A Dead Boche by Robert Graves
100
A Dead Boche by Robert Graves
Language
Imagery: the dead soldier
Pairs of adjectives...
Sibilance
Alliteration
Onomatopoeia
Structure
Two stanzas,
six lines each,
ABABCC
ABABCC
(1895 to 1985)
Tone
sad,
scared,
against war and glorification of war
Atmosphere
dirty,
messy,
smelly,
no order,
chaotic
content
A Dead Boche
How to cure a soldier's lust for blood.
To you who’d read my songs of War
And only hear of blood and fame,
I’ll say (you’ve heard it said before)
”War’s Hell!” and if you doubt the same,
Today I found in Mametz Wood
A certain cure for lust of blood:
Where, propped against a shattered trunk,
In a great mess of things unclean,
Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk
With clothes and face a sodden green,
Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,
Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.
Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfried Owen
Robert Ranke Graves
One of Graves's close friends at this time was the poet Siegfried Sassoon, a fellow officer in his regiment. In 1917, Sassoon rebelled against the conduct of the war by making a public anti-war statement. Graves feared Sassoon could face a court martial and intervened with the military authorities, persuading them that Sassoon was suffering from shell shock and that they should treat him accordingly. As a result Sassoon was sent to a military hospital near Edinburgh, where he was treated by Dr. W. H. R. Rivers and met fellow patient Wilfred Owen. Graves also suffered from shell shock, although he was never hospitalised for it:
I thought of going back to France, but realised the absurdity of the notion. Since 1916, the fear of gas obsessed me: any unusual smell, even a sudden strong smell of flowers in a garden, was enough to send me trembling. And I couldn't face the sound of heavy shelling now; the noise of a car back-firing would send me flat on my face, or running for cover.
The friendship between Graves and Sassoon is documented in Graves's letters and biographies, and the story is fictionalised in Pat Barker's novel Regeneration. The intensity of their early relationship is demonstrated in Graves's collection Fairies and Fusiliers (1917). He became a friend of Wilfred Owen, "who often used to send me poems from France." Graves's army career ended dramatically with an incident which could have led to a charge of desertion. Having been posted to Limerick in late 1918, he "woke up with a sudden chill, which I recognized as the first symptoms of Spanish influenza." "I decided to make a run for it," he wrote, "I should at least have my influenza in an English, and not an Irish, hospital." Arriving at Waterloo with a high fever but without the official papers that would secure his release from the army, he chanced to share a taxi with a demobilisation officer also returning from Ireland, who completed his papers for him with the necessary secret codes.
At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Graves enlisted immediately. He published his first volume of poems, Over the Brazier, in 1916. He developed an early reputation as a war poet and was one of the first to write realistic poems about experience of front-line conflict. In later years, he omitted his war poems from his collections, on the grounds that they were too obviously "part of the war poetry boom". At the Battle of the Somme, he was so badly wounded by a shell-fragment through the lung that he was expected to die and was officially reported as having died of wounds. He gradually recovered, and apart from a brief spell back in France, spent the remainder of the war in England.