The Missing of the Somme

by Geoff Dyer

  On 12 November 1919 the Manchester Guardian reported the previous day’s silence:

  The first stroke of eleven produced a magical effect. The tram cars glided into stillness, motors ceased to cough and fume and stopped dead, and the mighty-limbed dray-horses hunched back upon their loads and stopped also, seeming to do it of their own volition . . . Someone took off his hat, and with a nervous hesitancy the rest of the men bowed their heads also. Here and there an old soldier could be detected slipping unconsciously into the posture of ‘attention’. An elderly woman, not far away, wiped her eyes and the man beside her looked white and stern. Everyone stood very still . . . The hush deepened. It had spread over the whole city and become so pronounced as to impress one with a sense of audibility. It was . . . a silence which was almost pain . . . And the spirit of memory brooded over it all.

  The following year the silence and the unveiling of the permanent Cenotaph were complemented by another even more emotive component of the ceremony of Remembrance: the burial of the Unknown Warrior.

  Eight unmarked graves were exhumed from the most important battlefields of the war. Blindfolded, a senior officer selected one coffin at random.4 In an elaborate series of symbol-packed rituals ‘the man who had been nothing and who was now to be everything’ was carried through France with full battle honours and transported across the Channel in the destroyer Verdun (so that this battle and the soldiers of France also found a place in the proceedings). On the morning of the 11th the flag-draped coffin was taken by gun carriage to Whitehall, where, at eleven o’clock, the permanent Cenotaph was unveiled.

  The weather played its part. The sun shone through a haze of cloud. There was no wind. Flags, at half mast, hung in folds. No wind disturbed the silence which descended once again. Big Ben struck eleven. The last stroke dissolved over London, spreading a silence through the nation. ‘In silence, broken only by a nearby sob,’ reported The Times, ‘the great multitude bowed its head . . .’ People held their breath lest they should be heard in the stillness. The quiet, which had seemed already to have reached its limit, grew deeper and even deeper. A woman’s shriek ‘rose and fell and rose again’ until the silence ‘bore down once more’.

  O God, our help in ages past.

  The silence stretched on until, ‘suddenly, acute, shattering, the very voice of pain itself – but pain triumphant – rose the clear notes of the bugles in The Last Post’.

  From the Cenotaph the carriage bearing the Unknown Warrior made its way to Westminster Abbey. Inside, the same intensity of emotion was reinforced by numerical arrangement: a thousand bereaved widows and mothers; a hundred nurses wounded or blinded in the war; a guard of honour made up of a hundred men who had won the Victoria Cross, fifty on each side of the nave. The highest-ranking commanders from the war were among the pallbearers: Haig, French and Trenchard. The king scattered earth from the soil of France on to the coffin. ‘All this,’ commented one observer, ‘was to stir such memories and emotions as might have made the very stones cry out.’

  A similarly ironic palaver surrounds the choosing of the French Unknown Soldier in Bertrand Tavernier’s 1989 film La Vie et rien d’autre (Life and Nothing But).

  A photograph of the temporary Cenotaph of 1919: soldiers marching past, huge crowds looking on. There is nothing triumphant about the parade. The role of the army is not to celebrate victory but to represent the dead. This is an inevitable side-effect of the language of Remembrance being permeated so thoroughly by the idea of sacrifice. In honouring the dead, survivors testified to their exclusion from the war’s ultimate meaning – sacrifice – except vicariously as witnesses. The role of the living is to offer tribute, not to receive it. The soldiers marching past the Cenotaph, in other words, comprise an army of the surrogate dead.

  In an effort to give some sense of the scale of the loss, Fabian Ware, head of the Imperial War Graves Commission, pointed out that if the Empire’s dead marched four abreast down Whitehall, it would take them three and a half days to pass the Cenotaph.5 Over a million of the living passed by between its unveiling on 11 November and the sealing of the Unknown Warrior’s tomb a week later. The correspondence between Ware’s image and what actually took place in 1920 is such that to anyone looking at this photo the soldiers seem like the dead themselves, marching back to receive the tribute of the living. Ware’s hypothetical idea was made flesh. ‘The dead lived again,’ wrote a reporter in The Times.

  The surrogate dead

  ‘A crowd flowed over Westminster Bridge. So many, / I had not thought death had undone so many,’ wrote T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land.

  The line of soldiers marching past the Cenotaph stretches out of sight, out of time. If we followed the line, it would take us back to another photograph, of men marching away to war. These two images are really simply two segments of a single picture of the long march through the war. There is a single column of men, so long that by the time those at the back are marching off from the recruiting stations, heading to trains, those at the front – the dead – are marching past the Cenotaph.

  An early draft of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Apologia Pro Poemate Meo’ is entitled ‘The Unsaid’. In an accidental echo of Owen, John Berger has written that the two minutes’ silence

  was a silence before the untellable. The sculptured war memorials are like no other public monuments ever constructed. They are numb: monuments to an inexpressible calamity.

  The Cenotaph is the starkest embodiment of Berger’s claim. It is a representation in three dimensions of the silence that surrounded it for two minutes on Armistice Day. The public wanted a permanent version of the Cenotaph to record – to hold – the silence that was gathered within it and which, thereafter, would emanate from it. During the silence it had seemed, according to The Times, as if ‘the very pulse of Time stood still’. In recording that silence, the Cenotaph would also be an emblem of timelessness. A temporary version of the Cenotaph was an impossible contradiction: it had to be permanent.

  For two minutes in each of the years that followed, the silence of the monument was recharged. Since the Second World War and the diminished power of the Sunday Silence, that silence has drained from the Cenotaph. The clamour of London encroaches on it annually; its silence is becoming inaudible, fading.

  In the 1920s neither the permanent Cenotaph nor the Unknown Warrior could satisfy the passion for remembrance. In many ways the means of remembrance, like the war itself, were selfgenerating. In 1921 the British Legion instituted the sale of Flanders poppies – eight million of them – which has continued, in manufactured form, to the present day. Two years after its inauguration in 1927, the British Legion Festival of Remembrance introduced its most distinctive and moving feature whereby a million poppies, each one representing a life, flutter down on to the servicemen assembled below.

  Monuments, meanwhile, were being unveiled throughout Britain; cemeteries were being built in France and Belgium; the names of the dead appeared on regimental memorials and rolls of honour in places of work and trade associations, cities and villages, universities and schools.6

  While this made the human cost of the war more apparent, the scale of the loss, it turned out, could actually be comforting. The pain of mothers, wives and fathers was subsumed in a list of names whose sheer scale was numbing. In the course of the war the casualties had been played down. Then, realizing that grief could be rendered more manageable if simultaneously divided and shared by a million, the scale of sacrifice was emphasized. Publicizing the scale of the loss was the best way to make it bearable.

  And was there not, amidst all this grief, a faint shudder or shiver of excitement at the unimaginable vastness of it all? The war had set all kinds of records in terms of scale: the greatest bombardments ever seen, the biggest guns, shells and mines, the biggest mobilization, the greatest loss of life (‘the million dead’). Was there not a faint glow of pride, an unavoidable undertow of semantic approval, in terming the war ‘Great’?

  Covered by a patina o
f sorrow though it may be, something of this quality perhaps endures to this day, perpetuated by writers who, myself included, prefer this appellation with all its elegiac resonance to that stark numerical designation, ‘The First World War’.

  The construction of memory

  ‘Horrible beastliness of war’

  ‘Great’ or ‘First World’, any book about the war, or commentary on the literature or art it produced, will stress its horror. The largest entry in the latent index of any such book will always be: ‘War, horror of’. Before we have even settled down to read the first stanza of Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, we are already murmuring to ourselves the old mantra, ‘the horror of war’.

  War may be horrible, but that should not distract us from acknowledging what a horrible cliché this has become. The coinage has been worn so thin that its value seems only marginally greater than ‘Glory’, ‘Sacrifice’ or ‘Pro Patria’, which ‘horror’ condemns as counterfeit. The phrase ‘horror of war’ has become so automatic a conjunction that it conveys none of the horror it is meant to express.

  Partly this over-use is a product of decorum. One cannot, in good taste, dwell on death, mutilation and injury without stressing their horror. Horror, consequently, becomes a mere formality, a form of words. One is reminded, also, of washing-powder commercials, which have relied for so long on prefixing brand names with ‘new improved’ that the expression has actually come to mean ‘same old’. The words have bleached themselves out, become an unnoticed part of the brand name. To convey the new and improved nature of the product you have to add a prefix to the prefix: New Improved New Improved Ariel.

  ‘The horror of war’ has become similarly self-erasing. A review from The Times Educational Supplement, quoted on the back of the paperback edition of Lyn Macdonald’s 1914–1918: Voices and Images of the Great War, stresses ‘the sickening repetitive monotony of hopeless horror’. ‘Horror’ on its own, in other words, has no power to horrify. The more you pile it on like this, the faster linguistic wear proceeds. Having emphasized that the scenes in Paul Nash’s paintings are not simply appalling but ‘grimly appalling’, Nigel Viney, in Images of Wartime, soon finds himself descending into ‘the very depths of infinite horror’.

  The most horrific aspect of the Great War was the waste of lives as men were sent to the front in battles of meaningless attrition. Is their cause served appropriately, one wonders, by a verbal strategy which relies, for its meaning, on constantly reinforcing attrition?

  Strings of shuddering adjectives dull the reaction they are intended to induce. The calm, measured tread of Elaine Scarry’s formulation, by contrast, is terrible in its simplicity: ‘The main purpose and outcome of war is injuring.’

  ‘Before the Great War there was no war poetry as we now conceive the term,’ writes Peter Parker in The Old Lie; ‘instead there was martial verse.’ So pervasive were the conventions of feeling produced by this tradition that in 1914 the eleven-year-old Eric Blair could write a heartfelt poem – ‘Awake, young men of England’ – relying entirely on received sentiment. In exactly the same way, an eleven-year-old writing fifty years on could, in similar circumstances, come up with a heartfelt poem expressing the horror of war – while also relying solely on received sentiment.

  In some ways, then, we talk of the horror of war as instinctively and enthusiastically as Rupert Brooke and his contemporaries jumped at the chance of war ‘like swimmers into cleanness leaping’.

  This is not just a linguistic quibble. Off-the-peg formulae free you from thinking for yourself about what is being said. Whenever words are bandied about automatically and easily, their meaning is in the process of leaking away or evaporating. The ease with which Rupert Brooke coined his ‘think only this of me’ heroics by embracing a ready-made formula of feeling should alert us to – and make us sceptical of – the ease with which these sentiments have been overruled by another. Isaac Rosenberg acutely condemned Rupert Brooke’s ‘begloried sonnets’ for their reliance on ‘second-hand phrases’. But there is a similarly second- or third-hand whiff to critic Keith Sagar’s indignant characterization of Armistice Day as

  part of the process whereby the nation promises to remember for one day a year in order to be able to forget with a clear conscience for the other three hundred and sixty-four; the process whereby the nation accepts with pride the slaughter of a whole generation of its youth. The rhetoric of the Cenotaph ceremony is a continuance in solemn guise of the lying jingoism which prompted Owen to write three months before his death: ‘I wish the Boche would have the pluck to come right in and make a clean sweep of the pleasure boats, and the promenaders on the spa, and all the stinking Leeds and Bradford warprofiteers . . .’

  Owen is regularly invoked to challenge or undermine the official procedures of Remembrance in this way, but our memory of the Great War actually depends on the mutual support of these two ostensibly opposed coordinates: the Unknown Soldier and the poet everyone knows.

  Owen was born in Shropshire on 18 March 1893. He was teaching in France when war was declared but volunteered for the Artists’ Rifles in 1915. Under the influence of Sassoon, whom he met at Craiglockhart Hospital in 1917 while suffering from shell-shock, he began writing the war poems on which his reputation rests. He returned to France and was killed in action a week before the armistice, aged twenty-five.

  The extreme brevity of his life is brought out by Jon Stallworthy’s Wilfred Owen, the standard biography. Since Stallworthy diligently allots more or less the same amount of space to each phase of Owen’s life, by the time we come to the part we’re most interested in, the period of his major poems, we realize with a shock that there is only a fraction of the book left. It is as if the remaining 700 pages of a standard-sized life have simply been ripped out. Not only that, but in his last weeks we lose sight of Owen as an individual (there are no eyewitness accounts of his death) and have to resort to the wide-angle of regimental history. Dominic Hibberd has fleshed out this period somewhat in Wilfred Owen: The Last Year, but both books stop where Owen’s life really begins – with his death.

  In his lifetime Owen published only five poems (‘Song of Songs’, ‘The Next War’, ‘Miners’, ‘Hospital Barge’ and ‘Futility’). Seven appeared in Edith Sitwell’s Wheels anthology of 1919; a slim selection, edited by Sassoon, came out the following year; Edmund Blunden’s more substantial edition was published in 1931. This means that Owen’s poems came to the notice of the public not as gestures of protest but as part of a larger structure of bereavement.

  The period from the armistice onwards saw the construction of memorials throughout England and cemeteries throughout Flanders and northern France. Climaxing with a flash flood of war memoirs and novels in the late 1920s,7 this phase of protracted mourning was formally completed with the inauguration of the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval in 1932.

  The extent to which the strands of this fabric of loss are intertwined can be glimpsed by the way that in 1931 Blunden borrowed the ‘official’ vocabulary of Remembrance to lament ‘how great a glory had departed’ from the world of poetry with Owen’s death.

  In the years following the armistice the anti-war spirit was so strong that, as the mature Eric Blair (George Orwell) noted, ‘even the men who had been slaughtered were held in some way to blame’. But the hope that the anti-war case had been clinched for good, on the other hand – by the war poets particularly and by Owen especially – proved short-lived.

  Christopher Isherwood, who was born in 1904, the year after Orwell, recalls that ‘we young writers of the middle twenties were all suffering, more or less consciously, from a feeling of shame that we hadn’t been able to take part in the European War’. The war for Isherwood was a subject of ‘all-consuming morbid interest’, ‘a complex of terrors and longings’. Longing could sometimes outweigh terror as the Orwell-Isherwood generation ‘became conscious of the vastness of the experience they had missed’. Hence the fascination of the Spanish Civil War, Orwell g
oes on, ‘was that it was so like the Great War’.

  Looking back, C. Day Lewis considered that it was Owen’s poetry which ‘came home deepest to my generation, so that we could never again think of war as anything but a vile, if necessary, evil’. But this generation was faced with other, apparently greater evils; hence W. H. Auden’s ‘easy acceptance of guilt in the fact of murder’ in his 1937 poem ‘Spain’. Owen may have exposed, as Stephen Spender claimed in an essay of the same year, ‘the propagandist lie which makes the dead into heroes in order that others may imagine that death is really quite pleasant’, but this revealed truth was not without its own allure. Philip Toynbee, a veteran of the Spanish War, recalls that Owen’s poems ‘produced envy rather than pity for a generation that had experienced so much’. Keats, the most powerful influence on Owen before his encounter with Sassoon, had declared himself to be ‘half in love with easeful death’, but Owen had apparently done little to diminish the fear of violent death. ‘Even in our anti-war campaigns of the early thirties,’ remembers Toynbee, ‘we were half in love with the horrors we cried out against.’

  The realities of the war, then, were not simply overlaid by an organized cult of Remembrance (Cenotaph, Unknown Soldier, two minutes’ silence, poppies, etc.). Rather, our idea of the war, with its elaborately entwined, warring ideas of ‘myth’ and ‘reality’, was actively constructed through elaborately entwined, warring versions of memory in the decade and a half following the cessation of actual hostilities.

  So it comes about that the war seems, to us, to have been fought less over territory than the way it would be remembered, that the war’s true subject is remembrance. Indeed the whole war – which was being remembered even as it was fought, whose fallen were being remembered before they fell – seems not so much to be tinted by retrospect as to have been fought retrospectively.