Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature by Santanu Das

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War writing is haunted by experiences of physical contact: from the muddy realities of the front to the emotional intensity of trench life. Through extensive archival and historical research, analyzing previously unknown letters and diaries alongside literary writings by figures such as Owen and Brittain, Santanu Das recovers the sensuous world of the First World War trenches and hospitals. This original and evocative study alters our understanding of the period as well as of the body at war, and illuminates the perilous intimacy between sense experience, emotion and language as we try to make meaning in times of crisis.

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• ISBN: 0521066875
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Pub. Date: June 2008
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• Table of Contents
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Table of Contents

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Introduction

‘touch is the spirit and rule of all’¹

In contrast to the leg of the player about to kick the ball in the army match, the third soldier lifts his foot far higher than is needed as he tries to negotiate the duckboard: blindness is inscribed most powerfully at a point where touch is anticipated as collision but is actually absent. The exaggerated gesture dramatises the disjunction between our optical sense of space and the soldiers' tactile perception. In ‘The Fleeting Portrait’, Virginia Woolf recalls how ‘“Gassed” at last pricked some nerve of protest, or perhaps of humanity’. Referring to the raised foot, Woolf notes, ‘This little piece of over-emphasis was the final scratch of the surgeon's knife which is said to hurt more than the whole operation’.³ In Woolf's evocative account – as she plays on the relation between the surface of the canvas and the surface of the skin – the body of the painting and that of the viewer meet and move under the artist's hand: the ‘little piece of over-emphasis’ acts like the Barthesian ‘punctum’, pricking the skin set between the viewer and the painting, and subjectivity bleeds.

Sargent was commissioned to do a large painting for the Hall of Remembrance depicting the ‘fusion of British and American forces’.⁴ Trying to find a worthy subject, Sargent, along with his old friend Henry Tonks, travelled to France in July 1918 and, after spending some time as Earl Haig's guest, joined the Guards Division under General Fielding near Arras. On 11 September 1918, he wrote to his friend, Charteris, ‘The nearer to danger the fewer and the more hidden the men – the more dramatic the situation the more it becomes an empty landscape’. Of the three night-scenes he goes on to describe, one engrosses him: ‘a harrowing sight, a field full of gassed and blindfolded men’.⁵ The scene was the aftermath of a mustard gas attack in which the 99th Brigade and the 8th Brigade of the 3rd Division were caught. It is narrated in greater detail by Tonks: ‘Gassed cases kept coming in, led along in parties of about six just as Sargent has depicted them, by an orderly. They sat or lay down on the grass, there must have been several hundred.’⁶ Later, while spending a week in a hospital tent at Ypres, Sargent was further exposed to ‘the chokings and coughing of gassed men, which was a nightmare’.⁷ Yet, such horrors are largely absent in the painting. Sargent's emollient contours and colours aestheticise the soldiers: they are tall, blond and athletic, moving with solemn dignity, as in a sculpted frieze. The sky is strangely tranquil. The pinkish glow of the setting sun, coming from no particular direction, holds the soldiers, and stills them in our minds in a moment of numbed serenity. The most striking feature in the painting is the strange use of light: the spectacle of blindness is represented through the drama of chiaroscuro. The trance-like figures seem to be moving in an imaginary space amidst the scattered light, as if replaying a scene from one of the traumatic war-dreams that haunt First World War writings, and which Freud used as one of the starting points for Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).

The sense of finale is particularly evident when compared to Bruegel's more macabre The Parable of the Blind (1568) to which Sargent's painting clearly refers. In Sargent's world, there is an eternal wait for the piles of bodies crowding the ground, for the casualty station can treat only a handful of them. Yet the sense of desolation is balanced by an Owenesque sense of community as the soldiers on the ground, ‘leaning on the nearest chest or knees / Carelessly slept’.⁸ The homoerotic undertones of war that Owen evokes would not be lost on this society artist who painted portraits of fashionable women for his living, and often did nude studies of young working-class men for pleasure.⁹ If we look at the figures on the ground, we do not know where one figure ends and the other begins: the folds of colour and fabric hold within them the contours of the bodies as they touch and blend in a world of sensuous contact and comfort. The young boy in the right-hand corner gulps down water to alleviate the effects of mustard gas. Sargent's draft sketch (Figure ¹⁰ The aims of my study are both recuperative and literary: it seeks to recover and analyse the ‘sensuous’ world of the trenches and the war hospitals as lived by the men at the front and the women nurses, and to show how the texture of such experience is fundamental to, and provides new ways of understanding, First World War literature and art. If, in some contemporary discussions, the body has become a linguistic trace in the maze of signification,¹¹ Touch and Intimacy draws attention to its physicality, to the material conditions which produced the literature. Vision, sound and smell all carry the body beyond its margins; tactile experience, by contrast, stubbornly adheres to the flesh.¹² At once intense and diffuse, working at the threshold between the self and the world, touch can be said to open up the body at a more intimate, affective level, offering fresh perspectives on certain issues that repeatedly surface in war writings and have become central to contemporary cultural thinking: ideas of space and boundaries, questions of gender and sexuality or the concept of trauma (‘neurasthenia’ or ‘shell-shock’, as it was known at the time). The immediate post-war years were also the time when touch was being conceptualised by men such as Havelock Ellis in Sexual Selection in Man (1920) and Sigmund Freud in The Ego and the Id (1923). Though tightly focused on the First World War, the larger intention of the book is to provide an intimate history of human emotions in times of crisis – to explore the making and unmaking of subjectivity through the most elusive and private of the senses.

The First World War is remembered and represented as a time of darkness. The eyes of the soldiers I write about are not gassed or bandaged but open and disorientated in the night. Burgoyne, in his diary, describes the world of the trenches as ‘dark as Hades and wet’; David Jones, in In Parenthesis (1937), writes about ‘the stumbling dark of the blind, that Bruegel knew about – ditch circumscribed’.¹³ The reference manual British Trench Warfare 1917–1918 issued for the soldiers by the War Office stressed in a section titled ‘Training in Night Work’ how essential nocturnal duty was to trench life.¹⁴ In The First Hundred Thousand (1915), Ian Hay notes, ‘The day's work in the trenches begins about nine o'clock the night before’; the French writer, Ferdinand Céline, corroborates, ‘Everything that's important goes on in the darkness’.¹⁵ Amidst the dark, muddy, subterranean world of the trenches, the soldiers navigated space, as I argue in the first two chapters, not through the safe distance of the gaze but rather through the clumsy immediacy of their bodies: ‘crawl’ is a recurring verb in trench narratives, showing the shift from the visual to the tactile.

After three weeks at the front, Owen writes to his mother, ‘I have not seen any dead. I have done worse. In the dank air, I have perceived it, and in the darkness, felt.’¹⁶ Touch is considered to be the more apt register for recording the horrors than sight; the sense of violation is at once more acute and personal. And a month before his death on the Oise-Sambre Canal Bank, he writes to Siegfried Sassoon:

. . . the boy by my side, shot through the head, lay on top of me, soaking my shoulder, for half an hour.

Catalogue? Photograph? Can you photograph the crimson-hot iron as it cools from the smelting? This is what Jones's blood looked like, and felt like. My senses are charred.

Owen tries to evoke the perilous intimacy of the moment by drawing on the eye (‘crimson-hot iron’) but soon the visual gives way to the tactile. The moment is recalled differently to his mother: ‘Of whose blood lies yet crimson on my shoulder where his head was – and where so lately yours was’.¹⁷ Horror, pity, maternity and a diffuse eroticism are fused and confused in that ‘half an hour’ of bodily contact, defying the established categories of gender and sexuality. On the other hand, Donald Hankey, who was killed on the Somme in October 1916, evokes the ideal of the Christian officer through a careful detail: ‘If a blister [on the foot] had to be lanced, he would very likely lance it himself. . . . It seemed to have a touch of the Christ about it, and we loved and honoured him the more.’¹⁸ Between Owen's account of horror and Hankey's idealisation of daily routine, a whole new world of physical contact was opening up between men. Owen's repetition of the word ‘felt’ also raises an issue that will confront us repeatedly in relation to its neighbour ‘touch’: though referring primarily to the sensation (‘perceived’), ‘felt’ gathers its full significance in relation to the emotional world it contains, hovering at the threshold between the sensory and the psychic, bringing together the body and the mind.

Two broad questions will frame the argument of this book. First, I shall explore why the sense of touch seems to be so crucial to the experience of the First World War, and the profound, if at times necessarily oblique, ways in which it affects the subjectivities of soldiers and nurses. Second, I shall highlight the urgent need within war writings to find a literary language around this particular sense which gets charged with new intensities of meaning. Starting with a variety of archival and testimonial material – letters, diaries, journals, trench newspaper accounts – I move on to examine how imaginative writing of the period repeatedly dwells on moments of tactile contact and the ways in which these processes of touch – whether in a context of disgust, tenderness, pain – are gathered into the creative energies of a text, conceptualised within a novel, a poem or a short story. If such writing provides special insights into the phenomenological and emotional world of the First World War, its analysis will show literature's close engagement with the realm of the senses.

In the incomplete Preface to his intended collection of poems, Owen refashioned poetry as testimony. The relationship between touch and testimony is a particular concern of this study, especially in the case of the women who were called upon to nurse the men and whom Owen so uncharitably excluded (‘for you may touch them not’). Yet, it is precisely in this forbidden zone of physical contact that Mary Borden, an American nurse who served in Belgium and France, would locate her work, establishing the authority and authenticity of her touch: ‘My hands could instantly tell the difference between the cold of the harsh bitter night and the stealthy cold of death’.¹⁹ If Dr Elsie Inglis was famously told to ‘Go home and be still’ when she volunteered her medical services in August 1914, Borden would boldly lay claim to bodily knowledge, traditionally associated with the male experience of war. The book explores the pressures of memory and culture that underpin this kind of physical testimony. At the outbreak of the war, thousands of women, trained to be genteel Edwardian ladies, ventured into France, Belgium, Serbia and Mesopotamia to nurse the war-wounded. The direct relation posed by Owen between combat experience and war knowledge has in the past privileged a particular construction of war that largely marginalised women and civilians. Over the last two decades, however, a number of feminist critics such as Higonnet, Marcus and Tylee have powerfully drawn attention to the war experience of women, fundamentally affecting the way in which we ‘reconceptualise war – and therefore the vocabulary of war’.²⁰ Touch and Intimacy shows that women's writings are essential to an understanding of warfare and continues the process of recovery through examination of archival and literary material, shifting the idea of trauma, traditionally associated only with the figure of the shell-shocked soldier, onto the neglected figure of the nurse. However, as Trudi Tate usefully reminds us in Modernism, History and the First World War (1998), it is not always helpful to treat gender as the ‘final point of inquiry’.²¹ Instead of viewing trauma exclusively through the lens of gender (which remains an important category of analysis), or solely as a representational crisis, this study also addresses the relation of gender to the witnessing of the body in pain and the ‘charred’ senses of the young nurses.