Cold-Miser and Mud-Miser in The Great War (Final Paper Summary)

If you’ve seen the Christmas special “The Year Without a Santa Claus” or been on social media enough to see the makeup trend, you know that the Miser Brothers in this special represent the hot and the cold and control the weather.  (Their song is a bop, even more than I remember!)  Santa can deal with Heat-Miser and Snow-Miser, but we’re going to talk about Cold-Miser and Mud-Miser, the infamous World War One weather duo.

Heat-Miser and Snow-Miser

in my paper, I examined the poems “Winter Warfare” by Edgell Rickword, “Exposure” by Wilfred Owen, “The Song of the Mud” by Mary Borden, and “The Battle of the Swamps” by Muriel Elsie Graham (I did a previous blog post on this poem too).  These poems illustrate that at times a soldier’s greatest enemy was not man or weapons made by men, but cold and muddy battlefield conditions created by nature.  For each poem, I first analyzed it in its own context, then in the context of personifying the cold or mud.  To keep this post a reasonable length, I included only my analysis of “The Song of the Mud” since it was my favorite to work on and some of the outside research I did. 

In World War One, the lingering effects were seen as infamously awful mud sometimes described as the “liquid grave” for the armies (More, et. al. 2020).  A famous World War One poem by Mary Borden, titled “The Song of the Mud,” illustrates the conditions at the front caused by “invincible, inexhaustible mud” (Borden, line 6).  In Borden’s poem, the mud is everywhere, from hills and valleys to covering soldiers head to toe to jamming the motors of machines.  Like many Great War poets, Borden creates a dichotomy between beautiful imagery and reality to highlight how awful the mud really was through irony.  She imagines a man “crowned with a helmet of mud,” bringing to mind an image that is regal and dignified yet covered in filth (Borden, line 13).  The mud “covers the hills like Satin” while being “impertinent”, “intrusive,” and “unwelcome” (Borden, line 19).  It is “filthy” and “putrid” but also “beautiful glistening golden” (Borden, lines 32 & 48)  At some points, the poem actually reads a bit like a love poem, albeit an ironic one, about a terrible but beautiful man.  There’s a feeling that the mud wants only to love these men in a strange, erotic way.  This is especially evident in the third stanza where Borden uses words and phrases such as “slimy voluminous lips” that “slowly, softly, and easily” absorb men’s lives (Borden, lines 25 & 27).  The mud sounds like a deadly lover.

A soldier stuck in the mud

Like the previously mentioned poets, Mary Borden also employs personification in her poem and anthropomorphizes the mud.  The mud as a lover is just one example of this.  The entire poem makes readers feel like the mud is alive, and beyond that, that the mud has understanding and intent to kill.  In the third stanza, she writes about the mud mixing itself into food and crawling into machine motors.  While readers logically know mud is an inanimate object, Borden stresses the danger of it by making it seem like a living enemy without morals or “respect for destruction” (Borden, line 26).  In some ways, she even makes the mud seem more dangerous than any human.  Unlike a flesh and blood soldier, the mud is “inexhaustible” and “soaks up the power” of the armies in a “monstrous distended belly” (Borden, lines 6, 29, & 34).  Not only has Borden crafted a tangible human enemy, but she goes a step further to create an insatiable monster with human traits.  Remember Fussell’s ‘us versus them?’  ‘Them’ is now a human-like monster with the desire to harm, something readers will understand as dangerous more than they would understand mud as dangerous.

Mud on a battlefield

Soldiers Rickword and Owen attest to the cold in “Winter Warfare” and “Exposure” based on their own experience, and though Borden and Graham lack combat experience, they likewise explain a very real enemy in World War One.  The Battle of Passchendaele is just one example of how deadly the muddy and swamp-like conditions of the battlefield could be.  Artillery fire loosening the ground and days of relentless rain, combined with a water table only a few feet below the ground fostered the perfect environment for a muddy swamp.  Weapons and soldiers, sometimes alive, would sink into the mud and drown (Shuster).  George Pearkes, a soldier in the battle, shared his story many years ago and described how soldiers were “drowned or suffocated by the clammy mud.”  He said it was the mud more than the fighting that made achieving their objective such a challenge (“The Murderous Mud of One First World War Battlefield.”).  Unfortunately, mud was not exclusive to Passchendaele.  By nature, trench warfare created the ideal environment for mud, and the trenches were full of it.  Drainage was difficult, and continuous rain would fill trenches with mud and water.  Not only that, but it was often cold water falling and filling the trenches, and the cold was, as previously illustrated, quite dangerous (Schlenoff, 2016).  

From the Battle of Passchendaele

The essence of my final paper is really how poets make nature seem human-like as a way to understand what is happening to them.  It’s hard to be angry at mud or snow or rain, but a mud monster or a “Captain Cold” like Rickword writes about creates a tangible enemy.  In a part of the paper not included, I talked about the 'us versus them' habit that Fussell wrote about.  Personifying nature allowed people to imagine a ‘them.’  It was something to struggle and fight against.

As a sort of conclusion for this course, I want to come full circle to irony which was one of the first things we ever talked about and a theme running through just about every part of WWI.  All of the poems I looked at personified or anthropomorphized an aspect of nature to make it more understandable as an enemy.  I find this ironic because it is the exact opposite of what people generally do to an enemy, trying to dehumanize them in an attempt to make them easier to kill.