The Missing of the Somme

by Geoff Dyer

  BATTLEFIELD WHERE 18,000

  CANADIANS ON THE BRITISH

  LEFT WITHSTOOD THE FIRST

  GERMAN GAS ATTACKS THE

  22–24 APRIL 1915 2,000

  FELL AND LIE BURIED NEARBY

  In Fields of Glory Jean Rouaud describes a gas attack in terms that recall the rolling fog of Bleak House or the slinking catlike fog of Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’:

  Now the chlorinated fog infiltrates the network of communication trenches, seeps into dugouts (mere sections of trench covered with planks), nestles in potholes, creeps through the rudimentary partitions of casements, plunges into underground chambers hitherto preserved from shells, pollutes food and water supplies, occupies space so methodically that frantic pain-racked men search vainly for a breath of air.

  The leisurely sentence unfolds infinitely slowly, gradually revealing the harm that this apparently harmless stain on the air can do until, finding yourself running out of breath with several clauses still to go, you are suddenly struggling for the full stop. The initial lyrical lilt of the scene is soon rent apart by ‘the violent cough that tears the lungs and the pleura and brings bloody froth to the lips, the acrid vomiting that doubles up the body’.

  John Singer Sargent’s painting Gassed shows a line of ten men making their way through the mass of other gas victims sprawling on the ground on either side of them. Their eyes are bandaged and, as in Brueghel’s Parable of the Blind, each man has his hand on the shoulder of the one in front. In the middle of the group a soldier turns away to vomit. Another, near the front, raises his leg high, expecting a step. An orderly guides and steadies the two men at the head of the line. Further off, to the right of the low sun, another group are making their way uncertainly forward.

  The only sound . . .

  The soldiers in the foreground lie sleeping or resting, propped on one another. One drinks from a canteen. In the sky there are planes where birds should be, flying haphazardly.

  Henry Tonks, another war artist who was with Sargent when he saw the gassed soldiers, recalls the scene:

  They sat or lay down on the grass, there must have been several hundred, evidently suffering a great deal, chiefly I fancy from their eyes which were covered up by pieces of lint.

  In Gassed there is little suffering. Or rather, what suffering there is is outweighed by the painting’s compassion. In spite of the vomiting figure the scene has almost nothing in common with Owen’s vision of the gas victim whose blood comes ‘gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs’. What Sargent has depicted, instead, is the solace of the blind: the comfort of putting your trust in someone, of being safely led. At the same time the light itself seems enough to restore their sight, light so soft that it will soothe even their gas-ravaged eyes. Pain is noisy, clamorous. In Sargent’s painting coughing and retching are absorbed by the tranquillity of the evening. The lyricism at the opening of Rouaud’s description is beginning to make itself felt again as air and men convalesce, reasserting their capacity for tenderness.

  The scene is already touched, in other words, by the beauty of the world as it will be revealed when their vision is restored.

  The only sound, that is . . . But no, I am getting ahead of myself.

  In the first months of the war football was used as an incentive to enlistment; the war, it was claimed, offered the chance to play ‘the greatest game of all’. By the end of 1914 an estimated 500,000 men had enlisted at football matches. By the following spring, professional football had been banned: matches, it was feared, were so popular that (a reversal of the initial strategy) they deterred men from enlisting.

  At the front the enthusiasm for the game continued unabated. Whether a match actually took place in No Man’s Land between German and English troops on Christmas Day 1914 is doubtful; even if it did not, it is entirely appropriate that the day’s events should have generated the myth of a football match as the embodiment of fraternization.

  The most famous footballing episode was Captain Nevill’s kicking a ball into No Man’s Land on the first day of the Somme. A prize was offered to the first man to dribble the ball into the German trenches; Nevill himself scrambled out of the trench in pursuit of his goal and was cut down immediately. (Perhaps the Somme was not only an indictment of military strategy but also of the British propensity for the long-ball game.) Lawrence’s admonition – that tragedy ought to be a great big kick at misery – could not have been fulfilled more literally.

  Move close to Sargent’s painting, closer than its size compels. Through the legs of the gassed soldiers – and especially in the gap opened in the line by the vomiting man – you can glimpse a game of football being played in the background. One team in red, the other in blue, the ball in mid-air, suspended in the lovely evening light.

  The only sounds not absorbed by the light are the shouts of the game, just audible to the line of blinded men.

  * * *

  Road signs direct us through history as well as geography: Poelcapelle, Zonnebeke, Passchendaele. ‘There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity,’ wrote Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. A generation later Philip Toynbee remembers, as a boy, ‘murmuring the name Passchendaele in an ecstasy of excitement and regret’. Vernon Scannell too was mesmerized by the ‘litany of proper names’ which crop up, in various permutations, again and again in his poems: ‘Passchendaele, Bapaume, and Loos, and Mons’; ‘Cambrai, Bethune, Arras, Kemmel Hill’; ‘Passchendaele, Verdun, The Menin Road . . .’

  I cannot remember when in my childhood I first heard of places like these. But I know I heard them – the Somme especially – at home, before I came across them in history books or at school. It was at the Somme that history engaged my family, that my family entered history. Like Shurdington, Cranham, Birdlip, Leckhampton and Churchdown, the name was part of the soil in which the history of my family was rooted. This intertwining of the villages and landmarks of Gloucestershire with those of Flanders and Picardy is also the defining characteristic of the poetry of Ivor Gurney.

  Appropriately, his first volume of poetry, published in 1917, was entitled Severn and Somme; in the letters and poems he wrote from the trenches, and afterwards in the long years of mental illness, he exclaims again and again how – a source of comfort and torment – the landscape of northern France resembles his beloved Gloucestershire. At Crucifix Corner ‘all things said Severn’; in another poem the same spot reminds him of Crickley. Near Vermand, ‘the copse was like a Cranham copse with scythed curve’, like ‘Cotswold her spinnies if ever . . .’ Hearing a cuckoo in ‘a shattered wood . . . what could [he] think of but Framilode, Minsterworth, Cranham, and the old haunts of home’. Recalling the time he was gassed at ‘bad St Julien’ (long after that first attack, in September 1917), the poem ‘Farewell’ sets the dual landscapes of ‘Ypres’, ‘Somme and Aubers’ and ‘Gloucester’, ‘Cheltenham’, ‘Stroud’ swirling around each other.

  Gurney was born in 1890 and served in the Gloucesters, the same regiment as my father’s father. The last fifteen years of his life were spent at the City of London Mental Home, but when he died, in 1937, he was buried just outside Gloucester. Running past the bottom of our garden, Hatherley Brook passes within half a mile of the church at Twigworth where he is buried.

  We drive into Passchendaele. The power of this name has not diminished with the years. As words, ‘Auschwitz’ and ‘Dachau’ have become over-burdened by their rhetorical power as synonyms for evil. If not in print then certainly in conversation Belsen has become a common metaphor for extreme skinniness. Passchendaele, despite the carnage associated with it, is rarely heard except to designate the Battle of Third Ypres. Instead of passing into common linguistic currency, then, these place-names have acquired an almost sacred ring. They have perhaps become over-loaded with holiness, especially Passchendaele. For those who were there, Passchendaele was so awful, so horrific, that it became almost a joke. Paul reads aloud the accounts of two survivors quoted by Lyn
Macdonald: ‘Tuesday, 2 October. Back in the battery again, but what have we come back to? Passchendaele!’ Another recalls that

  the names were so sinister – Zonnebeke – Hill 60 – Zillebeke – the names terrified you before you got there, they had such a sinister ring about them. Then to end up making for Passchendaele was the last straw.

  This tone of disaffected endurance is not confined to place-names.

  Paul Fussell sees the war, via Hardy, as a huge ‘satire of circumstance’ in which irony emerges as the only adequate mode of expression. Hence, he notes satirically, ‘The Oxford Book of War Poetry might just as well be titled The Oxford Book of Satire.’ The war for Fussell is a text which he has read more perceptively and persuasively than anyone else. The participants are consequently judged in literary terms: Haig is reproved for a ‘want of imagination and innocence of artistic culture’; the ‘hopeless absence of cleverness’ about one of his plans is ‘entirely characteristic of its author’. In such company ‘it is refreshing to turn to a wittier tradition’, to Sir Herbert Plumer, for example, ‘a sort of intellectual’s hero of the British Great War’. Not surprisingly the war demanded from its generals ‘the military equivalent of wit and invention’ – exactly the qualities so abundantly displayed by a ‘sophisticated observer’ like Fussell himself. For Fussell, in short, irony is synonymous with sophistication – which makes it especially ironic that the war’s most deeply ironic mode is probably the ‘mustn’t grumble’ proletarian grumble. (Sassoon did not simply try to depict the war in realist terms; he tried to find a poetic diction of moaning.)

  Of the prose writers it is Frederic Manning who – despite a tendency to lop off every aspirate in sight – has best conveyed this pervasive idiom:

  ‘What ’appened to Shem?’ [Bourne] asked.

  ‘Went back. Wounded in the foot.’

  ‘’e were wounded early on, when Jerry dropped the barrage on us,’ explained Minton, stolidly precise as to facts.

  ‘That bugger gets off everything with ’is feet,’ said Sergeant Tozer.

  ‘’e were gettin’ off with ’is ’ands an’ knees when I seed ’im,’ said Minton, phlegmatically.

  Trench songs like ‘The Old Battalion’, used to famous effect in Oh What a Lovely War, are musical elaborations of exactly this brand of deadpan resignation. First performed by Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in 1963, Oh What a Lovely War reached a wider audience in 1969 when it was filmed by Richard Attenborough. I half saw the film a couple of times, but, disliking music hall and the theatre in equal measure, it never made any impression on me. It wasn’t until I read it as a text – in wilful defiance, as Sassoon might have put it, of a prefatory note which warns that ‘this is a play script and should be read as such’ – that I found a version I could respond to. The satirical attacks on Haig and the generals still seem to rely on crude caricature, but the trench scenes contain some of the best writing about the war. Writers may have resorted to irony, but the soldiers here rely on its more humane equivalent: the piss-take.

  On Christmas Eve the Germans sing ‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht’; the British respond with a carol of their own:

  It was Christmas day in the cookhouse,

  The happiest day of the year,

  Men’s hearts were full of gladness

  And their bellies full of beer,

  When up spoke Private Shorthouse,

  His face as bold as brass,

  Saying, ‘We don’t want your Christmas pudding

  You can stick it up your . . .’

  Tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy . . .

  In the course of the play almost all of the themes touched on in this book are dealt with in similar style. In place of a meditation on Gassed we have:

  They’re warning us, they’re warning us,

  One respirator for the four of us.

  Thank your lucky stars that three of us can run,

  So one of us can use it all alone.

  Listening to ‘those poor wounded bleeders moaning in noman’s-land’, a soldier notes that it ‘sounds like a cattle market’. The literary endeavours of the writer-soldiers – and the birth of the war’s written mythology – receive similarly short shrift:

  SECOND SOLDIER: What’s he doing?

  THIRD SOLDIER: Writing to his lady love.

  SECOND SOLDIER: Oh blimey! Not again.

  THIRD SOLDIER: Third volume. My dearest, I waited for you for two hours last night at Hellfire Corner, but you didn’t turn up. Can it be that you no longer love me?

  Signed – Harry Hotlips.

  SECOND SOLDIER: What’s she like?

  FOURTH SOLDIER: Lovely.

  SECOND SOLDIER: Is she?

  THIRD SOLDIER: Bet she’s got a nose like a five-inch shell.

  FOURTH SOLDIER: Shut up will you? I’m trying to concentrate.

  FIFTH SOLDIER: You writing for that paper again?

  FOURTH SOLDIER: Yes, they don’t seem to realize they’re in at the birth of the Wipers Gazette. Here, do you want to hear what I’ve written?

  SECOND SOLDIER: No.

  Appropriately and perfectly, the play ends with a song which, like that defining passage in Barbusse, looks ahead to the impossibility of conveying what happened in the trenches:

  And when they ask us, and they’re certainly going to ask us,

  The reason why we didn’t win the Croix de Guerre,

  Oh, we’ll never tell them, oh, we’ll never tell them

  There was a front, but damned if we knew where.

  Oh What a Lovely War was not ‘written’ in the conventional sense; it grew out of a close collaboration by all the members of the Theatre Workshop. In a characteristic aside Fussell, by contrast, notes that ‘it is really hard to shake off the conviction that this war has been written by someone’. The great value of Lyn Macdonald’s books is that they are not texts so much as carefully arranged accumulations of raw material which have not been ‘worked up’ as they have in Oh What a Lovely War. Preserved in 1914 or Somme are the voices of men – like my grandfather – who never sought to record their experiences on paper. The tropes identified by Fussell are reproduced in a different, ‘lower’ or non-literary register which simultaneously qualifies and verifies many of his claims.

  Sassoon’s observation, in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, that ‘the symbolism of the sunset was wasted on the rank and file’ suggests that Fussell’s elaborate analysis of sunsets has only literary significance – but sunsets bathe the accounts of even the least literary men in a lyric glow. Likewise, Fussell’s lengthy examination of the way the war was ironically underwritten by the sporting spirit is both supported by and wrenched away from its Newboltian public school context by an incident recorded by Macdonald. Lieutenant Patrick King, in the midst of shelling, calls across to see if his men are all right. The reply comes: ‘Aye, all’s reet here, Paddy. We’re still battin’.’

  This tone of deadpan resignation is surprisingly versatile. It embraces a range of the rhetorical devices catalogued in The Great War and Modern Memory. Fussell notes the way that The Pilgrim’s Progress provided a symbolic map of the war (Passchendaele is the Slough of Despond); one of Macdonald’s interviewees begins with the graphically exact understatement, ‘The salient was a dead loss,’ and moves in ten lines beyond Bunyan to describe it as ‘just a complete abomination of desolation’.

  This pretty much sums up our feelings about Passchendaele. We buy bread, fruit and pink-coloured meat at a supermarket and then go for coffee. At eleven-thirty in the morning the café is already full of men, beer and smoke.

  ‘To our dismay, on counting our money, we found that it was nearly gone,’ noted Williamson in 1927. ‘Whither had it gone?’

  ‘We must have spent more on beer than we thought,’ suggests Paul before going through the figures in the back of his notebook again. However we look at it, money is pouring through our fingers. After further anguished calculations we put it down to the exchange rate. A few weeks ago t
he pound plunged to a new record low, and as a consequence we are sitting here in Passchendaele, the poor men of Europe, licking our financial wounds.

  We leave the café and head for Tyne Cot Cemetery, a vast, sprawling city of the dead. Like any metropolis it has preserved the haphazard, unregulated heart of the old city: the 300 or so graves that were found here after the armistice. Since then it has spread out in a series of radial fans and neat purpose-built suburban blocks, accommodating over eleven thousand of the dead of the rural battlefields. Even rough-hewn German bunkers were absorbed by the city’s irenic expansion.

  Rain has cratered and pocked the earth around the headstones, smeared them with mud. The grass has been worn bare in places. The sky is grey with cold. Flowers have been pruned back to their stems. It is easy to imagine that the shedding of leaves is only the first stage in nature’s cutting back for winter. In time branches will shrink back into trunks and trunks into earth until only frost-ravaged headstones remain above the ground.

  It is so cold that we stay only a short time before Paul says,

  ‘Let’s get back in the car.’

  ‘Tank, Paul, tank.’

  ‘Sorry. “Tank.”’

  ‘And say “sir” when you say “tank”.’

  ‘Tank, sir. Yes, sir.’

  Our next stop is the Hill 60 Museum, which for the rest of the trip we refer to as the Little Shop of Horrors. If Hill 60 seemed out of place in that list of sinister names – a stray from Vietnam – this place soon persuades you of its right to be included among them. Out front is a ‘theme’ café decorated with wartime bric-à-brac. One of those creepy old war songs is playing on a scratchy gramophone: ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary . . .’ The canned past.