II.
From 1942 to 1945 Reed worked as a cryptographer and translator at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley. In the evenings he wrote much of his first radio play?an adaptation of Melville's Moby- Dick?and many of the poems to be published in A Map of Verona (1946). After the war, he produced a number of other successful?and often funny?radio plays, verse translations of the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798- 1837), and more fine poems. Many of the best of these
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REED: LESSONS OF THE WAR / 245 5
were found in manuscript at his death, and with the posthumous publication of his Collected Poems (1991), he emerged as a poet whose lifelong quest for lasting homosexual love?which he never found?led him through Edenic landscapes of desire, like the setting of 'Naming of Parts.'
From Lessons of the War
To Alan Michell
Vixi duellis nuper idoneus Et militavi non sine gloria1
1. Naming of Parts Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday, We had daily cleaning. An d tomorrow morning, We shall have what to do after firing. But today, Today we have naming of parts. Japonica2 Glistens like coral in all of the neighbouring gardens,
And today we have naming of parts.
This is the lower sling swivel. And this Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see, Whe n you are given your slings. An d this is the piling swivel, Whic h in your case you have not got. Th e branches Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Whic h in our case we have not got.
This is the safety-catch, which is always released Wit h an easy flick of the thumb. An d please do not let me See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy If you have any strength in your thumb. Th e blossoms Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.
An d this you can see is the bolt. Th e purpose of this Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this Easing the spring.' An d rapidly backwards and forwards Th e early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.
They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy If you have any strength in your thumb; like the bolt, And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance, Whic h in our case we have not got; and the almond- blossom
1. 'Lately I have lived in the midst of battles, cred-encapsulates the theme of the Lessons). itably enough, / and have soldiered, not without 2. A shrub with brilliant scarlet flowers. glory' (Horace's Odes 3.26.1?2, with the letter p 3. An operation that, by ejecting the bullets from of puellis?girls?turned upside down to produce the magazine of a rifle, takes the pressure off the duellis?battles; an emendation, an exchange, that magazine spring.
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2456 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR II
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards, 30 For today we have naming of parts.
1945
KEITH DOUGLAS 1920-1944
Keith Douglas was born in Tunbridge Wells, the son of a regular army officer, who had won the Military Cross in World War I and who, in 1927, deserted his wife and son. Like Byron, whose army officer father died in the poet's youth, Douglas developed an almost obsessive interest in warfare. At the age of ten he wrote a poem about the Battle of Waterloo, and later, at Christ's Hospital School in London, he divided his leisure time between developing his precocious talents as poet and artist, riding, playing rugby football, and participating enthusiastically in the Officer Cadet Corps. At Merton College, Oxford, he was tutored by Edmund Blunden, a distinguished soldier poet of World War I. In 1940 Douglas enlisted in a cavalry regiment that was soon obliged to exchange its horses for tanks and in August 1942 he went into battle against German field marshal Rommel's Africa Corps in the Egyptian desert. Forced to remain in reserve behind the lines, Douglas commandeered a truck and, directly disobeying orders, drove off to join his regiment.
His subsequent achievement as a poet and as the author of a brilliant memoir of the desert campaign, Alamein to Ze m Zem (1966), was to celebrate the last stand of the chivalric hero. His poem 'Aristocrats' ends perhaps with a distant echo of Boland's horn, sounded in the Pass of Roncevalles at the end of the twelfth-century French chivalric epic La Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland). Douglas's poem succeeds where most of the would-be heroic poems of 1914 and 1915 fail. Sharply focused, it acknowledges both the stupidity and the chivalry, the folly and the glamour of cavalrymen on mechanical mounts, dueling in the desert. Douglas's language, spare and understated, finely responsive to his theme, fuses ancient and modern: his heroes are 'gentle'?like Chaucer's 'verray parfit gentil knight' in The Canterbury Tales? and at the same time 'obsolescent.'
Douglas survived the desert campaign, but was killed in the assault on the Normandy beaches, on June 6, 1944.
Gallantry
Th e Colonel' in a casual voice
spoke into the microphone a joke
Which through a hundred earphones broke
into the ears of a doomed race.2
