Summary
A soldier gropes his way step by step along an underground tunnel. The light of his torch winks with patching glare from side to side. The air surrounding the soldier is unwholesome.
The shapes of various items can be made out in the dim light: tins, boxes, bottles, a smashed mirror, and a mattress. Other shapes are too vague to specify. The soldier explores fifty feet below the rosy gloom of a battle being waged overhead.
The soldier trips and grabs a wall to steady himself. He sees someone lying humped at his feet, half-hidden by a rug. As the soldier leans down to tug the sleeper's arm and ask for directions, he becomes frustrated at the lack of reply. Cursing the sleeping man, the soldier beseeches the man to guide him through the stinking tunnels. Sleep-deprived and stressed, the soldier kicks the sleeping man at his feet. The light of the torch reveals the person's face: his eyes glare with the agony of a hard death some ten days before. The dead man's fists clutch a blackening wound.
The soldier staggers on until he finds a hint of dawn filtering down. This fresh air reaches the dazed, muttering soldier, who has been stuck underground for days listening to the muffled boom of shells. Finally, with sweat and horror in his hair, he climbs through darkness up into the twilight air. With each step the soldier takes, he feels the hellish weight of his experiences underground become lighter.
Analysis
Siegfried Sassoon's "The Rear-Guard" follows a soldier making his way through a dark underground tunnel, providing a snapshot into the horrors of war. An epigraph specifies the setting as the Hindenburg Line in April of 1917. The Hindenburg Line was a German system of fortifications designed to effectively defend German forces while leading Allied troops into a massacre. Sassoon drew on his experience fighting in the Battle of Arras and the assault on the Hindenburg Line when he wrote his famous anti-war statement "A Soldier's Declaration."
A rear guard is a part of a military force that protects it from attack from the rear. This poem does not take place directly in active battle. Instead, the horror of war is showcased by the evidence of past violence: a decaying body. The boom of shells also sounds in the distance.
In the first stanza, a soldier gropes his way along the tunnel, step by step. The title and epigraph clarify the context of war, but throughout the poem, the soldier is referred to only as "he." That he has to grope his way slowly along the tunnel suggests that the tunnel is not in active use. This gives a sense of darkness and isolation.
The soldier winks his "prying torch," insinuating that the light of the torch uncovers things that are best left unseen (Line 2). The plosive alliteration of the /p/ in "prying" and "patching" evokes how the torchlight attempts to penetrate the darkness. The phrase "side to side" mimics the earlier phrase "step by step," showing a slow and repetitive progress. The air in the tunnel is "unwholesome": it is not conducive to well-being (Line 3).
The poem is written in iambic pentameter, but there are variations in the meter that mirror the soldier's stumbling progress through the heavy, dark air of the tunnel. For example, the first word, "groping," is trochaic: it is a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. The poem's four stanzas are uneven in length, further contributing to the soldier's (and the reader's) disorientation. An uneven rhyme scheme also assists this confusion.
In the second stanza, the light shines on tins, boxes, a smashed mirror, a bed mattress, and some shapes too vague to know. The placement of familiar objects in a dark abandoned tunnel creates an uncanny atmosphere. Clearly, the environment of war does not sustain a regular domestic life.
The soldier is revealed to be exploring a tunnel fifty feet below "the rosy gloom of battle overhead" (Line 7). The process of exploration implies that the soldier is traveling through this unfamiliar area in order to learn about it, but it is not yet specified what his purpose is. The "rosy gloom" of battle is somewhat of an oxymoron. Roses imply the pleasant scent and color of the flower, while gloom refers to sadness and despair. The rosiness could suggest that the battle overhead is preferable to the dark isolation of the tunnels, or that gunfire and other war technologies light up the gloom.
Like the word "groping" in the first stanza, the third stanza begins with another trochee: "tripping" (Line 8). The soldier grabs the wall to steady himself and sees someone lying humped at his feet. The alliteration of the /h/ in the line "Humped at his feet, half-hidden by a rug" creates a light and airy sound, contrasting the heavy darkness of the tunnel (Line 9). In the soldier's confused state (brought about by stress, isolation, and lack of sleep), he curses and kicks the sleeping person when they don't reply to a prompt for directions. The word "savage" is used to describe these actions, implying a violent and uncontrollable animal nature. The conditions of war strip people of their humanity.
As implied earlier by the word "prying," the torchlight reveals a disturbing scene: the livid face of a soldier "whose eyes yet wore / Agony dying hard of ten days before" (Lines 16-17). The word "livid" could mean angry, but it could also refer to a dark bluish-gray in color. The fingers of the dead man still clutch a blackening wound. There is a sense of dehumanization occurring in the progression of this stanza; the dead man is referred to as "someone," the "sleeper," an "unanswering heap," and then by disfigured individual parts of his body. These disturbing details are meant to evoke the harsh realities of war to readers who would otherwise never know about them. The last line in this stanza—"And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound"—evokes multiple fingers and hands, which in turn suggests that this individual body represents all the men left dead and disfigured by the war.
The soldier staggers on alone in the fourth stanza. His encounter with a hint of fresh air is described in the lines, "he found / Dawn's ghost that filtered down a shafted stair" (Lines 19-20). A ghost is a haunting imprint left behind; the soldier has not yet reached what he seeks. Dawn's ghost filters down "To the dazed, muttering creatures underground / Who hear the boom of shells in muffled sound" (Lines 22-23). The soldier himself is one of the "dazed, muttering creatures," showing that war not only dehumanizes the dead but strips the living of their sanity. The muffled boom of shells implies a danger above, but the soldier is clearly relieved to be leaving the tunnel. This is expressed with the words "At last" (Line 24).
The soldier leaves the tunnel with "sweat and horror in his hair" (Line 24). The word "horror" is not specific, perhaps implying that the soldier is incapable of specifying the other horrors he has experienced in this subterranean world (apart from the corpse). He climbs "through darkness to the twilight air, / Unloading hell behind him step by step" (Lines 25-26). Twilight is the soft glowing light from the sky when the sun is below the horizon. Perhaps this is the rosiness of the battle that was characterized earlier in the poem. Twilight could also refer to a period of obscurity, ambiguity, or gradual decline. In this way, the atmosphere of the battle reflects the soldier's internal state.
The last few lines of the fourth stanza (after the line about the dazed, muttering creatures underground) are written in regular iambic pentameter, showing that as the soldier gets closer to the world above, a sense of order and normalcy returns. This relief is further characterized as the soldier "Unloading hell behind him" (Line 26). This metaphor demonstrates the way that fear and isolation weighed down on the soldier while he navigated the tunnels. The term "unloading hell" is reminiscent of both the physical and emotional weights carried by soldiers. The relief this soldier feels as he reenters the world above is palpable. However, the final words of the poem, "step by step," reflect the very first stanza, suggesting that what awaits the soldier aboveground is just as horrible as what he encountered below.
