Skyline operations

[James A. Landau]

In a message dated Mon, 11 Feb 2002 10:57:42 AM Eastern Standard Time, Alexey Fuchs <alexeyf at ZORAN.CO.IL> writes:

> Dear List Members,
>
> W.H.Auden's poem 'Missing' contains the following lines:
>
> Heroes are buried who
> Did not believe in death
> And bravery is now
> Not in the dying breath
> But resisting the temptations
> To skyline operations.
>
>the poem in question was written in 1928

The following is a guess:

At a distance it is much easier to spot a person when he is silhouetted against the sky than when he is silhouetted against the earth.  This is especially true of soldiers, who wear uniforms in colors such as khaki that are deliberately designed to blend in with the ground.

While it is impossible to always keep from being silhouetted against the sky, there are simple things a soldier can do to make this occur less often, and therefore not be so easily spotted by the enemy.  The first rule is simple:  "Keep off the skyline!!"

(Hollywood is either unaware of this rule, or deliberately puts actors portraying soldiers on a skyline so as to make them more visible to the audience, which does not shoot back.)

Assuming that Auden used "skyline" as an attributive noun rather than as the verb of an infinitive, then he might be referring to feats of battlefield bravado such as deliberately standing up on top of a rise in the ground to let the enemy see you.

Writing in 1928, Auden was very likely to have been thinking of the World War, in which it was proven over and over again that machine guns are more powerful than gallantry.

By this interpretation Auden was writing a polemic on the subject of battlefield tactics, and was saying "you win a battle not by dying gallantly but by resisting the temptation to suicidal stunts and staying close to the ground where you have a chance to shoot the enemy before he shoots you."

Patton, thinking of Nathan Hale, said something similar:  "Nobody ever won a war by dying for his country.  He won it by making the other poor son of a bitch die for HIS country."

Was Auden writing on military tactics?  Perhaps, considering that in the 1920's portraying the stupidities of the World War military was a common literary activity.

      - Jim Landau

P.S. memo to self:  read less military history and more poetry!