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By Root 2051 0

spattered and scattered in the churned-up mire that had been green fields and woodland. You could write poems about vanishing names. He did not want to write poems about beauty, or sorrow, or high resolve. He would—if his wits held and he did not stop one—try to write a grim little poem or two about naming parts, and naming the battlefield. Thinking of Alice, some book lover had named trenches for the stories: there were Walrus Trench, Gimble Trench, Mimsy Trench, Borogrove, Dum and Dee. There was Image wood somewhere. Where had that come from? He had seen Peter Pan Trench, Hook Copse and Wendy Cottage. They were some other joker’s poetry but he could weave them into cat’s-cradles of his own, these ephemeral words in a world where nothing held its shape in the blast. You built your hiding-hole out of blocked dead men, and you called it End Trench, or Dead Man’s Bottom, Incomplete Trench, Inconsistent Trench, Not Trench, Omit Trench, or Hemlock Trench. The medical orderly came past and said they were taking him to a field hospital. Was he trying to say something, perhaps. Names, said Julian. Names. Names are getting away from things. They don’t hold together.

They gave him morphine. He wondered, as he drowned, if there was a morphine trench.

There was so much, so much of what was his life, that he wanted neither to name, nor to remember. Waking, he forced it down. In sleep, it rose, like a floodwave of dead and dying flesh, to suffocate him.

• • •

In the field hospital Julian thought from time to time about the English language. He thought about the songs the men sang, grim and gleeful. We’re ’ere because we’re ’ere because we’re ’ere because we’re ’ere.

Far, far from Wipers I long to be

Where German snipers can’t snipe at me.

Damp is my dugout

Cold are my feet

Waiting for the whizz-bangs

To send me to sleep.

I had a comrade

None better could you find

The drum called us to battle

He marched by my side.

Poetry, Julian thought, was something forced out of men by death, or the presence of death, or the fear of death, or the deaths of others.

He started making a list of words that could no longer be used. Honour. Glory. Heritage. Joy.

He asked other men for names of trenches. They came up with Rats Alley, Income Tax, Dead Cow, Dead Dog, Dead Hun, Carrion Trench, Skull Farm, Paradise Copse, Judas Trench, Iscariot Trench and many religious trenches: Paul, Tarsus, Luke, Miracle. Many trenches were named for London’s streets and theatres, and many more for women—Flirt Trench, Fluffy Trench, Corset Trench. Julian collected them in a notebook, and started stringing them together, but his head ached. They naturally formed into parodies of jingles

Numskull, rumskull

Hear the bullet hum skull

Now I’ve got my bum full

Of shrapnel tiddly um.

That was no good. But in that direction was something that could still be done. Rupert Brooke was gone, dead of an infected spot on his lip, in Greece, a year ago. He had written about Dining-Room Tea and about honey or some such thing in Grantchester, unimaginable now, and about war as a release from the life of half-men and dirty songs and dreary, and fighting as “swimmers into cleanness leaping.” These children, Julian thought, had been charmed and bamboozled as though some Pied Piper played his tune and they all followed him, docile, under the earth. The Germans had sunk the liner Lusitania, and Charles Froh-man, the impresario who had staged Peter Pan, had drowned with gallant dignity, apparently reciting the immortal line which had been judiciously cut from wartime performances: “To die will be an awfully big adventure.”

Writing about mud and cold and sleet and lice and rats appealed to the real genius of the English language. It would be good to include shit and fuck and words current at schools and repressed in the unimaginable social life of respectable England. Maggot was a good English word. Someone contributed “ Bully craters.”

He recovered, and went back to his regiment. They went to take over the captured Schwaben Redout. Here were the deep German dugouts