War arrives in this poem without a single gunshot, and the speaker's response is stranger and quieter than the title "War preparations" promises. There is no sharpening of blades and no packing of kit. Instead there is a shave and a footbath. The poem bets that these small, bodily gestures reveal more about war than a battlefield scene could.
The first sentence runs across three lines. "Hearing of the war" is oddly casual: war is news, something heard rather than seen, and it is "the war," as if it needed no name. Then the syntax lurches. The subject "I" is pushed away from its verb by the interruption "in a sudden fit," so the grammar acts out the impulse it describes. "Fit" is worth lingering on. It means an outburst of irrational feeling, but it may also point ahead to the uniform that must be fitted. I read that pun as possible rather than certain, though the second sentence makes it hard to ignore.
Lines two and three are built almost entirely from one-syllable words: "cut off all my beard / and wash my feet in the sea." The plainness makes the acts blunt and physical. The beard goes, and the word "all" insists on how complete the loss is. A beard can stand for a face that is recognisably one's own, so removing it looks like the first step out of individuality. Washing the feet in the sea suggests a ritual, since it recalls the old gestures of cleansing before a journey. Feet are also what armies march on, and the sea is the edge where land stops. Judging by the imagery, the speaker prepares his body as if for a rite rather than a fight. He gives no reason. The verbs sit side by side, joined by a bare "and," and the poem declines to explain them.
Then the poem turns from "I" to "people," and from the personal to the general. "A uniform will make mad people / of all sides." The line break allows two readings: a uniform will drive people mad, or it will turn them into mad people. Either way, "of all sides" removes any comfort. The madness belongs to every army, and no cause is exempt from it. The vocabulary changes too. After the monosyllables of beard and sea come the longer, institutional words "uniform," "people," "expected." The language has moved from skin and salt water to costume and role.
The poem's only authority figure, "the king," never actually appears. He is an archaic, almost fairy-tale presence, with no name, face or orders. What matters is the delusion of "thinking themselves / expected by the king." The enjambment after "themselves" holds the self-regard in the air for a moment before "expected" lands. The madness is a flattering belief: someone important is waiting for me, and I have been summoned personally. The poem suggests that a uniform supplies this feeling ready-made, a part to play and an audience to imagine.
The speaker's own position stays ambiguous. He calls his own act a "sudden fit," so he may already be one of the mad, or he may know exactly what he is doing and describe it with irony. The cut beard could be the first step toward the uniform, or a wry picture of how easily that step is taken. The tone is deadpan, with no exclamation and no outrage. The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre, and its lines taper from the long opening to the short final phrase, as if the sentence were running out toward the king.
The poem is significant for how much it does in six lines. It treats the pull of war as intimate and almost comic, something that begins before anyone is handed a weapon, with a razor and a walk into the water. It also suggests that mass delusion is made of individual acts of conformity, each one small enough to feel like a private decision. Its final image of men certain they are expected stays with the reader because no one in the poem ever shows up to expect them.