Mud
‘He got back into the trench towards the dug-out, skating in the sticky mud. The duckboards were completely sunk in it. In the whole affair it was the slippery mud he hated most.’
A Man Could Stand Up, p. 78 Ford Madox Ford, Carcanet Press
Trenches
‘There were all these inscrutable beings: the Other Ranks, a brownish mass, spreading underground, like clay strata in the gravel, beneath all this waving country that the sun would soon be warming: they were in holes, in tunnels, behind sackcloth curtains, carrying on…carrying on some sort of life: conversing, breathing, desiring. But completely mysterious, in the mass….’
Compare this picture from Ford’s novel, p. 94, with Wilfred Owen’s ‘Futility’.
Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds—
Woke once the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?
How effective is Owen’s use of the farming year as a background to this soldier’s death?
Futility: This item is from The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford (www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit); © The Estate of Wilfred Owen. The Complete Poems and Fragments of Wilfred Owen edited by Jon Stallworthy first published by Chatto Windus, 1983. Preliminaries, introductory, editorial matter, manuscripts and fragments omitted.