Maxwell Bodenheim’s “Soldiers” opens with a single smile, but it is not a comforting one. “The smile of one face is like a fierce mermaid / Floating dead in a little pale-brown pond.” A mermaid belongs to deep water and erotic legend; here she is dead, fierce, trapped in shallows the colour of mud. The simile sets the poem’s tone: war has turned human features into something half-mythological and wholly ruined. The poem does not look away from the corpses, but what it sees resists ordinary description.
The next lines build a gallery of faces, one after another. One soldier’s lips are “twisted / To a hieroglyphic of silence,” as if the mouth has become a sign in a lost language. Another face is “like a shining frog,” slick and no longer quite human, a creature of damp places. A question meets another face and “digs into it like sudden claws,” so that even an unspoken demand becomes an animal attack. Beside it lies “a face like a mirror / In which a stiffened child dangles,” an image that catches youth and stillness in the act of reflection. Each simile is vivid but isolated; the poem does not connect them into a story. It scans the dead the way an eye might move along a row of bodies, assigning each one a separate, uneasy image.
The poem’s form reinforces that scanning. The lines are unrhymed and irregular, moving from short phrases to longer, stranger pictures. Repetition of “one face,” “another,” and “another” creates a list-like rhythm, but the list never becomes comfortable or musical. The simile is the poem’s main structural tool: nearly every face is not itself but something else. That is the central horror—under war, even the dead lose stable identity. Their faces become mermaid, frog, mirror, hieroglyph, all transformations that make them more remote rather than more familiar. The four-dot pause after “dangles....” leaves that vision hanging, as if the poem has stopped before the worst can be named directly.
Then the final two lines step back. “Dead soldiers, in a sprawling crescent, / Whose faces form a gravely mocking sentence.” The individual grotesques suddenly have a collective shape: a crescent, perhaps the curve of a trench or a scattered line of bodies. The faces are no longer merely fragments; they “form a sentence.” The word “sentence” carries a double meaning. It is grammatical, suggesting that the dead have composed a statement, and it is judicial, implying punishment or judgment. “Gravely mocking” doubles again: “gravely” means solemnly, but it also points toward the grave. The dead seem to mock any attempt to turn their deaths into something noble or meaningful. Their silent faces form an accusation that remains just beyond translation.
What makes “Soldiers” significant is its refusal to sentimentalise. Many poems about war offer grief, heroism, or a clear moral; Bodenheim’s poem offers a set of disquieting images and then names them as a sentence without telling us exactly what the sentence says. The horror is in the looking. The poem forces the reader to see the dead as grotesque, fragmented, almost absurd, yet arranged with a terrible purpose. In doing so, it suggests that the true war poem may not explain suffering, but simply hold its unreadable face up to the light.