HOW MUCH MUD DOES A MAN NEED? LAND AND LIQUIDITY IN PARADE’S END

Abstract

Mud and the First World War are inextricably linked. Almost any account of the Western Front features complaints about the wet terrain of France and Flanders: its numbing physicality, its cheerless visual homogeneity, its often deadly power. John Ellis, in Eye-Deep in Hell (1975), reports that rainfall during March 1916 was the heaviest in thirty-five years. On 30 July 1917, during the third battle of Ypres, a drizzle began that lasted for the whole of August; an officer asked to consolidate his position responded to his superiors: 'It is impossible to consolidate porridge.'1Mud made even the simplest tasks laborious. The ubiquitous British greatcoat could be so clogged with rain and mud that it could weigh over thirty pounds, adding to an already heavy load that would combine to drag Tommies deep into the wet ground. Infantrymen would urinate in their clogged rifles. One soldier wrote that 'The mud makes it all but impassable, and now sunk in it up to the knees, I have the momentary terror of never being able to pull myself out. Such horror gives frenzied energy, and I tear my legs free and go on'.2 He was lucky: many never emerged from mud holes, as Liam O'Flaherty so graphically depicted in The Return of the Brute:No. 8470 Private George Appleby, formerly a worker in a chocolate factory, recently a member of the bombing section of No. 2 Platoon, at that moment ceased to exist as a living organism. He had thrown back his head and started at the sky with fixed eyes, with his tongue hanging out, thick and still and yellow, on his green lower lip. Rain drops fell into his open mouth. Then he disappeared with a gentle, sucking sound into the morass, unnoticed by Friel, who gaped at him in horror. In another moment, all that was left to mark his sojourn on this earth was a series of circular wrinkles in the slime that covered the surface of the quagmire and five orphan children, fathered by him, living with their widowed mother in Canning Town, London: all proudly bearing his name, that of a hero who died in action, fighting for his king and country.3O'Flaherty's ghastly scene is just one of many from First World War literature that uses mud to signal, not just the horror, but the futility of the war. The thinly-veiled sarcasm of the closing lines echo poems like 'Mud and Rain' by Siegfried Sassoon and 'Apologia Pro Poemate Meo' by Wilfred Owen. For many writers mud was shorthand for military disillusionment.Dan Todman's The First World War: Myth and Memory (2007) begins with a chapter titled 'Mud':mud stands for much more than a mere amalgam of water and soil. It is made up of excrement, dead soldiers and animals, shrapnel, barbed wire and the remnants of poison gas. For all the opportunities it offered to bacteria, surrounding splintered trees and dead men, it seems to be opposed to nature. This mud bears the terrifying potential to engulf the soldiers who struggle within it, to suck them down - spluttering, choking, drowning - and to convert their corpses into yet more mud.4For Todman, mud becomes a metaphor for the war itself, selfdestructive, all-encompassing, deadly and drab. Similarly, Santanu Das's chapter 'Slimescapes', in Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (2005), analyzes fiction and poetry for responses to mud. He quotes one front-line newspaper account from 1917:At night, crouching in a shell-hole and filling it, the mud watches, like an enormous octopus. The victim arrives. It throws its poisonous slobber out at him, blinds him, closes round him, buries him. . . . For men die of mud, as they die from bullets, but more horribly. Mud is where men sink and - what is worse - where their soul sinks. . . . Hell is not fire, that would not be the ultimate in suffering. Hell is mud.5Das interprets this widespread and visceral fear of mud as ultimately a fear of the 'dissolution into formless matter' that modem weaponry inflicted on soldiers in the trenches. …