On not forgetting

Marie Marshall
Sep 2, 2018 · 6 min read

My name is Marie Marshall. I’m a Scot, a poet (twice, thrice), a writer albeit one who has stalled for a couple of years and doesn’t see an end to the stall, and a humourist/commentator on ships and shoes and sealing-wax, cabbages and kings. I’m also a recovering internet addict — no, I’m not joking. Back in the early 2000s (remember ‘dial-up’?) I had a serious problem which helped precipitate a breakdown, and this is the last time I’m even going to mention it. Except to pose the rhetorical question, what then is someone like me doing launching yet another internet presence, wondering what to put here, and tutting at the folly of spreading myself even more thinly in virtuality? I could shift that responsibility to the person who said I ought to be on Medium — she is, after all, right about many things — but it was I who clicked my cursor on the button, I didn’t have to. That, I guess, is something we all have to remember each time we post anything anywhere. We’re the one who hits ‘enter’.

Keith Douglas

I will lodge things here, I think, that don’t quite fit in any of my other spaces. Today, for example, I’d like to look at one poem by someone else, a poem I stumbled on by a poet I had not even known about until the other day. Most often when we hear the words “war poet” we think of the Great War of 1914–18, and of Owen, Sassoon, Brooke, and so on. If there had been poets of the 1939–45 war, then in my ignorance I couldn’t have named one. Keith Douglas died on D-Day, 6th of June 1944, but in 1942 he was in the North African desert, and during the Battle of El Alamein he was in charge of a tank. At one point his tank was hit by a German shell, but in return of fire the enemy gunner was killed. Douglas’s poem was composed three weeks later, when happening to pass the same spot he discovered the German gunner’s body. Obviously he went through the man’s pockets, otherwise he could not have written the following poem.

Vergissmeinnicht

Three weeks gone and the combatants gone
returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again, and found
the soldier sprawling in the sun.

The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.

Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht.
in a copybook gothic script.

We see him almost with content,
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked at by his own equipment
that’s hard and good when he’s decayed.

But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move;
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave.

For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.

The first thing that strikes me is the title, Vergissmeinnicht. In German, “do not forget me” is “vergiss mir nicht.” The inscription on the reverse of the picture is in “copybook gothic script,” the formal typeface and hand of Germany at one time, arcane to a non-German. Had the girl used some sort of dialect expression? Had she mis-written? Had Douglas mis-read?

To me, the step back from that point of linguistic precision almost manages to convey the tone of the poem on its own. Douglas, I learn, was often criticised for the cold detachment of his poems. It was deliberate. In prioritising description he put into the reader’s hands the sole responsibility for emotion. If this poem seems to be almost void of enmity, in retrospect, it is also void of much in the way of obvious pity. Yet the more I read it, and in particular the more I read it aloud, the more I can’t get through the final verse without having to suppress a sob. Douglas’s poetics work. He has made me responsible for my emotional reaction. In making enmity and pity nuances rather than bold statements, he has highlighted a humanity which he, the dead German, a remote girlfriend, and I all share. I partake of this scene. I participate in it. It has resonances, brings up black-and-white images of war debris from old books and newsreels. They are on pause. Even the swart flies settle. I check my sob, and realise that in fact I partake at a distance.

Douglas’s technique lends itself to this nuancing rather than to bold statement. The metre is irregular but suggests regularity. The rhyme scheme, verse to verse, is not fixed. More often than not it relies on imprecise rhymes, half-rhymes, blunting the full rhymes. Split by “ground” and “found,” are “gone” and “sun” to be taken together, or does “sun” partner “gun” in the next verse? “On” with “demon,” and “content” with “equipment,” are rhymes to the eye, but natural emphasis in each word takes rhyming away from their endings. Only in the last verse, as the poem seems to be moving towards resolution in regular quatrains but still not quite getting there, do we have the only true bisyllabic rhymes “mingled” and “singled.” It is the coupling of “heart” and “hurt” that holds the key to reader reaction however. “Heart,” in Douglas’s pure description, has a physical meaning, putting it alongside what can be seen of the dead man’s organs through his opened belly; but of course it is a word which has long been used as a metaphor for emotion, long, long after the belief in it as the seat of emotion had passed away, and this is the obvious significance imported by the reader. And “hurt” — such a simple, almost trivial word, but so final when qualified by “mortal.”

The poem does not specifically tell us not to forget this particular dead German soldier, nor to speculate about whether his girl kept his memory alive. Nor is it really about the transience of human life, though all this can be inferred in the reading. It is a poem that introduces, questions, and leaves unanswered the concept of not forgetting. Not ‘remembering’ but ‘not forgetting’.

We live in the present. What we experience right now is immediate. The past must often seem to us simply like so much debris. But ‘not forgetting’ is a part of us too. How much a part of us? If we do let something slip away, how can it be recovered? One day, like the dead German and — who knows? — probably his girlfriend too as her day was so long ago, we will be incapable of ‘not forgetting’. Yes, we see the scene as described by Douglas as we might see a photograph, but not of anyone we know. The ‘not forgetting’ now has an extra degree of separation for us, it has become general not specific. It was not even specific for Douglas. He did not know the German over and above what involved them both directly — the exchange of gunfire — did not know his girl, had no direct knowledge of what each one of them felt obliged not to forget. He simply saw something written in copybook gothic, felt a resonance, and recorded it.

The photograph above is of a dead Afrika Korps grenadier. It was taken more than seventy years ago in North Africa. I have no idea what his name was, how old he was, or whereabouts in Germany he came from. The only thing I can hold onto is what is directly familiar: the shape of a young man who could be contentedly asleep, as a baby is when it lies with its arm raised, except from the absolute relaxation of his body on the stony surface of the desert I know he must be dead, contentedly abased; the shock of hair still thick enough to run fingers through; the untidiness of his battledress. I can’t hold onto the heat of North Africa, the smell of a corpse in that heat, the noise of a passing truck or tank and the silence when it stops, the muttering of the Tommies discussing whether to go through his pockets — these are things I can only infer. I can ask of him, “Was vergisst du?” but I can’t expect an answer. In a dead boy there exists not even the echo of what he should not forget.

__________

This has been a test post.

Marie Marshall

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Growing old gracelessly

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