by Geoff Dyer
Well there [he writes to his mother], I have told you what it’s like and made it sound bad because that is the truth and I would have you believe it all, and tell it to anyone who asks you with a gleam in their eye how the war is going. A mess. That’s all . . . Tell all this to anyone who starts talking about honour and glory.
We have noticed a tendency, during the war, to look forward to a time in the future when the participants’ actions could be looked back on; here is the opposite process of historic back-projection. Barton’s letters fail to ring true – not because he would not have expressed sentiments like this, but because, ironically, they correspond so exactly with those established as the historical legacy of the war. Their authenticity derives from exactly the process of temporal mediation they have, as letters, to disclaim. In this instance it is difficult not to recall the famous passage from A Farewell to Arms in which Hemingway established the template for Barton-Hill’s sentiments:
I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain . . . Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, hallow were obscene.
In a later letter Barton observes, parenthetically, that if British soldiers are attending to the wounded, the Germans ‘often hold their fire . . . as we do’. Again, it is the verifiability of the observation that renders its dramatic authenticity suspect. Barton’s remark is the product, we feel, not of the contingency of his own experience but the judiciousness of Hill’s research.
The imaginative fabric of Sebastian Faulks’ impressive war novel Birdsong absorbs the research so thoroughly that only a few of these leaks appear. Faulks’ own observation, that one of his characters ‘seemed unable to say things without suggesting they were quotations from someone else’ nevertheless has ironic relevance to some passages in the book. Just back from leave, an officer gives vent to his loathing of the civilians living comfortably back in England: ‘Those fat pigs have got no idea what lives are led for them,’ he exclaims. ‘I wish a great bombardment would smash down Piccadilly into Whitehall and kill the whole lot of them.’ An entirely authentic sentiment, but one too obviously derived from a famous letter of Owen’s (see p. 29 above) to ring individually true.
Given the near impossibility of remaining beyond the reach of Sassoon and Owen, one solution is to include them in the fictive world of a novel. Pat Barker has done exactly this in two fine novels, Regeneration and The Eye in the Door. Set in Craiglockhart, the former opens with a transcription of Sassoon’s famous declaration and dramatizes many of the crucial moments in his relationships with Dr W. H. R. Rivers and Owen (including his detailed amendments to early versions of ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’).
Unlike Hill, Faulks and Barker, Eric Hiscock actually served in the war and saw action near Ypres in the spring of 1918. Born in 1900, he did not publish his memoir The Bells of Hell Go Ting-a-ling-a-ling until 1976, six years after the first edition of Strange Meeting. The fact that he has no gifts as a writer makes his case more revealing. On one occasion he notes that the
ever-present dreamlike quality of the days and nights (nights when I heard men gasping for breath as death enveloped them in evil-smelling mud-filled shell-holes as they slipped from the duckboards as they struggled towards the front line) filled me with an intense loathing of manmade war.
Reality recedes with each ‘as’ until the final heartfelt declaration can barely sustain the weight of its own conviction. Even moments of extreme personal danger are rendered secure and comfortable by the familiar conventions by which they are expressed. ‘Terrified, I clawed the stinking mud as the bullet whistled round my head and shoulders and I waited for death.’ The whole war is compressed into a single cliché.
In The Bloody Game (another Sassoon-derived title) Fussell mentions that some have considered Hiscock’s memoir ‘not as factually accurate as it pretends to be’. Whether it is a true account is not the issue here. What is important is that, for Hiscock, the linguistic and thematic conventions of the genre are more powerful than the original experience; indeed the original experience can only be revealed by the accretion of clichés it is buried beneath. The homely crudity of Hiscock’s language makes him more – not less – susceptible to mediated expression. A lack of linguistic self-consciousness exacerbates the tendency to express the experience of war through the words of others. Hiscock unwittingly acknowledges this when, as a way of adding resonance to an incident, he concludes by observing ‘if that wasn’t a theme for Siegfried Sassoon, I don’t know what was’. In terms of the writing that results from his experiences Hiscock may as well not have participated personally in the events of his own story.
The problems built in to Hill’s naturalist novel and Hiscock’s memoir disappear in a book like Timothy Findley’s The Wars, which heightens the linguistic and narrative strategies on which it depends. The problem of mediation is resolved by accentuating it. The novel’s superb setpieces – in which the protagonist Lieutenant Ross shoots an injured horse in the hold of the troopship, becomes lost in Flanders fog, or shelters from a gas attack – seem wholly authentic because Findley avails himself of the full range of narrative gambits which have become available in the years since the war. Hill’s characteristic register is a vaguely twenties literary English; Findley’s jagged self-enhancing fragments anticipate the technique of Michael Ondaatje’s Second World War novel, The English Patient. Ross’s sensations are recorded with a linguistic resourcefulness that is nowhere achieved in the memoirs. After a deafening barrage, to pick the tiniest of examples, Ross’s ‘ears popped and the silence poured in’.
The structure of the book incorporates and depends on the research that has gone into its writing: transcripts of interviews, letters, old photographs . . . ‘What you people who weren’t yet born can never know,’ reads one such transcription,
is what it meant to sleep under silent falls of snow when all night long the only sounds you heard were dogs that barked at trains that passed so far away they took a short cut through your dreams and no one even awoke. It was the War that changed all that. It was. After the Great War for Civilization – sleep was different everywhere . . .
Findley moves, often within the space of a couple of paragraphs, from the contingencies of a moment-by-moment present tense to the vast historical overview. Instead of an imaginative leap into the trenches, in other words, he enters the time of photographs. Sometimes, when there is no ‘good picture available except the one you can make in your mind’, present and past, description and speculation resolve into each other. The staple tropes of the front are reinvented:
The mud. There are no good similes. Mud must be a Flemish word. Mud was invented here. Mudland might have been its name. The ground is the colour of steel. Over most of the plain there isn’t a trace of topsoil: only sand and clay. The Belgians call them ‘clyttes’, these fields, and the further you go towards the sea, the worse the clyttes become. In them, the water is reached by the plough at an average depth of eighteen inches. When it rains (which is almost constantly from early September through to March, except when it snows) the water rises at you out of the ground. It rises from your footprints – and an army marching over a field can cause a flood. In 1916, it was said that you ‘waded to the front’. Men and horses sank from sight. They drowned in mud. Their graves, it seemed, just dug themselves and pulled them down.
No eyewitness account is more evocative than this, precisely because Findley acknowledges that the most vivid feature of the Great War is that it took place in the past.
It therefore takes an effort of considerable historical will to remember that before the war Thiepval, Auchonvillers and Beaumont-Hamel were just places like any others, that the Somme was a pleasant river in the département of the same name. But in 1910, in Faulks’ Birdsong, when Stephen Wraysford arrives at Amiens, that is all it is, a place – where he falls for the wife of the local factory-owner with whom he is lodging. They are consumed by passion, but brooding over the doomed love affair is the grea
ter doom that will soon consume the earth beneath their feet.
In the course of their outings they see ‘a small train waiting to take the branch line into Albert and Bapaume’. A second train takes them ‘from Albert out along the small country line beside the Ancre, past the villages of Mesnil and Hamel to the station at Beaumont’. Another pushes its way south ‘where the Marne joined the river Meuse, whose course linked Sedan to Verdun’: a network of innocent connections that will soon define the geography of the Western Front. In Amiens Cathedral Stephen has a vision of the ‘terrible piling up of the dead’ of centuries, which is also a premonition of what is to come. On oppressive, sultry afternoons husband, wife and lover go punting in the stagnant backwaters of the Somme. Thiepval is a spot to take afternoon tea. The future presses on the lovers like the dead weight of geological strata. The Great War took place in the past – even when it lay in the future.
To us it always took place in the past.
The issue of mediation has been compounded by Paul Fussell, who I am reading again as preparation for our trip to Flanders. If it was impossible to write about the war except through Owen’s and Sassoon’s eyes, it is now difficult to read about it except through the filter of Fussell’s ground-breaking investigation and collation of its dominant themes. Whenever we read the war poets, we effectively borrow Fussell’s copies to do so and – even when we dissent from his judgements – cannot ignore his annotations and underlinings. Fussell has himself become a part of the process whereby the memory of the war becomes lodged in the present. His commentary has become a part of the testimony it comments on. (Reading him – or anyone else for that matter – I am searching for what is not there, for what is missing, for what remains to be said.) If Hill’s Strange Meeting is an example of primary mediation, then The Great War and Modern Memory raises the possibility of secondary or critical mediation.
Even the ceremonies of Remembrance are subject to mediation. Now that the two world wars are commemorated with a service at the Cenotaph on the Sunday closest to the eleventh of November, it is – as the term Remembrance Day suggests – the act of remembering together that is being remembered. Contemporary works like A Twentieth-Century Memorial by Michael Sandle (born in 1936) – a skeletal Mickey Mouse manning, or mousing, a bronze machine-gun – are memorials to the near extinction of the war memorial as a viable form of public sculpture.
And this book? Like the youthful Christopher Isherwood who wanted to write a novel entitled ‘A War Memorial’, I wanted to write a book that was not about ‘the War itself but the effect of the idea of [the War] on my generation’. Not a novel but an essay in mediation: research notes for a Great War novel I had no intention of writing, the themes of a novel without its substance . . .
I see Ypres and the surrounding area through the words of Stephen Graham and Henry Williamson . . . We arrive there in the afternoon darkness and book into an expensive cheap hotel. There are FIRE EXIT signs on every door, brown covers on the beds. Towels the size of napkins, burn marks on the dresser. Our room is the sort which demands that even nonsmokers spend the first conscious minutes of the day propped up in bed, exhaling smoke at the hangover ceiling.
In the evening we walk to the Grote Markt, the vast square in the centre of town. After Ypres was flattened during the war, many buildings – like the fourteenth-century Cloth Hall that dominates the Markt – were rebuilt just as they had been. Williamson returned here in 1927 to find Ypres unrecognizably ‘clean and new and hybrid-English’. Sixty years of ageing have given it the look of a pleasant if slightly gloomy somethingth-century town, scrupulously preserved.
After a couple of beers we make our way to the Menin Gate, the memorial to the Missing of the Ypres salient. The names of 54,896 men who died between 1914 and 15 August 1917 are carved here. Designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield, it is a version of a triumphal arch, so extended as to seem almost like a tunnel. Steps in the middle of this tunnel take us up to the outside of the memorial. From here we can see the leafy water of the canal beyond the Gate. Damp air. Stillness waiting on itself.
We walk back down inside the memorial and then beyond it, across the canal. From this distance the buildings stretching away from the Gate seem to crouch beneath it. And yet, at the same time, it belies its own scale and you wonder if it is really as big as it seems. Everything about the memorial suggests that it should work powerfully on you, but its effect is oddly self-cauterizing.
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.
By 1927 when Sassoon scrawled these words – metaphorically speaking – on the recently inaugurated Menin Gate, his tone of maimed derision had become a matter of reflex. If ‘this pomp’ of ‘peace-complacent stone’ is a misrepresentation and denial, then so, equally, is Sassoon’s response to it. Refusing to accommodate the possibility of atonement for ‘the unheroic Dead’ on whose behalf he is lobbying, Sassoon yet conveys – and thereby yields to – the memorial’s own version of itself when he writes of the ‘intolerably nameless names’.
In his novel Fields of Glory Jean Rouaud describes life in the kind of ‘sullen swamp’ that, for Sassoon, is the enduring truth of the Ypres battlefield:
Little by little, abandoned corpses sank into the clay, slid to the bottom of a hollow and were soon buried under a wall of earth. During an attack you stumbled over a half-exposed arm or leg. Falling face to face on a corpse, you swore between your teeth – yours or the corpse’s. Nasty the way these sly corpses would trip you up. But you took the opportunity to tear their identification tags off their necks, so as to save those anonymous lumps of flesh from a future without memory, to restore them to official existence, as though the tragedy of the unknown soldier were to have lost not so much his life as his name.
Rouaud here affirms the underlying longing that links those ‘who struggled in the slime’ and the memorial arch on which they are commemorated. Lord Plumer was not bandying empty rhetoric when, at the inauguration of the Gate, he declared on behalf of the bereaved: ‘He is not missing; he is here.’
Memorials to the Missing are not about people, they are about names: the nameless names.
It is almost eight o’clock. A few people have congregated beneath the arches. The clocks begin to chime damply. Traffic comes to a halt. Two buglers take up position beneath the Gate and play The Last Post.
The two minutes’ silence on the second anniversary of the armistice was broken by The Last Post, ‘acute, shattering, the very voice of pain itself – but pain triumphant,’ according to The Times. In Death of a Hero the burial of George Winterbourne is concluded by the same ‘soul-shattering, heart-rending . . . inexorable chains of rapid sobbing notes and drawn-out piercing wails’ that are heard here at the same time every day of the year.
A boy cycles past. One of the buglers gestures quietly for him to stop. The sound of the bugles ricochets from the walls of the memorial. Echoes chase themselves between the arches. The last notes fade away, beckoning into silence. Afterwards silence lies on the dark canal, a silence in which every note is preserved intact.
Traffic resumes. We drift away, eat dinner, drink some more. It is very cold. Perhaps it is just the weather, perhaps it would be different in the summer – though one feels this is the season when the town comes into its own – but Ypres seems, in Stephen Graham’s phrase, ‘a terrible place still’. Graham was writing about the Ypres of 1920, when ‘death and the ruins completely out-weigh[ed] the living’. The ruins have been replaced by replicas of the original buildings, there is nothing wrong with the town – though it is not the kind of place you would come for a honeymoon – but you can see what Graham meant when he wrote that
it would be easy to imagine someone who had no insoluble ties killing himself here, drawn by the lodestone of death. There is a pull from the other world, a drag on the heart and spirit.
Especially in our dismal hotel room. We lie on our beds, half pissed. Mark is reading Death’s Men; P
aul, They Called It Passchendaele; I read The Challenge of the Dead. Eventually the other two drop off to sleep. I go on reading. I ‘lie listless, sleepless, with Ypres on the heart, and then suddenly a grand tumult of explosion, a sound as of the tumbling of heavy masonry’.
Paul snoring.
We drive along the flat roads of Flanders through the dregs of autumn. Every crossroads is smeared with tractor mud. It has stopped raining and started to drizzle. ‘Intermittent’ is the nearest we get to turning off the wipers – the Ypres, as we prefer to call them. The landscape is a sponge, soaking up rain. Turnips or beets – root vegetables of some kind, in any case – are piled up at entrances to fields.
Because the car is rented, we drive at top speed through every puddle and slick of mud, rally-cross style. Soon it is plastered with muck. From now on we refer to it as the tank: ‘Let’s park the tank’, ‘The tank needs petrol . . .’ Mainly, because it is so cold, we say, ‘Let’s get back in the tank.’
Near St Julien we come to Frederick Chapman Clemesha’s Canadian Memorial: the bust of a soldier mounted on and merging into a pillar of square stones. Head tipped forward, facing not towards the enemy lines of old but back towards Ypres. Rain smoking around him, dripping from the brim of his tin helmet. Thin trees in the distance. Sky grey as the rainstreaked stone of the monument.
We are in no hurry to leave. The memorial makes no appeal and no demands. It commands its solemn patch of land. Withstanding rain and time, we stand with it, this imperturbable monument.
Mourning for all mankind?
Beyond that it is difficult to say what feelings the memorial evokes. Not pity, not pride, not sadness even. Henry Williamson acknowledged this uncertainty while remaining ostensibly untroubled by it. For him it is a ‘memorial to all soldiers in the war’. Having found a way of articulating the statue’s refusal to yield to an easily identifiable response, he generalizes still further: it ‘mourns for all mankind’ – at which point the actual statue all but disappears in a fog of generalized emotion. It is a grand gesture and a self-defeatingly banal one: if all mankind is to be mourned, there would be no need to single out for special lamentation this particular