‘Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature’ « Amitav Ghosh

From a review of an unusual book,

First World War writing is an old interest of mine so when I came upon a book with the intriguing title

‘Touch and Intimacy in the First World War I picked it up at once.

The writer had an Indian-sounding name, Santanu Das, but I had never heard of him before.

The book’s first chapter is called ‘Slimescapes’ and it is about the ways in which First World War writers dealt with the tactile experience of trench warfare. ‘In everyday trench life, the boundaries of the body can no longer be policed, as bodily fluids are perpetually on the brink of spillage. In Blasting and Bombardiering, the officer breaks wind at the sound of shelling; men vomit as they collect corpses in Graves’s Goodbye to All That and Cloete’s A Victorian Son. Winterbourne defecates in his trousers in Death of a Hero, as does the young boy in Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.  Just as bodily fluids leak out, similarly mud and slime seep in: Céline speaks of ‘eating Flanders mud, my whole mouth full of it, fuller than full’; in ‘A Night of Horror’, the narrator writes: ‘The suffocating mud and slime/ Were trickling down my throat’. Remarque, towards the end of his novel, observes: ‘Our hands are earth, our bodies mud and our eyes puddles of rain.’ Membrances have become permeable: the skin can no longer separate the inside and outside, the self and the world.’ (p. 52)

I read the book at a stretch, finishing it in a couple of sittings (I don’t think this has ever happened to me before with a book of literary criticism). But one thing puzzled me: if the writer was Indian, as his name suggested, why had he made no reference to the one million Indians who were on the Western front during the First World War? Was this deliberate and if so why?

‘Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature’ « Amitav Ghosh