The frequent "concerts" offered behind the line by official concert-parties kept the idea of revue and music hall lively as an ironic analogy. Blunden exploits it in his poem "Concert Party: Busseboum," where, after the men have delighted in the dancing, jokes, and music of the traveling troupe, they emerge from the show at cold sunset to find in the distance another "show" in progress, with its own music, jokes, and dancing:
We heard another matinee.
We heard the maniac blast
Of barrage south by Saint Eloi,
And the red lights flaming there
Called madness: Come, my bonny boy,
And dance to the latest air.
To this new concert, white we stood;
Cold certainty held our breath;
While men in the tunnels below Larch Wood
Were kicking men to death.
A raid is going on. To Blunden, the word raid "may be defined as the one in the whole vocabulary of the war which most instantly caused a sinking feeling in the stomach..." To Sassoon as well the idea of a raid is so shocking that in defense he betakes himself to the imagery of the concert-party, speaking of raids as "entertainments" and of the men who have blackened their faces with burnt cork as a troupe of "minstrels" about to put on a "concert." Guy Chapman sensed something about one highly organized attack that resembled music hall, especially the way it was "advertised" to the enemy well before it began. The name of Heath Robinson, cartoonist and illustrator, and designer of fantastic "Rube Goldberg" comedy sets for the Alhambra and Empire music halls, was often pressed into service. Looking down on the trench lines from the air, Cecil Lewis calls the scene a "spectacle," which, as a theatrical term, has about it some of the exasperation of Goneril's "An interlude!" (King Lear, V, iii, 90). The trench system, says Lewis, "had all the elements of grotesque comedy—a prodigious and complex effort, cunningly contrived, and carried out with deadly seriousness, in order to achieve just nothing at all. It was Heath Robinson raised to the nth power—a fantastic caricature of common sense." Just what one would see at the Empire. And as Philip Gibbs remembers, "Any allusion to 'the Empire' left [the troops] stone-cold unless they confused it with the Empire Music Hall, when their hearts warmed to the name." For the artistically more sophisticated, the idea of music-hall "concerts" could connote something like Commedia dell' Arte, as it does to the aesthete Hugh Quigley. As Passchendaele degenerated into the ridiculous, all pretence at serious purpose disappeared: "Columbine degenerated to a frowsy Fleming dispensing miserable coffee. Harlequin a naked wretch with not a spangle on him, not a single sequin to clothe his frail humanity. We were just Puncinellos without the lustre, fools doing foolish things. . . ."
~ From The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell, p. 200