-outs; then the gloom(^15) Owen to Susan Owen, 19 Jan. 1917, inCollected Letters, 429.
(^16) Eric Leed,No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1979), 126–31. See also Paul Fussell, who powerfully evokes the physical nature of
trench warfare—mud, sunrise, bird-song—in his classic studyThe Great War and Modern Memory
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 36–74. 17
Robert Graves, ‘The Great Years of their Lives’,The Listener, 86 (15 July 1971), 74; Siegfried
Sassoon, ‘Repression of War Experience’, inCollected Poems 1908–1956(London: Faber, 1984), 90.
(^18) Siegfried Sassoon, note appended to ‘A Working Party’, inThe War Poems, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis
(London: Faber, 1983), 27.