Santanu Das, in his worthwhile Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature, works to analyze the “central importance of the sense of touch in the experience of the First World War and its relation to literary representation” (5). That “sense of touch,” Das argues, pervades the literature of the First World War. His goal is to understand why that is so and also understand how writers, men and women, soldiers and nurses, attempted to make language equal to the task of chronicling the near-indescribable experience of the war. Das's effort, as he points out, brings together two similar but distinct strands in the historiography: what might be called the literary strand, which examines how the soldiers and veterans of World War I attempted to relate their experiences, and the memorialization strand, which focuses on how societies worked to remember (or not remember) the Great War. These might also be called the “Paul Fussell” and “Jay Winter” strands, though that would neglect a number of other important practitioners.

Das, like Fussell, is particularly concerned with the muddy “slimescapes” of the trenches. But that is only a part of his analysis, for Das also looks at the other kinesthetic sensations, ranging from the constant experience of darkness to the almost tangible presence of sound and smell and even taste. More, Das examines the role of touch not simply between the terrain and those who lived on and in it, but the role of touch between soldiers, and between soldiers and nurses. Intimacy and touching were enforced by the geography of the trenches. They were indeed often welcomed, as soldiers tried to keep warm or safe in a hostile environment. They were sometimes demanded, as dying or wounded soldiers needed to be held or kissed. In his analysis, Das pays particular attention to Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg, both of whom aggressively plumbed the tactile world around them. Finally, Das looks at the experience of nurses, usually middle- or upper-class women who had little experience of war or the male body before they went to the front. Their role as comforters, tenders, or mediators of wounded or dying soldiers, either in the wards or the operating room, provides a perspective that is different and distanced from the soldiers’ experiences. Das handles these analyses thoroughly and well, and the summary effect is to broaden and deepen our understanding of how World War I was written and remembered.

But Das's work is not without problems. He is, to a certain extent, captive of a dated perspective on the war, one that stresses a vision of stagnant futility on the Western Front. This has a number of effects. First, though the title lays claim to all of First World War literature, its focus is, in reality, much more limited. There are some German and French voices here, but they are dwarfed by the number of British accounts. The book pays little or no attention to Russian or German experiences on the Eastern Front, Italian or German experiences in the Italian front, Turkish experiences in the Middle East, or a host of other countries and theaters. Second, even on the Western Front, Das pays attention almost entirely to the middle years of the war, the years of stalemate. There is little in here about the much more mobile warfare of August–September 1914 or March–November 1918. Third, Das's treatment of women focuses entirely on those who were nurses. This is a defensible choice, given the focus of the book, but it echoes uncomfortably the tendency of the historiography of women's experience to be focused only on the women at home or those who were nurses. As Janet Watson (among others) has pointed out, women were much more than mothers, wives, or nurses. Finally, though Das effectively analyzes the way in which language about the experiences of war was gendered, he does not bring the same careful sensitivity to a discussion of either race or class. How did the Indian troops stationed on the Western Front speak of their experiences? Did they emphasize touch in the same way? How did working-class soldiers speak of their experiences? There is a tantalizing hint about this, when Das speaks of coal miners and how their underground life in the pits prefigured in many ways their experiences in the trenches, but Das never mounts a sustained analysis of that working-class perspective.

These criticisms should not be taken to invalidate the worth of the book. Touch and Intimacy offers a smart, insightful, and well-written look at the “narratives produced by soldier-writers and nurses who served in the war and for whom the immediate, material circumstances were drastically and often irrevocably changed” (231) and how touch, the most intimate of senses, was both a way of exploring the experiences and a necessity during those experiences. Ultimately, that look, despite the flaws, is a useful addition to our understanding of the recollection and memorialization of World War I.