ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses British soldier's poetic accounts of World War II as a kind of testimony, and looks in particular at the Imperial War Museum's vast collection of material on the 'Oasis' poets. The concepts of victim and perpetrator testimony that have been developed mainly in relation to the Holocaust are both relevant and problematized in the context of soldier testimony. The didactic pressure of the metatestimony forms part of a striking correlation between John Jarmain's text and Levi's more well-known poem. Bevan's 'Ubique' and 'Kaput' form examples of discomforting perpetrator perspectives, with their celebration of the aesthetics-and deadly results-of long-range artillery and the latter's description of abject Italian peasants, killed and piled like 'forked parsnips'. Keith Douglas's scathingly ironic depiction in 'Elegy for an 88 Gunner' of a German soldier's corpse that has just been looted is a more famous example.
