'Death Could Not Kneel So'

In his diary on this date, Aug. 22, in 1665, Samuel Pepys, after his wife asks him to buy her a pearl necklace, walks to Greenwich and sees “a coffin with a dead body therein, dead of the plague, lying in an open close belonging to Coome farme, which was carried out last night, and the parish have not appointed any body to bury it; but only set a watch there day and night, that nobody should go thither or come thence, which is a most cruel thing: this disease making us more cruel to one another than if we are doggs.”

In 1665-66, bubonic plague killed some 100,000 Londoners, about a quarter of the city’s population. The vectors, unknown to seventeenth-century medicine, were fleas living on rats. Pepys was not the most sensitive of men, certainly in comparison to enlightened citizens of the 21^st century, but that makes his remark about cruelty even more memorable.

In 2015, Oxford University Press published an illustrated edition of Edmund Blunden’s memoir of World War I, Undertones of War, originally published in 1928. Even if you’ve already read an earlier edition, read this one for the photos, annotations, the selection of Blunden’s war poems and the introduction by the poet John Greening. Pepys’ diary entry reminded me of several passages in Undertones of War, in which dead bodies are treated like refuse. In Chap. XII, “Caesar Went into Winter Quarters,” Blunden writes:

“My own unwelcome but persistent retrospect was the shell-hole there used by us as a latrine, with those two flattened German bodies in it, tallow-faced and dirty-stubbled. One spectacled, with fingers hooking the handle of a bomb; and others had much worse to remember.”

Even more haunting is this passage from later in the same chapter:

“Climbing the dirty little road over the steep bank, one immediately entered the land of despair.  Bodies, bodies and their useless gear heaped the gross waste ground; the slimy road was soon only a mud track which passed a whitish tumulus of ruin with lurking entrances, some spikes that had been pine-trees, a bricked cellar or two, and died out. . . . The shell-holes were mostly small lakes of what was no doubt merely rusty water, but had a red and foul semblance of blood. Paths glistened weakly from tenable point to point.  Of the dead, one was conspicuous. He was a Scottish soldier, and was kneeling, facing east, so that one could scarcely credit death in him; he was seen at some little distance from the usual tracks, and no one had much time in Thiepval just then for sight-seeing, or burying. Death could not kneel so, I thought, and approaching I ascertained with a sudden shrivelling of spirit that Death could and did.”