The Missing of the Somme

by Geoff Dyer

  ‘Takes great care of his animals.’ The Major who filled out this certificate might have been describing an animal. ‘Steady and reliable’ – like a dog. Go and find a job with that. Go out into the world with my blessing.

  Certificates played their part in enabling me to dispense with the qualities displayed by my father and grandfather. I left school and headed to Oxford with my A Level certificates and my top-of-the-class references. I graduated without being given a certificate proving I had even been there. I had entered a way of life in which certificates and recommendations were silently and invisibly assumed and so could be dispensed with.

  My deepest sense of kinship with my family is activated by this form of my grandfather’s – not just my love: my class feeling, my ambition, my loyalty. That form – army certificate Z. 18 – is why this book has the shape – the form – it does.

  * * *

  ‘Tenderness: something on animals and pity, something on tenderness . . .’

  In footage and photographs of the war there are horses everywhere. So many of them it is easy to think you are watching an early Western, set in an especially dismal period of the American Civil War. In St Jude’s Church, Hampstead, there is a memorial to the 375,000 horses killed in the war. In All Quiet on the Western Front, after an artillery barrage, the air is full of the screams of wounded horses. The belly of one of them is ripped open. He becomes tangled in his intestines and trips, stumbles to his feet again. ‘I tell you,’ says one of the soldiers, ‘it is the vilest baseness to use horses in the war.’11

  The cries that fill the air are worse than those of men who ‘could not cry so terribly’. The soldiers ‘can bear almost anything’; but this, claims the narrator, Paul, in a passage that anticipates Picasso’s Guernica, ‘is unendurable. It is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation, wild with anguish, filled with terror, and groaning.’

  The role of horses in memorials has historically been to raise St George above the clutches of the dragon or to hoist the victorious general to a more commanding height above the claims of the everyday. In either case the horse serves as an additional pedestal.12

  In Chipilly, on the Somme, the Memorial to the 58th (London) Division by H. Gauquié is of a soldier and his wounded horse. The horse’s legs have collapsed, its eyes are rolling in panic. The soldier has one arm around the horse’s neck; with the other he strokes its jaw, using his forearm to support its thrashing head. It takes all the soldier’s strength to comfort the wounded horse but his lips touch its face as tenderly as a lover’s. Both seem about to sink into the stone mud beneath them.

  ‘A very good groom and driver. Takes good care of his animals.’

  The driver tends the wounded horse he has led into war. Describing himself as ‘a herdsman’ and ‘a shepherd of sheep’, Owen tended his men like ‘a cattle-driver’. In action the soldiers ‘herded from the blast / Of whizz-bangs’ before dying ‘as cattle’. Widespread in writing from the war, the image of the officer as shepherd and Other Ranks as sheep is especially suggestive, notes Paul Fussell, ‘when the Other Ranks are wearing their issue sheepskin coats with the fur outside’. As so often happens in the war, reality runs ahead of metaphor: in 1917 regiments of the French army marched to the front baa-ing like lambs on their way to the slaughter.

  Earlier in the same year Sassoon had noted that troops on their way to France seemed ‘happy in a bovine way . . . They are not “going out” to do things, but to have things done to them.’ In almost identical terms Wyndham Lewis considered that Hemingway had depicted a new kind of man brought into being by the war, a man who ‘lives or affects to live submerged. He is in the multitudinous ranks of those to whom things happen – terrible things, and of course stoically borne.’

  ‘And the poor horses . . .’ – Constantine

  Three quarters of a century later, similar impressions are articulated in a larger historic context by Benedict Anderson:

  The great wars of this century are extraordinary not so much in the unprecedented scale on which they permitted people to kill, as in the colossal numbers persuaded to lay down their lives. Is it not certain that the numbers of those killed greatly exceeded those who killed?

  It is a suggestion confirmed and reinforced by the way these numbers met their deaths. Sixty per cent of casualties on the Western Front were from shell-fire, against which shelter was the infantryman’s only defence. Artillery fire transformed the foot soldier from an active participant in conflict to an almost passive victim of a force unleashed randomly around him. ‘Being shelled,’ Louis Simpson claimed later, ‘is actually the main work of an infantry soldier.’

  Even the artillery officers who dispensed death were tools in the hands of the war machine, calibrating and adjusting something whose destructive might was inbuilt and pre-determined. The real aggressor was industrial technology itself. ‘One does not fight with men against matériel,’ the French commander-in-chief, Pétain, was fond of saying; ‘it is with matériel served by men that one makes war.’

  If shelling meant that courage would increasingly consist of endurance rather than gallantry, the introduction of gas condemned the soldier to a state of unendurable helplessness. Once an enemy gun emplacement had been knocked out, the danger from that source ceased immediately. Once a gas attack had been launched, all soldiers – even those who had initiated it – were simply at the mercy of the elements.

  The first lethal gas, chlorine, was an inefficient weapon compared with phosgene and mustard gas which came later. Urinating in a handkerchief and breathing through it – as Robert Ross persuades his men to do in Timothy Findley’s novel The Wars – was often protection enough. Against mustard gas – which attacked the skin and eyes as well as the lungs – no protection was available. Since it could not be evaded, resisted or fled from, it eliminated the possibility not only of bravery but of cowardice, the dark backing which heroism, traditionally, had depended on to make itself visible.

  Mustard gas was designed to torment rather than kill. Eighteen times more powerful than chlorine, phosgene was invisible and lethal – but effective masks soon became available. For their survival, then, soldiers were at the mercy of the same industrial technology that was evolving new means of destroying them.

  The pattern for the century had been set: the warrior of tradition becomes little more than a guinea pig in the warring experiments of factories and laboratories. Cowering becomes heroism in passive mode. The soldier of the Great War comes increasingly to resemble the civilian sheltering from aerial attack in the Second. ‘The hero became the victim and the victim the hero.’ Men no longer waged war, it has often been said; war was waged on men. It therefore made no difference if the early zest for war had, by the autumn of 1916, begun to exhaust itself; by then the conflict had acquired an unstoppable momentum of its own.

  All of which tempts us to forget that, in spite of Anderson’s suggestion, the boys marching off to die for their country were hoping to kill for their country. We have become so accustomed to thinking of the slaughter of the war that we forget that the slaughtered were themselves would-be slaughterers. For all their abhorrence of war the poets of protest like Owen, Sassoon and Graves continued – for very different reasons – to wage it. Dominic Hibberd has pointed out how the official citation for Owen’s Military Cross refers to his having ‘personally manipulated a captured enemy M[achine] G[un] . . . and inflicted considerable losses on the enemy’; in the Collected Letters Owen’s family offer a milder rewrite of the citation, in which he ‘personally captured an enemy Machine Gun . . . and took a number of prisoners’. Sassoon seems to have oscillated between bouts of frenzied violence and bitter loathing of the war that unleashed this strain in him. Graves recalls that he ‘had never seen such a fire-eater as [Sassoon] – the number of Germans whom I killed or caused to be killed could hardly be compared with his wholesale slaughter’.

  As is so often the case, Barbusse was the first to offer protest in major imaginative form at n
ot simply the suffering the war inflicted on men, but at men’s capacity, in time of war, to inflict suffering on others. In ‘Dawn’, the final chapter of Under Fire, a soldier sums up himself and his fellows as ‘incredibly pitiful wretches, and savages as well, brutes, robbers, and dirty devils’. A little later one of the group of ‘sufferers’ says simply: ‘We’ve been murderers.’ Together the group of suffering murderers cries ‘shame on the soldier’s calling that changes men by turn into stupid victims or ignoble brutes’.

  when

  Will kindness have such power again?

  One of the reasons for the war’s enduring power is the way that, in the midst of so much brutality and carnage, compassion and kindness not only failed to wither but often flowered.

  The most moving episodes in the war always involve the awakening of a sense of the enemy’s shared humanity. Often this is initiated by the simplest gesture – an enemy soldier offering prisoners cigarettes or a drink from his canteen. On Christmas Day 1914 there was a truce along the whole length of the Western Front. In some circumstances, especially where the gap between the two lines of trenches was small, this became tacitly extended into the ‘live and let live’ policy whereby each side refrained from antagonizing the other. ‘For either side to bomb the other,’ Charles Sorley had realized as early as July 1915,

  would be a useless violation of the unwritten laws that govern the relations of combatants permanently within a hundred yards of distance from each other, who have found out that to provide discomfort for the other is but a roundabout way of providing it for themselves.

  Most poignant of all are the occasions when tenderness springs directly from an appalled awareness of the pain inflicted on the enemy. A German battalion commander recalls that after the British began their retreat from the battlefield at Loos in September 1915, ‘no shot was fired at them from the German trenches for the rest of the day, so great was the feeling of compassion and mercy for the enemy after such a victory.’

  Henry Williamson remembers coming across

  a Saxon boy crushed under a shattered tank, moaning ‘Mutter, Mutter, Mutter,’ out of ghastly grey lips. A British soldier, wounded in the leg, and sitting nearby, hearing the words, and dragging himself to the dying boy, takes his cold hand and says: ‘All right, son, it’s all right. Mother’s here with you.’

  Episodes like these are scattered throughout memoirs and oral testimonies from the war. Civilians bayed for blood and victory; combatants, meanwhile, had become passive instruments of their nations’ will. In the words of Arthur Bryant:

  German civilians sang specially composed hymns of hate against England and, in the most civilized country in the world, quiet inoffensive English gentlemen and ladies who had never seen a blow struck in anger scouted the very mention of peace and spoke of the whole German race as they would of a pack of wild beasts. Only in the battleline itself was there no hatred: only suffering and endurance: death and infinite waste.

  In Under Fire the shattered survivors of French and German units sleep side by side in the mud. This moment of exhausted solidarity is then worked up into the climactic vision of fraternity in which war will have no place. The experience of the trenches gives rise to Barbusse’s socialist-pacifist vision of a possible future. In this light the mutinies that rocked the French army in the spring of 1917 were like grumbling premonitions of revolution. The mutinies were suppressed, discipline was restored, conditions – food, leave – were improved. A similar configuration of experience, however, could lead to a more violently protracted form of discontent as there emerged from the conflict ‘men whom the war had ruined . . . who incorporated the renovating ideals of the socialist tradition, the cult of the earth, the taste of violence that had grown in the mud of the trenches.’

  ‘That was a laugh,’ remarked a German soldier on being told the war was over. ‘We ourselves are the war.’

  In London the Armistice Day ceremonies of 1921 had been disrupted by a demonstration by the unemployed, whose placards read: ‘The Dead are remembered but we are forgotten.’ In one of his Last Poems, published posthumously in 1932 (the year after Blunden’s edition of Owen), D. H. Lawrence presents a prophetic vision of the deepening depression and political unrest of the thirties as an expression of the ‘disembodied rage’ of the dead who died in vain, who ‘moan and throng in anger’. Never explicitly identified with the war, these ‘unhappy dead’ are yet impossible to disassociate from it. Set on a ‘day of the dead’ in November, the poem makes it seem as if the army of the surrogate dead that marched past the Cenotaph has now joined the massed ranks of the disillusioned, the unemployed, the dispossessed. The war that was to end all wars will lead inexorably to another, a world made safe for democracy seethes with this betrayal of the discontented dead:

  Oh, but beware, beware the angry dead.

  Who knows, who knows how much our modern woe is due to the angry, unappeased dead

  that were thrust out of life, and now come back at us malignant, malignant, for we will not succour them.

  In the face of unemployment, inflation and the other indignities and privations of peacetime, the shared suffering of the trenches offered an almost mythic embodiment of total belonging: the immersion of the individual within a rigidly hierarchical community of equals. For the movement that articulated this ideal in Germany, peace was a continuation of the war by means which, ultimately, led to its full-scale resumption after a simmering twenty-year interlude.

  Sassoon had noted how soldiers became almost happy in the knowledge that they were abandoning their own volition to the directives of the army; Nazism subsumed the individual will to the will of the Reich, the Führer. An ideological imperative was built from the martial ideal of obedience which the army had instilled in its soldiers.

  ‘The Third Reich comes from the trenches,’ said Rudolf Hess. But so too does the end of the idea of obedience as unequivocally heroic. A British survivor of the Somme remembers how

  the war changed me – it changed us all . . . Everybody ought to have this military training. It would do them good and make them obedient. Some of the young men now, they need obedience. They don’t know what it is. Our lives were all obedience.

  The passage contains its own implicit contradiction, yielding where it seeks to uphold, tacitly acknowledging that it was precisely the experience of the Great War that brought obedience and servitude into tainted proximity. Henceforth obedience would have some of the qualities of submission and complicity – culminating, for victims and perpetrators alike, in the Holocaust – and all heroism would have about it some of the quality of refusal, rebellion and – a key term in the next war – resistance. D. H. Lawrence had noticed this submissive quality of courage among recruits in Cornwall: ‘They are all so brave, to suffer,’ he wrote in July 1916, ‘but none of them brave enough, to reject suffering.’

  Perhaps the real heroes of 1914–18, then, are those who refused to obey and to fight, who actively rejected the passivity forced upon them by the war, who reasserted their right not to suffer, not to have things done to them.

  Which is why, despite a series of diversions, wrong turnings and U-turns, I made such an effort to find the village of Bailleulmont.

  In the communal cemetery there, tucked away from the tangle of civilian graves, is a group of military headstones. Unusually, they are made of brown stone, on one of which is inscribed:

  10495 PRIVATE

  A. INGHAM

  MANCHESTER REGIMENT

  1ST DECEMBER 1916

  SHOT AT DAWN

  ONE OF THE FIRST TO ENLIST

  A WORTHY SON

  OF HIS FATHER

  Like over 300 others, four of the soldiers buried here in Bailleulmont were shot for desertion or cowardice. Two of them – Ingham and Alfred Longshaw – were friends who served together – at the Somme – deserted together, were executed together and now lie together. For years Ingham’s family believed he had simply ‘died of wounds’ – as the inscriptions on the hea
dstones of other executed men maintain – but when his father was informed of the truth he insisted on this inscription being added to the headstone.

  A campaign was recently mounted to have executed deserters pardoned. A letter printed in the Independent provides a vivid illustration of the extent to which our idea of heroism has changed:

  My father was highly decorated in the First World War – DSM, MM and three times mentioned in dispatches. But his greatest pride was in the time when, escorting a deserter to death at dawn, he let him escape. This was not a latterday judgement, but that of one who had been involved in all the perils of the front line, and lost a limb in the process.

  The deserter’s grave has become a hero’s grave; pride has come to reside not in the carrying out of duty but in its humane dereliction.13

  ‘I’ve seen ’em, I’ve seen ’em . . .’

  The war goes on, silently, visibly. The same faces, the same ground. Men march up to the front, waving steel helmets. Artillery barrages. Lots of carrying: ammunition, shells, supplies. Larking around in the trenches. Lunch. More marching. More artillery. The attack. The first few prisoners brought in. The odd casualty. The landscape taking a pounding (with special emphasis on mine craters). A rubbled village. Walking wounded returning. Troops coming back with prisoners, miserable shaven-headed Hun . . .

  I am in the Imperial War Museum, watching a compilation of documentary films from the war. Each film seems identical to all the others. Their form is as fixed as the gridlock of trenches in which they are set.

  The camera stops everything. Soldiers can’t keep their eyes off it. During a pre-battle service no one listens to the padre: everyone is too busy watching the camera. Watching and grinning. The war is a grinning contest which the allies are winning (Jerry can only muster a weary smile). Only the most badly wounded – whom we never actually see – can resist grinning at the camera. Being so camera-conscious gives rise, inevitably, to some strikingly bad acting. Never more so than in the famous faked sequence of troops apparently going over the top in The Battle of the Somme (first shown, to a public horrified by its realism, on 21 August 1916) which was actually filmed at a training ground. A soldier falls, dies, looks back to the camera and then folds his arms neatly across his chest.