conversely , there were other poets who from the very outset hated and denounced the war , and yet got out of it something which was both less and more than hatred . however fiercely they might condemn it , it exerted a sinister hold over them . a striking case of this is the Russian futurist , Viktor Khlebnikov , who fought as a private soldier on the eastern front from early in the war until the dissolution of the Russian armies . a leading figure in the avant-garde of poetry , he experimented with words and images in the hope of making his poetry tougher and harsher , and war provided him with many opportunities for effects which suited his peculiar tastes . it appealed to him by its elemental disorder , its reduction of life to its lowest terms , its chaotic brutality which made him believe that the earth had returned to the sway of savage , primeval gods . his packed , forceful lines and his bold improvisations in vocabulary reflected his isolation from other men and his imperviousness to the common claims of humanity . his revolutionary ardour was perfectly sincere and set him in principle against the war , but in practice he displayed his feelings largely in his love of rasping shocks and grim surprises . his imagination was set to work by such themes as a dead man lying in a pond , soldiers caught in battle as in a mouse-trap , the merciless torment of rain and snow and wind , the flame and smoke of bombardments , the burning of villages and the wreck of forests . in these he feels at home , because he sees in them a reversion to a distant , disordered past for which his anarchic temperament craves . he creates his own mythology for the battlefield and likes to see in its routine survivals from pagan rites . so in trizna ( death-feast ) , he presents in the cremation of dead soldiers an ancient death-feast , in which modern military drill is part of the ceremony . as soldiers stand in silence and watch the pyre set alight , the smoke which rises from it recalls the flow of great rivers , the Don and the Irtish , and symbolizes the overpowering domination of nature when artificial restraints are removed . in Khlebnikov &apos;s love of horrors there is a streak of perversity , but it is none the less in character in a man who looked forward to the collapse of his world . for him also war transforms what he sees , and gives to it a fierce enchantment . from his knowledge of war as it really is the poet may start again towards a wider vision of it and try to see it in a fuller perspective without reverting to the old abstractions and falsities . it is impossible to present its illimitable chaos , but what counts is the poet &apos;s selection from it of what really strikes or stirs him . this is what Georg Trakl , who died on the eastern front in December 1914 , does in Im Osten ( on the eastern front ) . he applies to the whole shapeless panorama of battle his gift for images which form a centre for a host of associations and must be taken at their full value as each appears : here the individual elements are taken from fact and give a true picture of war , but they gain a special significance because they also point to something beyond themselves , of which they are both examples and symbols . Trakl shows that the soldier-poet is fully capable of seeing beyond his immediate situation with an insight denied to those who have no experience of actual battle . though Trakl looks upon war from the anguished solitude of a prophet , he draws no conclusions and makes no forecasts . yet it was not impossible for a fighting man to let his vision pierce beyond the actual carnage and to divine with an apocalyptic clairvoyance its meaning in the scheme of things . this was what Isaac Rosenberg did . in the British army he had little in common with his fellow poets . they were officers ; he was a private soldier . they cherished a trust in a privileged and happy England which had only to survive the war and return to its old ways ; he , brought up in poverty and frustration and conscious of his alien origin , shared none of their romantic dreams . for him the war was indeed a cosmic event , which he believed to be needed to purge the injustices of society and to bring back sanity to men . as such he welcomed it when it came , and as such he continued to believe in it when others had lost their nerve on finding that their vaulting hopes were false . he was convinced that the war was an inevitable part of an historical process , in which England , driven by a desire for self-destruction , by an incestuous worm eating into its vitals , was passing to the doom of Babylon and Rome . he had something in common with the Russian revolutionaries , but he differed from Mayakovsky in believing that the war was necessary to attain what he desired , and from Khlebnikov in taking no pleasure , however grim or perverse , in it . he did not deceive himself about its actual cost , and hardly any poet has written with so unshrinking a candour about the actual appearance of battle . as a human being Rosenberg was racked by the agony and the waste which he saw , but he steeled himself to endure it , because he believed that only through such an ordeal could the injustices and falsities of his world be discredited and destroyed . in his view England was paying a price for her cruelties , and , though the price was indeed heavy , it must none the less be paid . for this cause Rosenberg was ready to sacrifice himself , and he fulfilled his pledge when he was killed in April 1918 . he spoke very much from his own point of view , but what he said is an enlightening corrective both to those who saw nothing in the carnage and to those who saw nothing beyond it . a second matter on which there is a wide divergence between the non-combatant and the combatant views of war is in their treatment of death . those who are not in constant contact with it can not but be deeply affected by it , and not only express their grief freely but see in death much more than its immediate presence . death in battle has long had its own glory , and it is understandable that Rupert Brook , who died before he had seen any fighting except at Antwerp , should proclaim : blow out , you bugles , over the rich dead . but this was not how the average soldier treated it . so far as the prospect of his own death was concerned , he usually observed a private fatalism , which made speculation superfluous , and in the deaths of others , however deeply he might feel a personal loss , he knew that it was useless to lament or do anything but hide his feelings in a situation where death came all the time and hardly called for special remark . this of course did not deceive anyone , and was not intended to do so ; it was the dignity of silence in the face of something on which there was nothing to say . the soldier has to adjust his mind to death . he does so by treating it as nothing unusual , and in his topsy-turvy world he is not wrong . this note of superficial detachment is what Guillaume Apollinaire catches in Exercice : with solicitous understatement Apollinaire tells of the deaths of four men behind the lines as if it were nothing unusual , and so indeed it was . but behind this quiet exterior there is a real compassion at the impartial cruelty of death which suddenly breaks into the soldiers &apos; routine and destroys them , when in their talk about the past they pay no attention to the future , which suddenly falls upon them . Apollinaire &apos;s art speaks for a whole order of human beings of whom he is the representative , and presents these casual deaths in the spirit in which any soldier would , in his inarticulate way , feel about them . the paradox of death in war is that despite its presence life must go on without interruption and that even the most gruesome relics must not be allowed to break into the living soldier &apos;s hold upon himself , which is at all times precarious but none the less the centre of his sanity and his ability to act . the contrast between what he feels or does and the surroundings in which he does it is one of war &apos;s most violent discords , and in it we can see how the human spirit adapts itself to the most horrifying circumstances simply because it must exert itself and endure . something of this kind is in the mind of the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti in veglia ( watch ) : in the struggle to maintain his individuality Ungaretti has to resist any invasion of it by distress at the dead body . he is fully aware of it , and his words are not in the least lacking in humanity . he marks the horror of death in the snarl on the dead man &apos;s face and is painfully conscious of the way in which the dead hands push towards him , but he struggles against the horror , exerts a complete command over himself - and writes love-letters . it is his escape from the hideous unreality of war into the reality of his affections , and it gains greatly in seriousness from the chilling circumstances in which it all takes place . a third matter on which the fighting soldier has his own ideas is the enemy . at home enemies may be denounced as inhuman barbarians , ready to destroy the hearths and shrines of lands more civilized than their own . therefore patriots , safely ensconced in the rear , fulminate against them , but the average soldier soon sees that in this there is little truth . living in his own isolated world of the trenches , he feels that the enemy are closer to him than many of his own countrymen , and especially than the invisible commanders who from a remote security order multitudes to a senseless death . on no point is there a sharper contrast between home and front , and in England we may mark the extremes , on one side by Kipling &apos;s it was not part of their blood . it came to them very late with long arrears to make good , when the English began to hate , and on the other side by Siegfried Sassoon &apos;s o German mother dreaming by the fire , while you are knitting socks to send your son his face is trodden deeper in the mud . in Germany no less pungent a contrast can be found between one end of the scale with Littauer &apos;s hymn of hate and another with ordinary soldiers , who felt , almost despite themselves , the curious brotherhood into which battle draws its antagonists . so in Bru&quot;der ( brothers ) , Heinrich Lersch comes close to what many men felt as he tells of a dead man hanging on the barbed wire in front of his trench . he feels that this man is his brother , and at night he thinks that he hears him crying . he crawls out to bring him in and bury him , and then he sees that he is a stranger . he draws his conclusion : es irrten meine Augen . mein Herz , du irrst dich nicht : Es hat ein jeder Toter des Bruders Angesicht . &apos;t was my eyes were mistaken . you , heart , were not misled ; there &apos;s the look of a brother on every man that &apos;s dead . ) in France we find similar contrasts . at one extreme we may put Claudel &apos;s derri&amp;egrave;re eux , which in righteous anger denounces the Germans for shedding innocent blood and foretells their defeat and punishment by the implacable justice which they have aroused against them . it has its own proud fury when Claudel elaborates how in the end the Germans will be undone by the very forces which they have themselves set in action : retranche-toi , peuple assi&amp;eacute;g&amp;eacute; ! &amp;eacute;tends tes impassables r&amp;eacute;seaux de fil de fer ! fossoyeurs de vos propres battaillons , sans rel&amp;acirc;che faites votre fosse dans la terre ! but it moves in too exalted and too personal an atmosphere to speak for the common soldier . 