{"id":248,"date":"2024-06-09T18:48:17","date_gmt":"2024-06-09T18:48:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/?p=248"},"modified":"2024-06-09T18:48:17","modified_gmt":"2024-06-09T18:48:17","slug":"eightieth-anniversary-of-keith-douglass-death-in-normandy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/2024\/06\/09\/eightieth-anniversary-of-keith-douglass-death-in-normandy\/","title":{"rendered":"Eightieth anniversary of Keith Douglas’s death in Normandy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today is the eightieth anniversary of the death of the poet and memoirist.\u00a0 What follows is the piece I wrote ten years for the New Statesman<\/em> to mark the seventieth anniversary:<\/p>\n

Keith Douglas was just 24 when killed only three days after landing in Normandy. As 8th<\/sup> Armoured Brigade sought a breakout south of Bayeux, Captain Douglas was hit by mortar shrapnel.\u00a0 \u00a0Fatalistic, the young poet had crossed the Channel convinced he was going to die.\u00a0 Before his tank regiment, the Sherwood Rangers, left for France he wrote \u2018On a Return from Egypt\u2019.\u00a0 A prescient final stanza announced:<\/p>\n

The next month, then, is a window<\/p>\n

and with a crash I\u2019ll split the glass.<\/p>\n

Behind it stands one I must kiss,<\/p>\n

person of love or death<\/p>\n

a person or a wraith,<\/p>\n

I fear what I shall find.<\/p>\n

The writers of the Western Front \u2013 the generation of Sassoon, Owen, and Graves \u2013 have cast a long shadow, all but obscuring Britain\u2019s soldier-poets of the Second World War. Yet Ted Hughes was insistent that Keith Douglas\u2019s verse warranted comparison with the best of Wilfred Owen.\u00a0 Siegfried Sassoon \u2013 \u2018Mad Jack\u2019 \u2013 is arguably a more obvious figure of comparison.\u00a0 In the verse tribute \u2018Bog Cotton\u2019, Ulster man of letters Michael Longley used a floral leitmotif to connect Egypt\u2019s \u2018sandy soldiers\u2019 with the fallen \u2018poppy petals\u2019 of Flanders fields. In a neat piece of inter-textual referencing, Longley echoed Douglas\u2019s 1943 poem \u2018Desert Flowers\u2019 in name-checking Isaac Rosenberg.\u00a0 That fascination with flora and fauna surviving against all the odds may be resonant of Rosenberg, but it recalls another Great War writer, Edmund Blunden, in his uniquely lyrical memoir, Undertones of War<\/em>.\u00a0 When Douglas went up to Oxford in 1938, Blunden was his English tutor.\u00a0 Here was a direct link with the poets of the Western Front, and Blunden was sufficiently impressed by Douglas\u2019s undergraduate poems as to pass them on to T.S. Eliot at Faber.\u00a0 By then his student had quit Oxford for Sandhurst.<\/p>\n

Dying when he did Douglas became a writer defined solely by war.\u00a0 Yet someone who went to war so young could of course still be with us, had he survived the Allied campaign in north-west Europe.\u00a0 Not that his chances of staying alive were high given the Sherwood Rangers\u2019 almost continuous fighting through to May 1945; by which time the regiment had lost 344 officers and 213 other ranks. \u00a0\u00a0With a much fuller oeuvre of work would esteem for Douglas\u2019s wartime poetry and prose have become tarnished, or would many still acclaim him as the finest soldier-poet of the \u2018People\u2019s War\u2019 \u2013 a worthy successor to Sassoon, Owen, et al?<\/p>\n

Alamein to Zem Zem<\/em>, Douglas\u2019s memoir of the North African campaign, was published in 1946. It appealed to contemporary readers because here was a unique theatre of operation where popular and national mythology could resurrect the ostensible glamour and chivalry of a certain kind of war.\u00a0 At the time \u2013 and later, courtesy of the British film industry \u2013 the desert war was projected as a throw-back to a better age, with mutual respect between enemies.\u00a0 Yet Keith Douglas spared no detail in demonstrating that death and mutilation is every bit as bloody, devastating, and screamingly traumatic if you are dressed in silk scarf, waistcoat, and suede boots as when you are huddled in a ditch defending Sedan or Stalingrad.\u00a0 His letters and verse confirm that from the moment he joined the Army in 1940 he had no illusions about the nature of war in the middle of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n

On 6 June 1944 Douglas found himself in the vanguard of the Allied invasion of Europe.\u00a0 Nearly two years earlier he had missed the start of the last great battle fought by the massed forces of the British Empire and Commonwealth.\u00a0 He was serving as a camouflage officer in Palestine when the Sherwood Rangers, having finally swapped horses for tanks, survived a baptism of fire at Alam Halfa and then lead the break out at El Alamein.\u00a0 Six days later their commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel E.O. Kellett, welcomed Douglas back to frontline service when in desperation the poet stole a truck and returned to his regiment.\u00a0 Within hours of arrival he was leading his tank troop westward into the Libyan desert.<\/p>\n

\u2018Flash\u2019 Kellett was a master of foxhounds in his native Nottinghamshire and a Tory MP.\u00a0 As \u2018Gentleman Jim\u2019 the colonel dominates the narrative in Alamein to Zem Zem<\/em>, very much an account of English men at war: anyone from elsewhere in the British Isles is scarcely mentioned, and women feature only as part of a vague back story that hints at unrequited love in Cairo.\u00a0 In Douglas\u2019s memoir \u2018Tom\u2019 \u2013 another pseudonym \u2013 is second in command by virtue of having spent his life working with horses, whereas the unattractive personality of \u2018Raol\u2019, the next most senior officer, is attributed to his being half-French.\u00a0 Douglas duly records such prejudice with neither endorsement nor disapproval, albeit displaying both bemusement and amusement at the survival of this feudal structure.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s obvious that these volunteer gentlemen soldiers are an anachronism.\u00a0 Having so recently dismounted their horses they endeavour to retain the routines, rituals, and language of both mounted cavalry and the hunt.\u00a0 This language, recorded in a mixture of affection and incredulity by Douglas, is idiosyncratic and firmly rooted in rural life, most obviously fox hunting and cricket.\u00a0 In that great tradition of the wartime middle and upper classes, understatement is everything.\u00a0 This is understood throughout the regiment, with no Americans present to assume that all is well when the real message is one of crisis.<\/p>\n

Douglas chronicled the dying days of a paternalistic social structure in which the original officers, scions of the East Midlands landed classes and their squires, deem the well-being of their men paramount and espouse a gentlemanly set of values.\u00a0 They may be amateurs at the game compared with proper armoured regiments, but they learn fast: on 5 November 1942 no less than 26 enemy tanks were destroyed at Galal, with Douglas playing a prominent role.\u00a0 The likes of \u2018Gentleman Jim\u2019 and \u2018Tom\u2019 are respectfully portrayed as leaders of men \u2013 yet both were dead by the time the wounded writer rejoined his regiment in the spring of 1943.\u00a0 While in hospital, Douglas drafted \u2018Gallantry\u2019; a poem whose Sassoon-indebted satire displays bitterness tempered by regret and even quiet remorse.\u00a0 It begins:<\/p>\n

The Colonel in a casual voice<\/p>\n

spoke into the microphone a joke<\/p>\n

which through a hundred earphones broke<\/p>\n

into the ears of a doomed race.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Into the ears of the doomed boy, the fool<\/p>\n

whose perfectly mannered flesh fell<\/p>\n

in opening the door for a shell<\/p>\n

as he had learnt to do at school.<\/p>\n

Douglas is clearly not one of the old guard, but neither does he conform to Orwell\u2019s ideal of the progressive technocrat.\u00a0 His 1943 poem \u2018Aristocrats\u2019 is a moving panegyric for the chevaliers<\/em> of the shires who took the Sherwood Rangers to war four years earlier, the final stanza recalling how:<\/p>\n

The plains were their cricket pitch<\/p>\n

and in the mountains the tremendous drop fences<\/p>\n

brought down some of the runners.\u00a0 Here then<\/p>\n

under the stones and earth they dispose themselves,<\/p>\n

I think with their famous unconcern.<\/p>\n

It is not gunfire I hear but a hunting horn.<\/p>\n

Such poems confirm Douglas as the bridge between old and new, shouting \u2018Tally ho!\u2019 and yet comfortable with the technology and tactics of mechanised warfare; the hearty, killing time in his tank reading Tit-Bits<\/em>, and the intellectual, a handy copy of Shakespeare\u2019s sonnets in his battledress pocket.\u00a0 He was thus well placed to record changes taking place within the regiment; a microcosm of more profound social developments behind the front line and on the Home Front.\u00a0 Back in Britain during the first half of 1944 Douglas noted how much the country had altered; and wartime London\u2019s literary life exposed him to an agenda for change singularly absent from the social chit chat of the mess.<\/p>\n

Douglas\u2019s keen sense of national identity \u2013 of what it means to be English \u2013 may to a degree have absorbed a leftward shift in attitudes.\u00a0 Yet on the whole he retained the values and prejudices of his class, not least a veiled anti-semitism.\u00a0 \u2018Cosmopolitan\u2019 was often coded language for being Jewish, but Douglas was genuinely cosmopolitan \u2013 he had travelled in Europe, and was almost unique among his comrades in being a Francophile.\u00a0 His linguistic skills stretched to basic German, and he shared the 8th<\/sup> Army\u2019s healthy respect for the Afrika Korps<\/em>.\u00a0 On the other hand he loathed Italians.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because unlike the Germans in the desert the Italians refused to play the game and respect the rules, witness their booby-trapping the corpses of British soldiers.<\/p>\n

Yes there was respect for Rommel\u2019s men, but any code of behaviour transgressed by Italians constituted no more than a crude and elementary means of mutual survival in a deeply hostile environment.\u00a0 The war in North Africa was fought across vast spaces, with the odd nomadic tribe the only civilian intruders on an empty battlefield.\u00a0\u00a0 Douglas contrasts the stark beauty of the desert with the ugly detritus of contemporary warfare.\u00a0 Evidence of death and destruction is everywhere, with the ubiquitous wrecked tanks emblematic of \u2018industrial war\u2019 at its apogee.\u00a0 Death is similarly on an industrial scale, and Douglas spares few details; his graphic prose descriptions matched in verse. \u2018Dead Men\u2019 is a truly disturbing poem, its extended image of the wild dog devouring dead comrades in shallow graves prompting speculation as to the writer\u2019s state of mind had he survived the war.\u00a0 \u2018How to Kill\u2019 recalls Orwell\u2019s reflections in Spain on finding frozen in your rifle sight a fellow human being, but one cruelly ignorant of his imminent demise: \u2018And look, has made a man of dust\/ of a man of flesh.\u00a0 This sorcery\/I do.\u2019\u00a0 Those last words seem Shakespearean not Orwellian, as does the final stanza of \u2018How to Kill\u2019:<\/p>\n

The weightless mosquito touches<\/p>\n

her tiny shadow on the stone, and with how like, how infinite<\/p>\n

a lightness, man and shadow meet.<\/p>\n

They fuse.\u00a0 A shadow is a man<\/p>\n

when the mosquito death appears.<\/p>\n

Douglas spotlights the horror, the tedium and the stupidity, but he also signals the moments of pure delight \u2013 the heightened pleasure experienced in a variety of different circumstances linked only by the absence of mid-century Britain\u2019s prevailing rules, conventions, and social mores.\u00a0 Thus poems such as \u2018The Knife\u2019 and \u2018Cairo Jag\u2019 are located in the Egyptian capital\u2019s raciest and most exotic settings, carrying a sexual sub-text that reinforces the impression of a complicated love life.\u00a0 \u2018Behaviour of Fish in an Egyptian Tea Garden\u2019, a witty and bitter-sweet short story in seven stanzas, is sufficiently black as to suggest its author would be better off back in the front line.\u00a0 Keith Douglas was no saint \u2013 far from it \u2013 but he was scrupulously honest, if cruelly so.\u00a0 Nowhere more so than in his much anthologised and best known poem, \u2018Vergissmeinicht\u2019 \u2013 the \u2018forget-me-not\u2019 of the dead German\u2019s girlfriend:<\/p>\n

.But she would weep to see today<\/p>\n

how on his skin the swart flies move;<\/p>\n

the dust upon the paper eye<\/p>\n

and the burst stomach like a cave.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

For here the lover and killer are mingled<\/p>\n

who had one body and one heart.<\/p>\n

And death who had the soldier singled<\/p>\n

has done the lover mortal hurt.<\/p>\n

Here surely is someone who stands comparison with the steeliest soldier-poets of an earlier conflict.\u00a0 Not that Douglas resurrected the futility of fallen comrades\u2019 sacrifice \u2013 for all his fatalism, he deemed himself to be fighting a very different sort of war: justified if not unreservedly just.\u00a0 Too often Douglas\u2019s poems are seen in terms of what came before, and yet more striking is their modernity.\u00a0 This after all is the writing of a young man, albeit as a consequence of combat one older than his years.\u00a0 Naturally they prompt the question of what was still to come.\u00a0 What does survive is an evocative, elegiac, and exceptional account of the desert war.\u00a0 The attractiveness of the author comes across strongly: the intelligence, the quiet courage, and the good humour.\u00a0 As such, the last word should surely rest with Captain Douglas\u2019s batman: \u2018I like you, sir.\u00a0 You\u2019re shit or bust you are.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today is the eightieth anniversary of the death of the poet and memoirist.\u00a0 What follows is the piece I wrote ten years for the New Statesman to mark the seventieth anniversary: Keith Douglas was just 24 when killed only three days after landing in Normandy. As 8th Armoured Brigade sought a breakout south of Bayeux, … <\/p>\n

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