Batman (military) Batman (military) A batman or an orderly is a soldier or airman assigned to a commissioned officer as a personal servant. Before the advent of motorized transport, an officer's batman was also in charge of the officer's "bat-horse" that carried the pack saddle with his officer's kit during a campaign. The U.K. English term is derived from the obsolete "bat", meaning "pack saddle" (from French "bât", from Old French "bast", from Late Latin "bastum"). A batman's duties often include: The action of serving as a batman was referred to as "batting". In armies where officers typically came from the upper
The Death of a Soldier The Death of a Soldier "The Death of a Soldier" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, "Harmonium." The poem uses free verse to describe the death of a soldier. The poem's longevity reinforces the naturalistic austerity of its depiction of death. One interpretive viewpoint asks whether Stevens is writing about any death, or rather, as Longenbach asserts, the death of the soldier—"and not an ambiguously 'fictive' soldier but Eugène Lemercier [the young French painter killed in 1915 whose letters were collected as "Lettres d'un soldat" and read by Stevens in the summer of 1917]." Lemercier was