Trenches: St. Eloi

Over the flat slope of St. Eloi
A wide wall of sand bags.
Night.
In the silence desultory men
Pottering over small fires, cleaning their mess-tins:
To and fro, from the lines,
Men walk as on Piccadilly,
Making paths in the dark,
Through scattered dead horses,
Over a dead Belgian’s belly.

The Germans have rockets.  The English have no rockets.
Behind the line, cannon, hidden, lying back miles.
Before the line, chaos:

My mind is a corridor.  The minds about me are corridors.
Nothing suggests itself.  There is nothing to do but keep on.[1]

T.E. Hulme (1883-1917)

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[1] Source: Jon Silken, ed. The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, 2^nd ed. (1984). T. E. Hulme was an English poet who refused to record any of his poetry while on duty and instead left it to his friend Ezra Pound.  He was killed in action in Flanders.  Note that the above poem is unrhymed, which was intentional. Hulme’s significance is that he helped redefine man’s position in the world by bringing it closer to the principles of anti-humanism, an aesthetic and philosophic tendency which became more pronounced following the First World War.  Among the major influences on his writings were: Henri Bergson’s, An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), which Hulme translated in 1910; Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy (1907); and, Georges Sorel’s Reflections of Violence (1908), which Hulme also translated from the original French into English.