Vincigliata A military batman was a soldier or airman assigned to a commissioned officer as a personal servant. In the Royal Navy they were called stewards. The position was generally phased out after the war. There were a number of escape plans from the castle. O'Connor's attempt over the wall had failed, with the inevitable punishment of a month's solitary confinement. Then in mid-September 1942 a tunnel was started and designed by Neame, a Royal Engineer. Various officers took it in turns to work on it in shifts of four hours per day. This was hard blistering work, but they managed
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