‘Yoors truly German’: A Micro-History of Poetic Enemy Encounters of the 1917 Retreat

Enemy encounters of the Great War have attracted the attention of poets, the best-known example being Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Strange Meeting’. However, processes of canonisation have equated war poetry with only a handful of poets, leading to a belief that wartime verse is defined by its literary value and therefore can only offer aestheticised representations of the enemy. The author proposes to examine poetry as a wider wartime practice that fulfils social and cultural roles regardless of literary value, including the role of mediating enemy encounters. Specifically, the chapter examines a 13-line poem written in English by German soldiers, carved on a cupboard door and left behind for British troops to find after the 1917 retreat to the Hindenburg line. Stemming from close reading and using a micro-historical approach, looking at both object and text, the chapter argues that, through metre and content, Germans reclaim the narrative of their own otherness and create a mirror effect, not only questioning but also flipping enemy alterity. This micro-history of how prosody not only represents alterity but also creates and questions it sheds light on the linguistic and material mediation of deferred enemy encounters.