A month before his death on 4 November, 1918, Wilfred Owen, in a letter marked ‘strictly private’, wrote to his mother about his ‘excellent little servant Jones’: ‘Of whose blood lies yet crimson on my shoulder where his head was – and where so lately yours was’. The moment is however recalled differently to Sassoon: ‘the boy by my side, shot through the head, lay on top of me, soaking my shoulder, for half an hour’. Owen evokes the juddering of the self through ‘half an hour’ of tactile contact; it is also a peculiarly intimate scene. The invocation of the maternal in the first letter is particularly resonant in the context of the ‘mother's kiss’ in the letters of Connor and Fenton. The whole range of emotional and physical intensities between men in the trenches that we have been exploring in the previous chapter finds in the poetry of Wilfred Owen one of its most powerful and complex testimonies.

The sense of touch, this chapter argues, was particularly acute in the case of England's most famous war poet and is fundamental to understanding his art. Owen's relationship with his mother, the main love in his life, was summed up in terms of a ‘tangible caress’: ‘Oh how I stand (yes and sit, lie, kneel and walk, too,) in need of some tangible caress from you [mother] … my affections are physical as well as abstract – intensely so’.