Isaac Rosenberg on Trench Warfare

Trench warfare was comparatively horrific when contrasted with earlier forms of warfare, primarily because of the very instruments listed by the textbook authors in discussing combat during World War I: "the hand grenade, the spade, and the machine gun."[1] In their own ways, each tool is emblematic of how warfare had changes from earlier generations. The spade was the tool with which the trenches were dug, the hand grenade was the weapon that was most feared by the men while in the trenches, and the machine gun posed the threat to men when going "over the top." In the poetry of the British poet Isaac Rosenberg, himself killed at the Battle of Arras in 1918, all these new aspects of trench warfare make appearances.

The most important aspect of trench warfare was the trenches themselves. Each side dug long trenches in which their combat soldiers would wait to launch or defend against a charge. In rainy seasons, the trenches would fill with water, giving rise to the worsening of already poor sanitary conditions. In addition, the presence of rotting corpses both in the trenches and on the battlefields between the trenches of each side proved a fertile ground for rats, who would also infest the trenches. Rosenberg addresses one of these rats in his poem "Break of Day in the Trenches," in which the poet writes, "Now you have touched this English hand / You will do the same to a German / Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure / To cross the sleeping green between."[2] In these lines, Rosenberg as a British combat soldier recognizes the common predicament of soldiers on both sides. While the home fronts and home governments demonized enemies, World War I soldiers often recognized the common humanity of the men on the other side.

While men in the trenches awaited a charge, a common experience was to lob grenades at the other sides' trenches or to have grenades thrown at oneself. Given the confining nature of the trenches, the fear of a grenade landing in one's trench and the certain injury or death it promised made combat in World War I frightening in a way combat had not been before. Lines from Rosenberg's poem "Marching" evoke the image of the hand grenade when, considering the Roman god of war, Mars, and how his craft has changed, the poet writes, "Blind fingers loose an iron cloud / To rain immortal darkness / On strong eyes."[3] The soldier in the trench is blind to the soldiers on the other side and throws a weapon that rains iron on its victims. Rather than meeting his enemy face to face as in previous wars, in World War I, soldiers could for the first time kill one another without seeing each other.

Finally, the mettle of the men in the trenches was tested when they were commanded by their platoon leaders to go "over the top" and charge the other side, which usually waited with machine guns trained on the chargers. Again, Rosenberg describes the scene in a poem, "Dead Man's Dump": "The air is loud with death / The dark air spurts with fire, / The explosions ceaseless are."[4] Here, Rosenberg makes clear the real wages of war: in the end, dead is dead. Whereas earlier poetry about war written by British poets had been celebratory, whether it was the "band of brothers" monologue from Shakespeare's Henry V or the far more recent "Theirs but to do and die" of Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade," war was seen as a noble endeavor in which man met his destiny. With Rosenberg, this tradition seems to have ended. In no small part, we can see that it was the very different nature of combat in trench warfare that contributed to this change of perspective on the nature of war.

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     [1] Felix Gilbert and David Clay Large, The End of the European Era, 6th edition (New York: Norton, 2009),  106.

     [2] Isaac Rosenberg, "Break of Day in the Trenches," Poetry Foundation, accessed June 20, 2016, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/13535, lines 9-12.

      [3] Isaac Rosenberg, "Marching," Poetry Foundation, accessed June 20, 2016, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/13534, lines 14-16.

      [4] Isaac Rosenberg, "Dead Man's Dump," poetry Foundation, accessed June 20, 2016, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/47411, lines 36-38.