by Geoff Dyer
The first room of the museum proper is given over mainly to stereoscopic viewers. Bright sepia in 3-D: lines of blasted trees receding into history; an exaggerated perspective on the past. Everything is covered in dust, ‘the flesh of time’ Brodsky calls it, ‘time’s very flesh and blood’. The walls are lined with photographs, photographs of the muddy dead. Another trench song, ‘The Old Battalion’, scratches and crackles through the speakers:
If you want to find the old battalion,
I know where they are:
They’re hanging on the old barbed wire.
I’ve seen ’em, I’ve seen ’em,
Hanging on the old barbed wire.
The next room is given over to hideous uniforms and a random assortment of broken bayonets, revolvers and shell casings. There are a couple of petrified boots, the remains of a rifle so rusty it looks like it has been salvaged from a coral reef. A dusty damp smell – damp rot, rotting dust – pervades the place. It is as if Steptoe and Son have opened up their own branch of the Imperial War Museum.
Through a glass door we step out into the rain-clogged trenches and ditches. Everything here is rusty. Not just the strips of corrugated iron which, let’s face it, were designed to rust, but the earth and leaves. The year is turning to rust. Mud is old rust with dirt mixed in. Water is liquid rust.
By now the tank is a slum. It is littered with pâté rind, bread crumbs, greaseproof paper, orange peel and banana skins. Tins of beer rattle across the floor every time we turn a corner. From the outside hardly a square inch of the original paintwork can be seen. Even the interior is caked with mud from our boots.
Paul is driving. We are waiting at a junction. He begins pulling out on to the main road.
‘Watch out!’
A truck, overtaking a car on the main road, thunders past, missing us by inches. We’re all stunned. We talk about nothing else for the next hour.
‘Think of the publicity that would have got for your book,’ says Mark. ‘Getting killed before you even wrote it.’
‘This is not a book about Paul’s driving,’ I say. ‘English poetry is not yet fit to speak of it.’
‘Dulce et decorum est in tankus mori,’ says Paul.
Messines Ridge Cemetery is set back from the road, in the middle of a quiet wood. The graves are strewn with leaves: yellow, flecked with black, brown-green. At the back of the cemetery is an arcade of classical pillars. Even the slightest breeze is enough to tug leaves from the trees. The rustle of a pheasant breaking free of the silence. Rain dripping through trees. Damp bird calls.
The headstones are turning green with moss. The words ‘Their Glory Shall Not Be Blotted Out’ are blotted out by mud splashed up by rain.
As each year passes, it grows more difficult to keep time at bay. A quarter of a century’s moss forms in one year. Time is trying to make up for lost time. Left untended this cemetery, with its classical pillars, would look like an ancient ruin in a couple of years. If the machine-gun’s unprecedented destructive power made it ‘concentrated essence of infantry’, then here we have concentrated essence of the past. This is the look the past tends towards.
We come to the vast German cemetery at Langemark. A pile of horse dung lies, accidentally, I suppose, in the entrance. Nearly 25,000 men are buried here in a mass grave. At the edge of the Kameradengrab stand four mourning figures, silhouetted against the zinc sky. Up close these are poorly sculpted figures, but from a distance they impart a sense of utter desolation to the place. It is as if the minute’s silence for which they have bowed their heads has been extended for the duration of eternity. Names are printed on low grey pillars. To the right there are individual graves marked by flat slabs of stone.
There is no colour here, no flowers, nothing transcendent. The dead as individuals hardly matter; only as elements of the nation. There are no individual inscriptions, no rhetoric. Only the unadorned facts of mortality – and even these are reduced to a bare, bleak minimum. This is the meaning and consequence of defeat.
The French cemetery at Notre Dame de Lorette covers twenty-six acres. There are 20,000 named graves here; in the ossuary lie the remains of another 20,000 unknown dead. It is icy cold. Wind streams across the grey hill. Wind is not something that passes through the sky. The sky is wind and nothing else. Crosses stretch away in lines so long they seem to follow the curvature of the earth. Names are written on both the front and back of each cross. The scale of the cemetery exceeds all imagining. Even the names on the crosses count for nothing. Only the numbers count, the scale of loss. But this is so huge that it is consumed by itself. It shocks, stuns, numbs. Sassoon’s nameless names here become the numberless numbers. You stand aghast while the wind hurtles through your clothes, searing your ears until you find yourself almost vanishing: in the face of this wind, in this expanse of lifelessness, you cannot hold your own: you do not count. There is no room here for the living. The wind, the cold, force you away.
We head south, following the Western Front down towards the Somme. We entertain ourselves by singing ‘The Old Battalion’ or conversing in a pseudo Great War lingo. Paul and I address Mark as Private Hayhurst and prefix everything with an officerly ‘I say’ or ‘Look here’. For his part Mark, while adopting the tones of the loyal batman, is actually a scrimshanker who does nothing except sit in the back reading Death’s Men. Our hotel is a ‘billet’. The forthcoming night in the boozer is referred to as ‘the show’ or ‘stunt’. None of us is quite sure whether we’re on a gloomy holiday or a rowdy pilgrimage.
We are not the first to be uncertain on this score. During the twenties the British Legion and the St Barnabas Society organized subsidized trips to enable relatives of the dead who could not afford the journey to make a pilgrimage to the cemeteries where their loved ones lay.
Helen Turrell makes such a pilgrimage in Kipling’s haunting, lovely story ‘The Gardener’. Helen has brought up her nephew Michael ever since his father – her brother – died in India. Michael is killed in the war and buried in Hagenzeele Third Military Cemetery. It is a huge cemetery and only a few hundred of the twenty thousand graves are yet marked by white headstones; the rest are marked by ‘a merciless sea of black crosses’. Overwhelmed by the wilderness of graves, Helen approaches a man who is kneeling behind a row of headstones. ‘Evidently a gardener’, the man asks who she is looking for and Helen gives her nephew’s name.
The man lifted his eyes and looked at her with infinite compassion before he turned from the fresh-sown grass towards the naked black crosses.
‘Come with me,’ he said, ‘and I will show you where your son lies.’
The story all but ends there, with the words of this Christlike figure. A three-line epilogue records that when Helen left the cemetery she looked back and saw the man bending over his plants once again, ‘supposing him to be the gardener’.
Like Helen, most of the pilgrims were bereaved women, but their numbers soon came to include veterans wanting to revisit the battlefields. Comforts were few on such trips, but there were also large numbers of visitors who wanted – and were willing to pay for – a less arduous and sombre trip around the trenches and cemeteries of France and Flanders: tourists, in short. In another instance of historical projection these battlefield tours had already been bitterly satirized by Philip Johnstone in his poem ‘High Wood’, first published in February 1918:
Madame, please,
You are requested kindly not to touch
Or take away the Company’s property
As souvenirs; you’ll find we have on sale
A large variety, all guaranteed.
As I was saying, all is as it was,
This is an unknown British officer,
The tunic having lately rotted off.
Please follow me – this way . . .
the path, sir, please . . .
Lyn Macdonald is perhaps exaggerating when she describes Ypres in 1920 as ‘the booming mecca of the first mass-explosion of tourism in history’, but in 1930 a
hundred thousand people signed the visitors’ book at the Menin Gate in just three months. Many came in the spirit of Johnstone’s visitors or Abe North, who, in the Newfoundland Memorial Park, showers Dick Diver and Rosemary in a mock grenade attack of ‘earth gobs and pebbles’; many more departed in the spirit of Dick himself who ‘picked up a retaliatory handful of stones and then put them down.
‘“I couldn’t kid here,” he said rather apologetically.’
Understandably as well as apologetically, for few novels are as saturated with the memory of the Great War as Tender is the Night. Dick himself sums up this central concern of the book with the ‘half-ironic phrase, “Non-Combatant’s shell-shock”’.
On the first page, as Dick makes his way to Zurich in 1917, he passes ‘long trains of blinded or one-legged men, or dying trunks’. The clinic where he first meets Nicole is ‘a refuge for the broken, the incomplete, the menacing’. Nicole’s mental instability may not be related to the war – ‘the war is over’, she says, ‘and I scarcely knew there was a war’ – but is all the time reminding us of it. Her smile ‘was like all the lost youth in the world’. Lost youth may be a perpetual theme of Fitzgerald’s but there is often a larger historical dimension to our most personal concerns. In 1947, seven years after her husband’s death, Zelda wrote in a letter: ‘I do not know that a personality can be divorced from the times which evoke it . . . I feel that Scott’s greatest contribution was the dramatization of a heart-broken + despairing era . . .’ In 1917 Fitzgerald himself wrote: ‘After all, life hasn’t much to offer except youth and . . . Every man I’ve met who’s been to war, that is this war, seems to have lost youth and faith in man.’
All around Nicole at the clinic, meanwhile, are those maimed mentally or vicariously by the war: ‘shell-shocks who merely heard an air raid from a distance’ or ‘merely read newspapers’. The accessories of fashion – a beret, for example – seek to cover ‘a skull recently operated on. Beneath it human eyes peered.’ Despite Nicole’s immense wealth, even the idyllic period of their courtship is surrounded ominously by the sound of war:
Suddenly there was a booming from the wine slopes across the lake; cannons were shooting at hail-bearing clouds in order to break them . . . the hotel crouched amid tumult, chaos, and darkness.
Years later, by which time his marriage to Nicole is showing signs of strain and he is falling for another, younger woman, Dick and his friends make their tour of the Newfoundland trenches.
We arrive there on a November morning. The sky is armistice-white. The trenches are still preserved but without the barbed wire – removed, finally, because sheep kept getting tangled up in it – the grass-covered shell-holes make the place look like a particularly difficult golf course.
Fitzgerald, by contrast, deliberately begins the section of the novel which describes Dick’s visit, ‘Casualties’, so as to make it seem, for a moment, either as if the scene is taking place in the middle of the actual war or – and it amounts to the same thing – as if the war is still being waged in 1925:
Dick turned the corner of the traverse and continued along the trench walking on the duckboard. He came to a periscope, looked through it a moment, then he got up on the step and peered over the parapet. In front of him beneath a dingy sky was Beaumont-Hamel; to his left the tragic hill of Thiepval.
A few minutes later, by which time it has become clear that the friends are simply visitors rather than combatants – though they are, of course, ‘casualties’ – Fitzgerald vouchsafes to Dick one of the most famous, beautiful and telling of all passages about the war.
See that little stream – we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it – a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No European will ever do that again in this generation . . .
This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation between the classes.
Despite the cold there were a handful of other visitors at the Memorial Park. The smaller cemeteries are deserted. Sometimes there are intervals of three or four weeks in the visitors’ books. Often people come to visit one particular grave: a great uncle, a grandfather. They are always touching, these personal inscriptions in the book, especially when the pilgrimage is the fulfilment of a lifetime’s ambition.
Most comments, though, are generic: ‘RIP’, ‘Remembering’, ‘We Will Remember Them’, ‘Lest We Forget’, ‘Very Moving’. Sometimes there is a jaunty salute: ‘All the best, lads’, ‘Sleep well, boys’. As well as commenting on the cemetery itself – ‘Peaceful’, ‘Beautiful’ – many people offer larger impressions of the war: ‘Such a waste’, ‘No more war’, ‘Never again’. All comments are heartfelt, even those like ‘They died for freedom’ or ‘For Civilization’, which, testifying to the enduring power of ignorance, end up meaning the opposite of what is intended: ‘They died for nothing.’ At the Connaught Cemetery for the massacred Ulster Division several visitors from Northern Ireland have written ‘No surrender’. One entry, from Andy Keery, reads: ‘No surrender. Proud to come from Ulster.’ Beneath it his friend has written: ‘No surrender. I came with Andy.’ Occasionally people quote a couple of lines of poetry. I add my own little couplet:
A lot of people have written ‘no surrender’.
That’s how bigots remember.
Sometimes people’s comments are so idiosyncratic as scarcely to make sense: ‘The bloke on the tractor spoiled it for me by his reckless driving. Signed anon’ – the unknown visitor. On 10 October 1992 at Tyne Cot Greg Dawson wrote, ‘We really showed those fascists a thing or two!’ Another person had drawn a Star of David and written, ‘What about the 6 million Jews?’ Beneath it someone else had written, ‘Wrong war, mate.’ This quickly becomes something of a catchphrase between the three of us: irrespective of its relevance, any remark elicits the droll rejoinder, ‘Wrong war, mate.’
At the Sheffield Memorial a diligent student wrote a short essay pointing out, in closely reasoned detail, that blame for the Somme rested, ultimately, on Churchill’s shoulders. He even added a footnote citing A. J. P. Taylor, complete with page reference, place and date of publication. Reluctant to get drawn into the minutiae of scholarly debate, another visitor had simply scrawled in the margin: ‘Rubbish!’
Sometimes a dialogue does evolve, most obviously at one of the Redan Ridge cemeteries. The theme of the discussion here is exactly that announced by the anti-Taylorite at the Sheffield Memorial: rubbish.
There are three tiny, beautifully located cemeteries at Redan Ridge. Next to one of them is a stinking mound of farm rubbish. An entry from 10 July 1986 expresses the characteristic sentiments of most visitors: ‘It’s such a shame they must rest with a rubbish pit beside them.’17 Several pages on, after numerous endorsements of these remarks, the first dissenting voice appears: ‘If visitors fail to recognize the true pathos behind their visits here only to latch on to the presence of a rubbish dump, then their presence here disgusts me.’
This attempt to scotch the debate only inflames it. The characteristic tone becomes aggressively indignant: ‘The rubbish is a thinly disguised insult to the memory of Pte. Tommy Atkins.’ Adding injury to insult the next person to join in notes: ‘It’s quite apt: human waste next to more of it.’ Comments like this mean that from now on the ire of those offended by the rubbish is directed not only against the farmer who dumped it but against those who implicitly condone him – and who, in turn, become steadily more aggressive in their responses: ‘Sod the rubbishtip – these men lived and died in it. Isn’t rubbish a part of life?’
That’s a moot point, but for quite a few months now the rubbish has been playing a more important part in the visitors’ book than t
he cemetery. Gradually the debate itself becomes the main subject of debate. The cemetery was ousted by the rubbishtip; now both are only incidental to the real focus of attention: the visitors’ book itself. You can imagine it being integrated into battlefield tours, becoming the main reason for people’s visit. Conscious of this, someone has written: ‘Quite frankly the wastage of human life is worthy of more comment than a ridiculous rubbish-tip saga.’
Every attempt to have the last word, however, demands a response and so the rubbish debate and the debate about the rubbish debate perpetuate themselves. It comes as something of a disappointment to read, on 9 September 1991: ‘Glad the rubbish has finally gone.’
I note all this down on 9 November 1992. It is the second time I have been here and there is a strange pleasure in standing in exactly the same spot again. I find the proof of my last visit, in my own handwriting, in the visitors’ book. It was a different season then; now the sky sags like mud over the brown earth. The air is cold as iron. Rain is blowing horizontal. The smell of rotting farmyard waste pervades the scene. I write:
Returned here after my previous visit 5.9.91.
PS: The rubbish has returned too.
The pages of these visitors’ books are clipped in a green ringhooped binder. When there are no pages left, new ones are clipped in. What happens to the old ones? Burned? Filed away in archives? If the latter, then perhaps an academic will one day salvage all these pages and use this hoard of raw data as the basis of a comprehensive survey of attitudes to the war, the ways in which it is remembered and misremembered. There is certainly enough material to fill a book: people who come here are moved and want to record their feelings, explain themselves.
And this book, really, is just an extended entry, jotted on pages ripped from the visitors’ book of a cemetery on the Somme.
What with the weather and the escalating cost of the trip, we decide to abandon our plan to be at Thiepval for Armistice Day. I am all for continuing with the big push to Ors, where Owen is buried, but by now serious questions are being raised about my leadership. Paul and Mark are refusing to budge.