Living nightmares …

… There are no literalists in foxholes | Washington Examiner. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The first full-scale technological war would invert and empty the noble myths and chivalrous vernaculars; in Lt. Robert Graves’s famous poem, a “grey, grim” Goliath handily cuts open a “calm and brave” David. But before this sensation was registered in the stanzas of the war poets, it was felt by ordinary soldiers, by some lanky person crouched in a rain-battered trench, gripping his rifle as he prepared to “jump the bags,” the phrase infantry used to describe the act of heaving oneself over the sandbags of a trench to begin the march across the Stygian blightscape of no man's land. Fussell believed the overbearing irony of postmodernity was born here, in this moment, because what this soldier was about to experience was worse than anything he could imagine.