Vergissmeinnicht

by
Keith Douglas

Click on the microphone to listen to a reading of the poem.

[Biography of Keith Douglas]

Keith Douglas was born in 1920. His father had fought in the First World War, and in the Second World War Keith chose to fight too. He joined the cavalry in 1939 after only a year at university. Like the rest of the cavalry he actually trained in tanks.

Douglas was injured by a landmine during the battles in Egypt, and was taken to a hospital in what was then Palestine. He took the opportunity to write poems while he recovered, and then went back to active service. Vergissmeinnicht and other poems that came out of Douglas's personal experience of war in the Western Desert are among the very best of the war poetry genre.

Douglas returned from North Africa to England in December 1943 and took part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944. He was killed by enemy mortar fire on 9 June while his regiment was advancing from Bayeux. He was buried at the war cemetery at Tilly-sur-Seuilles. He was only 24 years old.

[Opening assignment for students]

Form groups of three or four students and discuss the following questions. Each group reports back to the class after the discussion.
- Do you play wargames on your computer? If so, how do you feel about killing all those virtual soldiers?
- Could you be a professional soldier? Would you like to be one? Why (not)? Would it be a problem for you to shoot down enemy soldiers?
- Have you ever seen a dead person? If so, how did you feel?

[Class discussion]

Keith Douglas was a 22-year-old lieutenant in command of about half a dozen British tanks involved in 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 for almost three weeks (October 23 - November 12) during which time the Germans lost about 50,000 men and over 1,000 armoured vehicles while the British and Americans lost 37,000 men and almost 400 tanks.

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's lightly armoured tank. 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's 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. Obviously they were operating on "nightmare ground", but Douglas and his gunners were lucky that day and managed to kill 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 the fourth stanza of the poem, which contains Douglas's reaction to these terrible and poignant sights. 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. he got 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.

Douglas may no longer have an undamaged sensibility, 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 perhaps even 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.

It might be fair to say that the central experience of this poem is Douglas's realization that the war is killing off his better human instincts and replacing those instincts with guilt and distorted reactions. Clearly one of the costs of war is damage to the basic human sensibility. Scenes as described in the poem ought not to leave a normal human being feeling "content" or sarcastic amusement or emotional indifference. The poet suggests to us 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.

Whatever was going on in his soul, outwardly Douglas performed his duties as a soldier well. He was promoted to captain and was given command of a tank company. In some of the letters he wrote during training for the D-Day invasion of Europe, 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. Three days after the D-Day landings he was killed in action.

[Closing assignment for students]

Form groups of three or four students and discuss the following questions. Each group reports back to the class after the discussion.
- Remember the things you said when you answered the questions stated in the opening assignment. Do you think differently now about war, and killing, and perhaps even about wargames on your computer?
- Did this poem influence you in any way? If so, how?