"Kiss Me, Hardy": Intimacy, Gender, and Gesture in First World War Trench Literature

January 12, 1916 saw a very peculiar drama enacted in the trenches--two men, who had left their girlfriends back in England, were exchanging a ritual of kisses:

As we arrived at the barn-door he said, "Just a moment, Frank, before we go in I've something else to give you,--put that light out." I put the lamp out and into my pocket, wondering what was coming. Then I felt an arm round my neck, and the dear lad kissed me once--"that's from Evelyn" [Cocker's fiancée] he said; then he kissed me again and said, "that's from your Mother." I returned his tender salute and said, "that's from me." There we were, two men, like a couple of girls,--but then, there was no one about, and the matter was a sacred one between us,--andyou. ¹

This is Lieutenant Frank Cocker's letter to his fiancée Evelyn written from the trenches. The exchange of this "tender salute" is an almost climactic episode in the charged friendship between Cocker and his "dear Charlie," a relationship that can be pieced together from the letters he wrote to Evelyn and to his sister, Minnie. What is astonishing is not so much the nascent homoeroticism but how this kiss between two men is snugly contained within a heterosexual framework through the trope of the girlfriend and the mother. With its detailed stage management, the narrative transmits some of the excitement of the actual moment, as does Cocker's ready reciprocity with the frank acknowledgment, "that's from me." Physical demonstrations of such ardor could perhaps just be contained within the parameters of the "romantic friendship" that characterized late Victorian culture and intensified during wartime. ² Anxieties about sexuality--or, at least awareness of the surreptitious nature of the act ("there was no one about")--are filtered through a mock violation of gender categories and their tactile norms with the slightly pejorative simile ("two men, like a couple of girls") intended to point up silliness rather than deviance. Yet the moment cannot so easily be dismissed. If, following the logic of the sentence, "sacred" is taken to be a Freudian slip for "secret" the moment hovers curiously between the sacrosanct and the furtive. On the other hand, if "sacred" is a deliberately chosen word, it might betray an understandably overzealous attempt to ward off "profanity," while at the same time, maybe unconsciously, echoing the marriage vow. Situated between a radical innocence and a transgressive thrill, the exchange mirrors a moment of epistemological crisis in the interlocked histories of sexuality, gender, and gesture at a crucial moment in modernist history and culture. The kiss had just started to be theorized in the realm of sexology, which in turn was beginning to be conceptualized by men such as Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud. Both would write pioneering essays on homosexuality, resulting in the epoch-making conclusion that "the sexual object and the sexual aim are merely soldered together." ³ It was also the time of the cultural construction of the homosexual, or what Alan Sinfield calls "the consolidation of the queer image" through a nexus of effeminacy, aestheticism, and decadence. ⁴ The war hero, andwartime bonding, informed by manly sentiments and noble ends, were honorably exempt from such base charges and yet, as Cocker's letter demonstrates, not without a trace of anxiety. In so far as historical constructions shape desire, this epistemological uncertainty might well have engendered a greater emotional fluidity: maternal empathy, heterosexual romance, and homoerotic frisson merge in the kiss. These emotions are complexlyinterrelated and equally resonant, defying the strict categories of gender and sexuality. ⁵

In the trenches of World War I, the norms of tactile contact between men changed profoundly. Mutilation and mortality, loneliness and boredom, the strain of constant bombardment, the breakdown of language, and the sense of alienation from home led to...