In his short story ‘Lance-Jack’, published in the 1942 collection The Last Inspection, Alun Lewis captured the monotonous reality of warfare and army life. The writing is vivid and atmospheric:

At night, in the drizzle, I walk round and round the cemetery, along the circular road, and I do not know when to stop walking round and round the silent and eternal cemetery.

There is, of course, the figure of Dante behind this repetition and later in the story Lewis suggests that the soldiers ‘were the exiles, like Dante.’ The other literary voice heard through this story is that of Edward Thomas and Lewis suggests to the reader that he might be wise to re-read those poems from 1915 / 1916:

 The soldier says “Life is a series of meetings with strangers. We are all strange, to ourselves as well.”

That is true. But it is dangerous, like cynicism. For sometimes when he is utterly alone, utterly impersonal, on guard in the night at some outpost, somewhere, he can only envisage the human past, the great centrifugal force of the heart which draws into its orbit and unites in love all differences of people, mother and sweetheart, friend and pauper, employer and baby daughter, I say he can only envisage this great power of life as a swarming of bees on a bough, of flies on a fallen damson, a noisy, slightly indecent congress. A complex, if you prefer.

And if you ask why a man appears to prefer what is casual, rough, hazardous and incomplete to what is warm and personal and loving, I suggest you read Edward Thomas’s poems again. It is, if you like, curious that the idealist should live casually with regard to himself and the preservation of himself, that he should find the haversack, the trench, the journeying, most suited to the pursuit of high ends.

The rootless lives of soldiers can be felt in the opening lines of ‘All Day It Has Rained…’ as the men ‘sprawled in our bell-tents, moody and dull as boors’. It is perhaps no accident that Lewis should have used a word from Thomas’s pursuit of his doppleganger, ‘The Other’, where the older poet’s determination to find himself led to his being confronted by ‘those dull boors’ before he pursued his journey ‘Aimed at the unseen moving goal’.

Alun Lewis’s poem centres around dissolution, death. What starts as casual conversation about ‘dropping bombs on Rome’ swiftly moves on to a contemplation of the ‘quiet dead’ juxtaposed with the ‘loud celebrities / Exhorting us to slaughter’. A contemplation of this quietness of not-being brings to the poet’s mind many of the small details that were so central to Thomas’s own poetry: children, woods, the slow raking of burning chestnuts, the Shoulder O’Mutton hill near Petersfield where the earlier poet had walked so many times ‘till a bullet stopped his song’.

In ‘All Day It Has Rained’ the particular Thomas poem which Lewis had in mind was ‘Rain’, written in January 1916. In that poem Thomas had focused on the ‘bleak hut’ he was in and suggested an image of trench-warfare as its backdrop with the dead ‘Like a cold water among broken reeds’. There is an echo of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in the Thomas poem and a feeling of being ‘half in love with easeful Death’ and, in similar vein, Lewis moves from the monotonous repetition of ‘Smoking a Woodbine, darning dirty socks, / Reading the Sunday papers’ to that ‘thought of the quiet dead’. In Dante’s Inferno the souls are in torment for eternity and in T.S. Eliot’s epigraph to ‘The Waste Land’ it is no accident that the Cumaean Sybil, when asked by the boys what she wishes for, should reply:

‘I want to die’

This page contributed by Ian Brinton