‘The characteristic act of men at war is not dying, it is killing’ argues Joanna Bourke (1999: xiii), but arguably in wartime killing and dying cannot easily be divided. For the most part those doing the killing are equally likely to be dying further down the line – an intimate symbiosis not lost on Keith Douglas, who concludes his 1943 poem ‘Vergissmeinnicht’ with an image of lover and killer ‘mingled’: ‘And death who had the soldier singled/ has done the lover mortal hurt’ (1978/2000: 118). Yet this chapter is, nonetheless, called ‘Killing’: its emphasis is on the active rather than the passive, and on the complex relationship between that activity and the dominant discourses of man-making circulating during the war. As critics such as Mark Rawlinson have noted, the turn to killing reflects a significant change in the focus of combat literature from the canonical works of the First World War. Comparing Douglas's ‘Vergissmeinnicht’ to Wilfred Owen's ‘Strange Meeting’ he notes that Douglas's work disturbs through its seemingly callous detachment (2000: 8).