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| The Thinker, William Orpen (c1918) |
As the First
World War transformed the world, it also changed the English language. Numerous
new words and phrases were added, including tank,
cootie, and camouflage. While the phrase cannon fodder first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary’s supplement
of 1891, the term became widely used during the Great War. Fodder is food given to livestock, and the sense
of using men as “food for the cannons” entered English in the late 1800s
through a direct translation of the German word kanonenfutter. The concept of regarding men “merely as material to
be consumed in war,”* however, is not a new one; as early as the 16th
century in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I,
Falstaff describes common
infantry troops as “food for powder.”**
During the First
World War, the British frequently used the term to describe German military strategy,
as can be seen in this example from a 1916 essay published in Punch Magazine: “The Crown Price has
still his laurels to win, and it is clear that no sacrifice of German ‘cannon
fodder’ will be too great to deter him from pushing the stroke home.”***
But in his 1918
collection of war poetry, English machine-gunner Alec Waugh applied the term to
the British dead.
Cannon Fodder
Is it seven days you’ve been lying there
Out in the cold,
Feeling the damp, chill circlet of flesh
Loosen its hold
On muscles and sinews and bones,
Feeling them slip
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| Zonnebeke 1918, William Orpen |
Seven days. The lice must be busy in your hair,
And by now the worms will have had their
share
Of
eyelid and lip.
Poor, lonely thing; is death really a
sleep?
Or can you somewhere feel the vermin
creep
Across
your face
As you lie, rotting, uncared for in the
unowned place,
That you fought so hard to keep
Blow
after weakening blow.
Well.
You’ve got what you wanted, that spot is yours.
No one can take if from you now.
But at home by the fire, their faces
aglow
With
talking of you,
They’ll be sitting, the folk that you
loved,
And
they will not know.
O Girl at the window combing your hair
Get
back to your bed.
Your
bright-limbed lover is lying out there
Dead.
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| WW1 Bamforth Song Card |
O mother, sewing by candlelight,
Put
away that stuff.
The clammy fingers of earth are about his
neck.
He
is warm enough.
Soon, like a snake in your honest home
The
word will come.
And the light will suddenly go from it.
Day
will be dumb.
And the heart in each aching breast
Will
be cold and numb.
O men, who had known his manhood and
truth,
I
had found him true.
O you, who had loved his laughter and
youth,
I
had loved it too.
O girl, who has lost the meaning of life,
I
am lost as you.
And yet there is one worse thing,
For all the pain at the heart and the eye
blurred and dim,
This you are spared,
You have not seen what death has made of
him.
You have not seen the proud limbs mangled
and broken,
The face of the lover sightless and raw
and red,
You have not seen the flock of vermin
swarming
Over
the newly dead.
Slowly he’ll rot in the place where no
man dare go,
Silently over the right the stench of his
carcase will flow,
Proudly the worms will be banqueting….
This
you can never know.
He will live in your dreams for ever as
last you saw him.
Proud-eyed and clean, a man whom shame
never knew.
Laughing, erect, with the strength of the
wind in his manhood—
O
broken-hearted mother, I envy you.
—Alec
Waugh, Flanders. September 1917.
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| Death Forbids, Percy Smith 1918 |
Alec Waugh and
his regiment participated in the horror at Passchendaele in 1917. Waugh’s direct
and brutal description of witnessing a body decay in No Man’s Land was
discussed in a review that appeared in The
Bookman: “his [Waugh’s] ‘Cannon Fodder’ and ‘The Other Side’ strip the
romance of war to the bone and leave it a senseless huddle of mud and blood and
putrefaction that no sane man could glorify.Ӡ
Less explicitly,
the poem “Cannon Fodder” gives voice to the isolation and alienation that link
the experience of the trenches with that of the home front. Despite the multitude of living things in No
Man’s Land – busy lice, creeping vermin, and feasting worms, the dead man is a
“poor, lonely thing.” And when the family learn of their soldier’s death, the
news enters their home like a snake, leaving a young girl, mother, and all who
loved him, in silent, solitary darkness.
The form of the poem
mimics the frustrated search for meaning in a world that no longer makes sense:
while there are rhymes, they are unpatterned and unpredictable, and several lines
end with words that never find an answering echo (as in line 3, flesh or line 47, broken). The poem’s stanza
lengths also vary widely: the first stanza and its description of the
putrefying body is the longest (18 lines). As the poem continues, however, stanzas
grow increasingly shorter, until the last four stanzas are limited to four
lines, as if mirroring the breakdown and decay of bodies, of understanding, and of meaning.
When The Bookman reviewed the poem in 1918,
St. John Adcock noted what made Waugh’s work both disturbing and distinctive:
We
are so accustomed to have our poets pass elusively over ugly truths that it
shocks some of us to come across Alec Waugh’s swift statement of bald details
in his sharply-contrasted sketches of what is happening simultaneously at home,
here, and on the battle-fields at a distance.††
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*
Oxford English Dictionary, "cannon fodder."
** William
Shakespeare, 1 Hen. IV, iv. ii. 72.
*** February
1916, Mr. Punch’s History of the Great
War, Cassell, 1920, p. 74.
† A. St. John
Adcock, “Poets in Khaki,” special supplement to The
Bookman, vol. 55, December 1918, p. 98
†† St. John
Adcock, “Poets in Khaki,” p. 99.
