Jay Winter

a purification by fire, a preparation through voluntary sacrifice of a better life to come. Holocaust was a form of aesthetic redemption: it gave meaning to the pain, the suffering, the loss of life in the war.

It is a splendid evisceration of the romantic glow of the early months of the war among those incapable of seeing that being enthusiastic for war is like shouting hurrah for bubonic plague.

Adding to the play's drama was another event of 1916. On 1 October, a German Zeppelin, the L-31, was shot down over north London. The day after, Shaw went to see the downed airship. Shaw had the honesty to admit that the whole incident had fascinated him. To the Webbs he confessed:

What is hardly credible, but true, is that the sound of the Zepp's engines was so fine, and its voyage through the stars so enchanting, that I positively caught myself hoping next night that there would be another raid . I grieve to add that after seeing the Zepp fall like a burning newspaper, with its human contents roasting for some minutes (it was frightfully slow) 1 went to bed and was comfortably asleep in ten minutes.

The dead must be served', 'we must not ignore the voice of the dead', became catch phrases in the effort to sell whatever politicians wanted to sell

The dead became a 'silent army'

At every turn, the dead were invoked to legitimate the status quo.

The poem is a raucous rendition of a theme treated by Georg Grosz in a cartoon showing a German medical board passing a skeleton for military service.1