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 dishonored 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.
Keith Douglas (1920-1944)
Keith Douglas and the Struggle to Remain Human: A Reading of "Vergissmeinnicht"
Keith Douglas was a 22-year-old lieutenant in command of about a half dozen British tanks involved the 1942 Battle of El Alamein, a decisive battle in the North African deserts in which British and American tankers destroyed over half of the legendary Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps. The battle raged on for almost three weeks (October 23-November 12) during which time the Germans lost about 50,000 men and over 1,000 armored vehicles while the British and Americans lost 37,000 men and almost 400 tanks. Douglas' poem "Vergissmeinnicht" captures the horror and violence of that monstrous battle by focusing on a single event, an exchange of fire between a powerfully equipped German anti-tank crew and Douglas' lightly armored tank. The poet also suggests to us another issue, i.e., how easily our sense of humanity becomes distorted and diminished by the horrors of war and how difficult it is for the soldier to retain the sensitivity and compassion that characterize the better side of human nature.
What took place in that desert combat is fairly clear. On the first day of the attack Douglas led his tanks into battle and almost immediately ran into a German anti-tank gunpit. The Germans fired their huge 88-mm cannon and scored a glancing hit on Douglas' little command tank. The result was "like the entry of a demon." Indeed, any kind of hit on a tank can cause fragments of metal to go spinning around inside the turret, inflicting horrible wounds on the tankers inside. Obiously they were operating on "nightmare ground," but Douglas and his gunners were lucky that day and managed to destroy the crew of the gunpit. Three weeks later, having been part of the great victory over the Germans, Douglas triumphantly leads his tanks back over the same ground and finds the horrible aftermath of the fighting at the gunpit -- the body of the German gunner, which has lain for three weeks in the North African desert sun, swelling with the gases of decomposition until, finally, his stomach has actually burst open like "a cave." His eyes are open but have dried to the consistency of parchment. Large black flies are swarming over the disgusting corpse. Poking about in the scattered contents of the gunpit, Douglas finds a picture of the dead German's girlfriend signed :"Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht." "Steffi. Forget me not!" It is clear what happened; and it is also clear that what happened was both sad and horrible.
Consider then the fourth stanza of the poem, which contains the description of Douglas' reaction to these terrible and poignant sights:
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.
The dead soldier has been "abased," i.e., humiliated in death, but the living soldiers look at the corpse "almost with content." To the strangely satisfied and contented young British officer, the dead German seems "to have paid," i.e., gotten what he deserved. Also, Douglas finds a satisfying but bizarre sense of irony when he notices that the man's equipment is mostly "hard and good" while the man himself is decaying into a soft and useless putrid mush. Clearly one of the costs of war is damage to the basic human sensibility. Such scenes as this ought not to leave a living, normal human being feeling "content" or sarcastic amusement or emotional indifference.
The speaker of the poem may no longer have an undamaged sensibility, but he has at least an intellectual appreciation of the situation. He is able to grasp that poor Steffi "would weep to see" the nightmarish condition of her soldier-boyfriend; she would be able to express true emotion far better than he himself. He is also able to see that there is a tragic mingling of "the lover and killer" in "the one body and one heart" of the dead German boy. There is, he can understand, a reason to mourn the death of the lover who was extinguished along with the soldier doing his job as a killer. He can even begin to understand that the lover and killer are also blended together in his own being and that there is damage being done to his innermost being by his own role as a killer. Thus, it might be fair to say that the central experience of this poem is Douglas' realization that the war may be killing off his better human instincts and replacing those instincts with guilt and distorted reactions.
Whatever was going on in his soul, outwardly Douglas performed his duties as a soldier well. After recovering from some minor wounds he received in 1943, he was promoted to captain and was given command of a tank company. Soon afterwards that unit was assigned to training for the D-Day invasion of Europe. In some of the letters he wrote during this training period, he made extensive mention of his concern about how the war was affecting his heart and soul; and, as he waited to go ashore on D-Day, he started a poem which clearly shows his deepening concern that war was destroying his basic humanity. The poem is entitled "Actors Waiting in the Wings of Europe":
Now we are in it
and no more people, just little pieces of food
swirling in an uncomfortable digestive journey.
He never finished that poem. On June 6, 1944, the very first day of the D-Day invasion of Europe, he was killed while leading his tanks into action on Gold Beach, one of the bloodiest spots along the Normandy coast.