The Missing of the Somme

by Geoff Dyer

  A memorial service ‘for one of the most inefficient of polar expeditions, and one of the worst of polar explorers’ was held at St Paul’s, and Scott’s failure took its place alongside Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar as a triumphant expression of the British spirit. Scott’s distorting, highly rhetorical version of events was taken up enthusiastically and unquestioningly by the nation as a whole. At the naval dockyard chapel in Devonport, the sermon emphasized ‘the glory of self-sacrifice, the blessing of failure’. By now the glorious failure personified by Scott had become a British ideal: a vivid example of how ‘to make a virtue of calamity and dress up incompetence as heroism’.

  That the story of Scott anticipates the larger heroic calamity of the Great War hardly needs emphasizing. As a now-forgotten writer put it, he had given his

  countrymen an example of endurance . . . We have so many heroes among us now, so many Scotts . . . holding sacrifice above gain [and] we begin to understand what a splendour arises from the bloody fields . . . of Flanders.

  In Huntingdon, on Armistice Day 1923, a war memorial was unveiled. The statue is of a soldier resting, one foot propped on the wall behind him. The protruding knee supports his left arm which in turn supports his chin in a quizzical echo of Rodin’s Thinker. His other hand steadies the rifle and bayonet propped beside him. The figure was sculpted by Kathleen Scott, widow of Scott of the Antarctic.

  Discussion about the form memorials like this should take was widespread and well advanced before the war ended. By 1917 associations and clubs across the country were meeting to establish appropriate means of remembrance.1 By the early twenties the nation’s grief had been sculpted into a broadly agreed form. Although permitting of many variations, this was the form sketched in September 1916 when the Cornhill Magazine argued against allegory in favour of ‘simplicity of statement . . . so that the gazer can see at once that the matter recorded is great and significant, and desires to know more’.

  At the end of the war a counter-case was still being made for memorials which would have practical rather than simply poetic value: hospitals, homes, universities. Such proposals were more in keeping with the mood of 1945 than 1918 when the need was for a memorial idiom and architecture unencumbered by questions of utility. In 1945 that architecture and idiom were in place: all that was needed was to add new names and dates. The real task was to rebuild an economy and infrastructure shattered by war.

  Whatever the human cost, the Second World War had an obvious practical purpose and goal – one that became especially clear retrospectively after footage of Hitler’s death camps became public. After the Great War people had little clear idea of why it had been fought or what had been accomplished except for the loss of millions of lives. This actually made the task of memorializing the war relatively easy.

  Memorials to the Second World War and the Holocaust are still being constructed all over the world; the form they should take is still being debated. Controversy – over the ‘Bomber’ Harris statue in London, for example – punctuates each phase of the Second World War as it is replayed along the length of its fiftieth anniversary. The form of memorials to the Great War, by contrast, was agreed on and fixed definitively and relatively quickly. By the mid-thirties the public construction of memory was complete. Since then only a few memorials have been built: addenda to the text of memory. All that needed to be added was time: time for the past to seep into future memory and take root there.

  The exact number of people who died in the Great War will never be known. France and Germany each lost more than a million and a half men; Russia, two million. Three-quarters of a million of the dead were British – a figure which rises to almost a million when the losses of the Empire as a whole are considered.

  During the war the dead were buried haphazardly, often in mass graves. By the time of the great battles of attrition of 1916–17 mass graves were dug in advance of major offensives. Singing columns of soldiers fell grimly silent as they marched by these gaping pits en route to the front-line trenches. Those who died in the midst of fiercely protracted fighting could lie and rot for months or years before being buried. Others would be buried in isolated individual graves or small, improvised cemeteries. Sir Edwin Lutyens, one of the architects responsible for the cemeteries we see today, visited France in 1917 and was moved by the hurriedly constructed wartime graves. On 12 July he jotted down his impressions in a letter to his wife:

  The graveyards, haphazard from the needs of much to do and little time for thought. And then a ribbon of isolated graves like a milky way across miles of country where men were tucked in where they fell. Ribbons of little crosses each touching each across a cemetery, set in a wilderness of annuals and where one sort of flower is grown the effect is charming, easy and oh so pathetic. One thinks for the moment no other monument is needed.

  Such feelings, as Lutyens himself realized, were transitory; for the future more enduring monuments were needed. Accordingly, after the armistice, under the auspices of the Imperial War Graves Commission, work began on establishing the cemeteries as permanent memorials to the dead.2

  Despite protests, culminating in a debate at the House of Commons on 4 May 1920 in which the proposals were condemned as ‘hideous and unchristian’, it was decided that there would be no repatriation or private memorials. All British and Empire soldiers would be buried – or would remain buried – where they fell. Undifferentiated by rank, uniform headstones – cheaper to produce and easier to preserve than crosses, compatible with a range of religious (dis)belief – would achieve an ‘equality in death’; the name of every soldier who died would be recorded, either in a cemetery or – where no body was found – on one of a number of memorials. At the base of each headstone there would be space for the next of kin to add inscriptions of their own.

  ‘One thinks for the moment no other monument is needed’ – Lutyens

  Such an undertaking was without precedent but not without a prehistory. The war dead may not have merited cemeteries of their own in earlier centuries, but in some ways the military cemeteries of the Great War represent the culmination and systematic application of developments in civilian cemetery design. These developments were themselves emblematic of the way attitudes towards death had been changing since the Enlightenment. As the spectre of plague receded, so, in George Mosse’s striking phrase, ‘the image of the grim reaper was replaced by the image of death as eternal sleep’. A growing awareness of the link between poor hygiene and illness – and a corresponding association between foul odours and death – saw cemeteries being built away from crowded towns in quiet, shaded settings, in environments conducive to rest. Setting and symbolism encouraged a mood of pantheistic reflection rather than penitence and fear.

  Three architects – Lutyens, Sir Herbert Baker and Sir Reginald Blomfield – were given overall responsibility for implementing the principles established by the Commission: white headstones undifferentiated by rank, the Great War Stone with the inscription ‘Their name liveth for evermore’ (chosen by Rudyard Kipling) from Ecclesiasticus. Lutyens wanted the cemeteries to be non-denominational, but was forced to accept the inclusion of Blomfield’s Cross of Sacrifice: the sword of war sheathed by the cross, a simple reconciliation of the martial and the Christian.

  With so many graves scattered over the battlefields, bodies had sometimes to be exhumed from the smaller cemeteries and re-interred in larger, or ‘concentration’, plots – though frequently these ‘new’ sites were themselves extensions of original battlefield cemeteries. Some were named after regiments or battalions, but, wherever possible, the wartime names were retained: Railway Hollow, Blighty Valley, Crucifix Corner, Owl Trench . . .

  Even after this process of rationalization hundreds of British and Commonwealth cemeteries were spread over Flanders and northern France. The first were completed by 1920, but work continued throughout the decade. By 1934, in the département of the Somme alone, 150,000 British and Commonwealth dead had been buried in 242 cemeteries. In total
918 cemeteries were built on the Western Front with 580,000 named and 180,000 unidentified graves. A few cemeteries were kept – and remain – ‘open’ to bury bodies discovered after the official searches had been completed, in September 1921. Between then and the outbreak of the Second World War, in spite of the major battlefields having been searched as many as six times, the remains of 38,000 men were discovered in Belgium and France. The bodies of the missing still continue to reappear: pushed to the surface by the slow tidal movement of the soil, unearthed by farmers ploughing their fields.

  The design is always broadly similar, but each cemetery – due to its location, size, layout and the selection of flowers – has its own distinctive character and feel. Some, like the Serre Road cemeteries, are, in Kipling’s phrase, vast ‘silent cities’. Others are very small, tucked away in a corner of a field, in the crook of a stream, at the shaded edge of a wood.

  All, whether large or small, are scrupulously maintained, immaculate. This is strange: cemeteries, after all, are expected to age. In these military cemeteries there is no ageing: everything is kept as new. Time does not exist here, only the seasons. The cemeteries look now exactly as they did sixty years ago.

  Then as now the official idiom of Remembrance stressed not so much victory or patriotic triumph as Sacrifice. Sacrifice may have been a euphemism for slaughter but, either way, the significance of victory was overwhelmed by the human cost of achieving it. As if acknowledging that, in this respect, there was little to choose between victory and defeat, between the British and German experience of the war, memorial inscriptions were not to ‘Our’ but to ‘The Glorious Dead’.

  The war, it begins to seem, had been fought in order that it might be remembered, that it might live up to its memory.

  Even while it was raging, the characteristic attitude of the war was to look forward to the time when it would be remembered. ‘“The future!”’ exclaims Bertrand, one of the soldiers in Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire.

  ‘How will they regard this slaughter, they who’ll live after us . . . How will they regard these exploits which even we who perform them don’t know whether one should compare them with those of Plutarch’s and Corneille’s heroes or with those of hooligans and apaches.’3

  He stood up with his arms still crossed. His face, as profoundly serious as a statue’s, drooped upon his chest. But he emerged once again from his marble muteness to repeat, ‘The future, the future! The work of the future will be to wipe out the present, to wipe it out more than we can imagine, to wipe it out like something abominable and shameful. And yet – this present – it had to be, it had to be!’

  Published in France as Le Feu in 1916 and translated into English the following year, Barbusse’s novel was the first major work of prose to give fictional expression to the experience of the war. A direct influence on Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, it established an imaginative paradigm for much subsequent writing about the war. The passage quoted is crucial, not simply for the content of Bertrand’s speech but for the manner in which Barbusse presents it. The sculptural similes are especially telling. With his ‘marble muteness’ and face like a statue Bertrand becomes, literally, a monument to this present which will, he alleges, be wiped out.

  In the final chapter of the book there is a related, equally revealing passage. Following a terrible bombardment the soldiers wake to a nightmare dawn and fall to talking about the impossibility of conveying what went on during the war to anyone who was not there.

  ‘It’ll be no good telling about it, eh? They wouldn’t believe you; not out of malice or through liking to pull your leg, but because they couldn’t . . . No one can know it. Only us.’

  ‘No, not even us, not even us!’ someone cried.

  ‘That’s what I say too. We shall forget – we’re forgetting already, my boy!’

  ‘We’ve seen too much to remember.’

  ‘And everything we’ve seen was too much. We’re not made to hold it all. It takes its bloody hook in all directions. We’re too little to hold it.’

  The person whose opinions begin this passage speaks ‘sorrowfully, like a bell’. Anticipating Owen – ‘What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?’ – the discussion turns to whether there can be any adequate recognition of those who have suffered so much. Barbusse also anticipates Owen in his response: by itemizing everything that will be forgotten. ‘We will remember them,’ intones Binyon. ‘“We shall forget!”’ exclaims one of Barbusse’s soldiers,

  ‘Not only the length of the big misery, which can’t be reckoned, as you say, ever since the beginning, but the marches that turn up the ground and turn it up again, lacerating your feet and wearing out your bones under a load that seems to grow bigger in the sky, the exhaustion until you don’t know your own name any more, the tramping and the inaction that grinds you, the digging jobs that exceed your strength, the endless vigils when you fight against sleep and watch for an enemy who is everywhere in the night, the pillows of dung and lice – we shall forget not only those, but even the foul wounds of the shells and machine-guns, the mines, the gas, and the counter-attacks. At those moments you’re full of the excitement of reality, and you’ve some satisfaction. But all that wears off and goes away, you don’t know how and you don’t know where, and there’s only the names left . . .’

  Sassoon’s later claim – ‘Remembering, we forget’ – is inverted: a memorial is constructed from the litany of what will be forgotten. At the end of it all, as with a memorial, there are ‘only the names left’.

  ‘We’re forgetting-machines,’ exclaims another of Barbusse’s soldiers. Accompanying the draft preface Owen wrote for a proposed collection of his poems was a list of possible contents; next to the first poem, ‘Miners’, is scribbled ‘How the future will forget’. Constantly reiterated, the claim that we are in danger of forgetting is one of the ways in which the war ensured it would be remembered. Every generation since the armistice has believed that it will be the last for whom the Great War has any meaning. Now, when the last survivors are within a few years of their deaths, I too wonder if the memory of the war will perish with the generation after mine. This sense of imminent amnesia is, has been and – presumably – always will be immanent in the war’s enduring memory.

  The issue, in short, is not simply the way the war generates memory but the way memory has determined – and continues to determine – the meaning of the war.

  Taken from his earlier poem ‘Recessional’, Kipling’s words ‘Lest we Forget’ admonish us from memorials all over the country. Forget what? And what will befall us if we do forget? It takes a perverse effort of will to ask such questions – for, translated into words, the dates 1914–18 have come to mean ‘that which is incapable of being forgotten’.

  Sassoon expended a good deal of satirical bile on the hypocrisy of official modes of Remembrance but no one was more troubled by the reciprocity of remembering and forgetting. He may claim, in ‘Dreamers’, that soldiers draw ‘no dividends from time’s tomorrows’, but he is determined that they will have a place in all our yesterdays.

  As early as March 1919, the poem ‘Aftermath’ opens with the aghast question, ‘Have you forgotten yet? . . .’ Sassoon’s tone is no less admonitory than Kipling’s – ‘Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget’ – but in place of august memorials he wants to cram our nostrils with the smell of the trenches:

  Do you remember the rats; and the stench

  Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench –

  And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?

  * * *

  The Glorious Dead

  Beating his familiar drum, Sassoon, in his 1933 sequence ‘The Road to Ruin’, imagined ‘the Prince of Darkness’ standing in front of the Cenotaph, intoning:

  Make them forget, O Lord, what this Memorial

  Means . . .

  Over the years, passing by in a bus or on a bike, I have seen the Cenotaph so often that I sc
arcely notice it. It has become part of the unheeded architecture of the everyday. The empty tomb has become the invisible tomb.

  In the years following the armistice, however, especially in 1919 and 1920, the Cenotaph, in Stephen Graham’s words, ‘gather[ed] to itself all the experience and all that was sacred in the war’.

  A victory parade had been planned for 19 July 1919, but the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, opposed any proposals for national rejoicing which did not include ‘some tribute to the dead’. Lutyens was duly asked to devise a temporary, non-denominational ‘catafalque’. In a matter of hours he sketched the design for what became the Cenotaph.

  The wood and plaster pylon was unveiled on schedule, but such was the emotion aroused by its stern, ascetic majesty that it was decided – ‘by the human sentiment of millions’, as Lutyens himself wrote – to replace it with an identical permanent version made of Portland stone.

  In the meantime the temporary structure remained in place for the first anniversary of Armistice Day when the two minutes’ silence was first introduced.

  Since the Second World War, when it was decided to commemorate the memory of the dead of both wars on the Sunday closest to the eleventh of November, the effect of the silence has been muted. On the normally busy weekdays between the wars – especially in 1919 and 1920 – the effect of ‘the great awful silence’ was overwhelming, shattering.

  In 1919, at eleven a.m., not only in Britain but throughout the Empire, all activity ceased. Traffic came to a standstill. In workshops and factories and at the Stock Exchange no one moved. In London not a single telephone call was made. Trains scheduled to leave at eleven delayed their departures by two minutes; those already in motion stopped. In Nottingham Assize Court a demobbed soldier was being tried for murder. At eleven o’clock the whole court, including the prisoner, stood silently for two minutes. Later in the day the soldier was sentenced to death.