ABSTRACT
Three images have haunted me during the writing of this chapter. The first is taken from Isaac Rosenberg’s ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’, which he wrote in 1916 as a private soldier in the British Army during the First World War. In this poem, Rosenberg gives the reader an ironic self-image of someone who is between cultures and who is unable to assimilate, even in wartime, into any one nation:
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew Your cosmopolitan sympathies. Now you have touched this English hand You will do the same to the German – Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure To cross the sleeping green between.
