by Geoff Dyer
The smoking, by contrast, is entirely convincing. At any time at least half the people in shot are puffing away. They smoke so much you suspect they are trying to build up resistance to possible gas attacks. To our eyes these films are vintage cigarette ads – especially since a good proportion of these smokers are only days or hours away from getting blown to bits and so the possibility of developing lung cancer in twenty years is a luxurious pipedream. Still, what with smoking, gas, artillery, noise, damp and generally poor conditions of hygiene and sanitation, war, in these films, seems characterized by a general disregard for the health of the soldier.
All the more remarkable, then, that nothing too serious results from it. Gilbert Adair has pointed out that in Hollywood films of the Vietnam War ‘every American character who happens to find himself within the camera’s field of vision is already in danger’. In this documentary view of the First World War the camera frame is a safe haven, a refuge from danger. To be on film is to be out of harm’s way.
Hardly anyone dies and they’re all Germans anyway. As for the Tommies they have the odd arm wound, sometimes a head bandage, usually just a limp. After the battle friend and foe alike tramp back together – Tommy supporting Fritz – as if from a fiercely contested rugby match in atrocious conditions. After the game it’s all handshakes, friendliness and slapstick fraternization: a British soldier changes hats with a German prisoner (the title reads ‘Tommy and Fritz change hats’). Everyone looks on. All in all the battles of the Somme and Ancre look pretty harmless affairs.
Harmless and, from an allied point of view, entirely successful. The role of the German army is to suffer terrible bombardment and then surrender in numbers so vast the whole army must have been rounded up by 1917 at the latest.
So it goes on. Everyone looks the same. Everywhere looks the same. Every battle looks the same. And so, while titles and maps give an impression of a succession of easy victories, the films undermine themselves: if it’s all so straightforward, why this need to fight another identical battle, over an identical patch of ground a few months later? What we end up with is, as Samuel Hynes almost accurately puts it,
masses of men and materials, moving randomly through a dead ruined world towards no identifiable objective; it is aimless violence and passive suffering, without either a beginning or an end – not a crusade, but a terrible destiny.
Destiny is the wrong word here, for it implies a purpose, a goal, and thereby contradicts his main point that ‘nothing really happens’. Not a destiny, then, but a condition.
After a couple of hours of this condition I am stupefied by boredom. My interest is revived briefly by a sequence showing an officer in cavalry uniform – cap, boots, riding coat, riding a tank. An innovation so novel that on titles the word is always flanked by inverted commas, the ‘tank’ is the real star of these films. Ugly, slow, it lumbers up to the battlefield and then lumbers back again, unscathed and terrifying, an ungainly iron beetle. A bucking beetle, an iron bronco rather, for as it dips and grinds over the cratered field the officer perched atop tries desperately to keep a stiff upper body.
After this humorous interlude the war reverts to the plodding, plotless norm. The same faces, the same ground. I imagined I could watch footage endlessly and am surprised by my longing for modern documentary framing, for the raw material of history to be recut, edited down further, reshaped and contextualized. I almost find myself wishing there were a few of those interviews with ageing generals (‘Yes, I like to think I did for them both with my plan of attack.’) that I’d hated in The World at War.
The war goes on, silently, visibly. The same faces, the same ground. A title says something about our tireless armies marching without rest and I feel I’m the tireless viewer yomping without pause through the battles of Ancre, the Somme, Arras – I’ve long stopped noticing which is which or taking notes. I sit for another quarter of an hour, slumping deeper and deeper in my chair. Eventually I can bear it no longer. I get up, bang on the projectionist’s door and plead, ‘O Jesus, make it stop!’
He is only too happy to call a truce. He can knock off a bit early for lunch too. Live and let live. As I walk out I half expect to be presented with a white feather by more diligent researchers.
This is what the war is like for us. We can stop it at will. We gaze at photographs of soldiers in the trenches. Snow, dirt, cold, death. When we have been there long enough, we get up and leave, turn the page and move on.
The war was filmed at 16 to 18 frames per second on hand-cranked cameras. Modern projectors – like the one in the museum’s screening room – run at 24 frames per second and so the action flickers quickly by.
As part of an installation in the museum’s main building a special projector has been set up to show an endless loop of parts of The Battle of the Somme at the correct speed. Men marching to the front, survivors limping back. This is the middle segment of that continuous line of men first seen entraining for France and glimpsed later winding its way past the Cenotaph. An endless loop: a river of men, moving towards death. They are dead and they are going to die. Marching to the front, endlessly, so slowly that they never cease marching. In Craiglockhart, Sassoon remembered the war in an almost identical image:
I visualized an endless column of marching soldiers, singing ‘Tipperary’ on their way up from the back areas; I saw them filing silently along the ruined roads, and lugging their bad boots through mud until they came to some shell-hole where trees were stumps and skeletons . . .
Because the original cameras were hand-cranked, it is impossible to synchronize the projector exactly. Consequently the action is often slower than it should be. Like a photo taken at a shutter speed so slow it actually moves, the picture ‘ghosts’.
‘The past is never dead,’ wrote William Faulkner. ‘It’s not even past.’
Before going over the top, an officer said that his men ‘seemed more or less in a trance’. Charles Bean, the official Australian historian of the war, noted that after action ‘the men appeared to be walking in a dream and their eyes looked glassy and starey’. Another survivor recalls going through battle ‘like a sleepwalker’. David Jones notes of combat-weary soldiers that ‘they come as sleepwalkers whose bodies go unbidden of the mind, without malevolence, seeking only rest’.14
In Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune, a company of men are about to march to the front to join a major offensive on the Somme. The men looked at each other ‘with strange eyes, while the world became unreal and empty, and they moved in a mystery, where no help was’. When the order to move off is given there comes
a rippling murmur of movement, and the slurred rhythm of their trampling feet, seeming to beat out the seconds of time, while the liquid mud sucked and sucked at their boots, and they dropped into that swinging stride without speaking . . . and the mist wavered and trembled about them in little eddies, and earth, and life, and time, were as if they had never been.
In one of the best passages in his memoirs, Sassoon watched an exhausted Division returning from an offensive on the Somme:
Now there came an interval of silence in which I heard a horse neigh, shrill and scared and lonely. Then the procession of returning troops began. The campfires were burning low when the grinding, jolting column lumbered back. The field guns came first, with nodding men sitting stiffly on weary horses, followed by wagons and limbers and field-kitchens. After this rumble of wheels came the infantry, shambling, limping, straggling and out of step. If anyone spoke it was only a muttered word, and the mounted officers rode as if asleep. The men had carried their emergency water in petrol-cans, against which bayonets made a hollow clink; except for the shuffling of feet, this was the only sound. Thus, with an almost spectral appearance, the lurching brown figures flitted past with slung rifles and heads bent forward under basin-helmets.
Sassoon was ‘overawed’ by what he had witnessed; it seemed as though he ‘had watched an army of ghosts’. In that characteristic wartime attitude of projected retro
spect Sassoon felt he ‘had seen the war as it might be envisioned by some epic poet a hundred years hence’. Almost ninety years later this film is the epic, endless poem of the war.
Bearing a wounded comrade over his shoulder, a soldier floats towards the camera. Silent, ghostlike, slow.
Watching the sleep-walking figures we enter dream time, dead time: the remembered dreams of the dead.
A river of men, flowing towards death. Marching to the front, endlessly. Survivors limping back, lessly.
One thing emerges plainly from all this footage: war, for the ordinary soldier, was a continuation of labouring by other means. The battlefield was a vast open-air factory where hours were long, unions not permitted and safety standards routinely flouted. It thereby combined the worst aspects of agricultural labour and industrial shiftwork. The ‘mysterious army of horsemen, ploughmen and field workers who’, in Ronald Blythe’s words, ‘fled the wretchedness of the land in 1914’ discovered, in Flanders, an intensification of wretchedness. Miners found themselves engaged in exactly the same activity they had pursued in peacetime – except here their aim in burrowing beneath the earth was to lay hundreds of pounds of high explosive beneath the enemy’s feet. The Germans, meanwhile, were engaged in similar operations and sometimes the two tunnel systems broke through to each other. Hundreds of feet beneath the earth ‘men clawed at each other’s throats in these tunnels and beat each other to death with picks and shovels’.
For those above ground the chief activity recorded on film is carrying. Before the battle, shells; after, stretchers. Life, one realizes, is primarily a question of loading and unloading, fetching and carrying. Many of the shells are too heavy to be lifted and have to be winched or rolled into position. Every piece of equipment looks like it weighs a ton. There were no lightweight nylon rucksacks or Gore-tex boots. Things were made of iron and wood, even cloth looks like it has been woven from iron filings. Everything weighed more then. Weighed down with equipment, men do not march to the front so much as carry themselves there. Greatcoats are not worn but lugged:
We marched and saw a company of Canadians,
Their coats weighed eighty pounds at least.
This is one of the lessons of history: things get lighter over time. The future may not be better than the past but it will certainly be lighter. Hence the burden, the weight of the past.
We feel this especially strongly when looking at the memorial sculptures of Charles Sargeant Jagger. Some sculptors coax stone into a deceptive lightness; Jagger emphasizes its heaviness.
In the 1907 relief Labour (since destroyed) men strain and sweat to shift a piece of equipment; one figure in the right-hand corner seems exhausted, injured or wounded. Only the slightest addition of detail would be necessary to render the scene suitable for use as a relief on Jagger’s best-known work, the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner.
We stopped there one night in August. Obscured by trees, isolated for most of the day by a moat of traffic, no one else in the car even knew the memorial was there. There were four of us, all drunk. It was two in the morning and still warm. Moonlight glanced off the black figures. We looked up at the figure lugging shells, his gaze fixed blankly into the future or the past or whatever it is that the present eventually becomes.
The weight of the past
‘Men became reminiscent and talkative as they looked at the figure carrying four 18-pound shells in the long pockets of his coat,’ reported the Manchester Guardian the morning after the memorial was unveiled on 18 October 1925.
He would perhaps carry them a long distance, they said, if the gun was camouflaged, and like as not he would have two more under his arms. It meant a great weight added to the 96 pounds of an artillery man’s equipment.
Dead weight
Even in rest the weight of their equipment drags down on the men. We walked around the memorial, sheltered from the noise of the traffic. At the side of the memorial a figure lay covered by a greatcoat, part of his face – an ear, the line of his jaw – just visible. He is simply dead weight.
Jagger’s distinctive style combines this almost hulking heaviness of stone and equipment with the most delicate of details: you can almost see the hairs on the shell-carrier’s forearms, hear the rustle of the letter read by the soldier waiting at Paddington station. A scarf wrapped around his neck, a greatcoat draped around his shoulders, absorbed in the act of reading. The promise and dread of letters. Propped against the bar of the Café de l’Industrie, I open an envelope with my name in your writing. The second paragraph wonders, in your latest flourish of colloquial English, how I am ‘bearing up’.
Charles Sargeant Jagger: memorial at Paddington station
The scale and strength of Jagger’s figures recall the heroes of classical sculpture, but they are utterly ordinary. His sculptures are of average men whose heroism lies in their endurance. Jagger himself was shot through the left shoulder in Gallipoli in November 1915; in April 1918 he was again badly wounded at the Battle of Neuve Eglise. On both occasions he made a speedy recovery: ‘I heal,’ he wrote in May 1918, ‘almost before I’ve been hit.’ What he emphasizes in his sculpture is not the body’s vulnerability but its resilience, its capacity for bearing up. His figures – most obviously in the Hoylake and West Kirby Memorial, or in the identical maquette ‘Wipers’ at the Imperial War Museum – stand their ground, guarding their own memory. Their backs are, typically and literally, against the wall.
Public sculpture aims to display itself to maximum effect. There is an inherent difficulty, therefore, in using as the basis for such sculpture figures whose main aim was the exact opposite: maximum concealment. During the day, front-line troops stayed below ground level; only under cover of darkness or during a major offensive did they venture out into the open. Rather than revealing itself on a plinth, then, an authentic figure should, except on rare occasions, seek cover behind or – ideally – beneath it.
Like almost all of Jagger’s figures the Artillery officers are sheltered and protected by their own Memorial. Only the hunched machine-gunners of Jagger’s Portsmouth Memorial are framed by open air.
Jagger may have been the best but he was not the only sculptor to benefit from the needs of Remembrance. Commissions for most of the British memorials in France were given to architects but at home the post-war period represented a boom period for sculptors. For French sculptors times were even better. Thirty thousand war memorials – or fifty a day – were raised in France between 1920 and 1925. ‘There hasn’t been a golden age like this since the Greeks, since the cathedrals,’ says a memorial sculptor in Tavernier’s film Life and Nothing But. ‘Even the most ham-fisted sculptor is inundated with commissions. It’s like a factory production line. Talk of the Renaissance, this is the Resurrection.’
Inherently backward-looking, sponsored, mainly, by the state and the military, Memorial art will always tend to the conservative rather than experimental – even more so when the war to be commemorated has early on identified ‘tradition’ with England and home, ‘modern’ with the enemy. By implication ‘traditional’ figurative sculpture was readily compatible with victory, or at least with the milder affirmation that the war had not been utterly devoid of purpose. By similar and paradoxical implication, modernism – in the post-war years which witnessed its consolidation and triumph – seemed to identify itself with defeat or, more mildly, with hostility to the values in whose name the war had been waged.
Significantly, the principal modernist memorials were designed in Germany, the defeated nation, by Ernst Barlach and Käthe Kollwitz (both of whose work was subsequently condemned by the Nazis).
In Britain, memorials were executed in the main by older, more established sculptors like Albert Toft (1862–1949) and William Goscombe John (1860–1953). Even the major commissions undertaken by younger sculptors like Walter Marsden (1882–1969), Gilbert Ledward (1888–1960) and Jagger himself (1885–1934) were cast in traditional forms.
‘Survivor outrage’ – as Jame
s Young terms it – was also a factor determining the essentially conservative nature of memorials. As representatives of the dead, survivors tend to be hostile to abstract representation of their past: ‘Many survivors believe that the searing reality of their experiences demands as literal a memorial as possible.’ Such public hostility to the experimental or abstract is not always wrong-headed or philistine. The memorials of Toft and Jagger have endured better than less traditional works, like those of Edward Kennington for example. Over time his simple totemic forms, crowded on to a plinth in Battersea Park, have been unable to perform the basic function of the Memorial: to give shape to the past, to contain it.
And yet, from this confluence of needs and socio-aesthetic forces there emerges the possibility of a memorial sculpture which, in Britain at least, never came into existence, which is missing from the art historical record: a wounded realism, a sculpture rooted in a figurative tradition but maimed by modernism; a memorial sculpture which is both rent asunder and held together by the historical experience it seeks to express. Such a memorial form might have resembled Zadkine’s Monument to Rotterdam, or Ernst Neizvestny’s Soldier Being Bayoneted. These were made in the 1950s but both use ‘a sculptural language which derives from the same period of the early 1920s’.
A work from slightly earlier, Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s haunting The Fallen of 1915–16, shows that sculptural language beginning to express itself in terrible sobs. A naked, painfully etiolated figure is on his hands and knees. His head hangs to the floor. The grief of Europe seems to bear down on his back but this fallen youth is still supporting himself, resisting the last increment of collapse (his head touches the floor but this sign of helplessness adds to the sculpture’s structural stability). Another work by Lehmbruck, Head of a Thinker, shows a figure whose arms appear to have been wrenched off, leaving the shoulders as rough stumps; the left hand is clenched against the chest from which it protrudes. Lehmbruck worked as an orderly in a military hospital in Berlin and was devastated by the injuries and suffering he witnessed. He committed suicide in 1919, but his work might have provided a model for future memorials.