by Geoff Dyer
‘You’ll damn well go where I order you,’ I say at last.
‘What are you going to do? Court-martial us?’ says Mark.
‘Yeah. Fuck off, Hitler,’ says Paul.
‘Wrong war, mate,’ chant Mark and I.
We decide to head back to Vimy Ridge (missed on the way down due to a navigational error) before beating a retreat to Boulogne.
Since Armistice Day has been incorporated into Remembrance Day, there is little point remaining here until the eleventh, but, as we drive towards Vimy, I ponder the significance of dates – 4 August 1914, 1 July 1916, 11 November 1918 – and the extent to which the ebbing and flowing of the memory of the Great War are determined by the gravitational pull of the calendar.
In his study of Holocaust memorials, James Young points out how
when events are commemoratively linked to a day on the calendar, a day whose figure inevitably recurs, both memory of events and the meanings engendered in memory seem ordained by nothing less than time itself.
The actual date of the event to be commemorated often falls as arbitrarily as a person’s birthday. In the case of the Great War, which ended punctually at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the temporal significance of the moment and day on which hostilities ceased was consciously pre-determined. If the intention was to bring the future memory of the war into the sharpest possible focus, it could hardly have been better arranged: the various ceremonies of Remembrace could not have worked so powerfully without this precise temporal anchoring. Since the Second World War, this anchoring has been lost. Remembrance Day can now drift three days clear of the eleventh of November. Hence the sense noted earlier that at the Cenotaph it is the act of remembering together that is being remembered. Past and present are only imperfectly aligned.
In other ways they are being pulled into closer proximity. This was felt especially strongly in 1993, the centenary of Owen’s birth and the seventy-fifth anniversary of his death: another example of the way in which the war has become memorialized in the poet’s image. The same year also saw the seventy-fifth anniversary of the armistice. 4 August 1994 marked the eightieth anniversary of the outbreak of war. All of these dates are signposts pointing to one of the ways in which the memory of the Great War exerts itself more powerfully as it recedes in time. This has less to do with recent events in Sarajevo than the simple sense that we are drawing gradually closer to the time when the war took place exactly a hundred years ago. In terms of remembrance the years 2014–2018 will represent the temporal equivalent of a total eclipse. By then no one who fought in the war will be alive to remember it.
‘The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer . . .’
Like the Newfoundland Memorial, the other major Canadian memorial, at Vimy Ridge, is located in an expanse of parkland in which the original trenches have been neatly maintained. A road winds up to the park through thick woods. Then, suddenly, the monument looms into view: two white pylons, each with a sculpted figure perched precariously near the top. Sunlight knifes through the clouds.
Twin white paths stretch across the grass. The steps to the monument are flanked by two figures, a naked man and a naked woman. The stone is dazzling white. It is difficult to estimate the height of the pylons. A hundred feet? Two hundred? Impossible to say: there is nothing around to stand comparison with the monument. It generates its own scale, dwarfing the idea of measurement. At its base, between the two pylons, is a group of figures thrusting a torch upwards towards the figures perched high above. The distance between them is measureless.
Carved on the walls are the names of Canada’s missing: 11,285 men with no known graves. I walk round to the east side of the monument where a group of figures are breaking a sword. Far off, in the other corner, is another similar group whose details I cannot make out at this distance. Between them, brooding over a vast sea of grass, is the shrouded form of a woman, her stone robes flowing over the ground. The figure spans millennia of grieving women, from pietàs showing the weeping Virgin to photos of widowed peasant women wrapped in shawls against the cold. Below her, resting on a tomb, are a sword and steel helmet, the shadows of the twin pylons stretching out across the grass.
Vimy Ridge: the Canadian war memorial
The Memorial took eleven years to construct. Unveiled, finally, in 1936, it was the last of the great war memorials to be completed. Walter Allward, the sculptor and designer, explained its symbolism in the following terms. The grieving woman represents Canada, a young nation mourning her dead; the figures to her left show the sympathy of Canada for the helpless; to her right the Defenders are breaking the sword of war. Between the pillars, Sacrifice throws the torch to his comrades; high up on the pylons are allegorical figures of Honour, Faith, Justice, Hope, Peace . . . This string of virtues recalls a speech made by Lloyd George in September 1914 in which he itemized
Grief . . .
the great everlasting things that matter for a nation – the great peaks we had forgotten, of Honour, Duty, Patriotism and, clad in glittering white, the great pinnacle of Sacrifice pointing like a rugged finger to Heaven.
In its glittering whiteness Allward’s monument seems the shorn embodiment of Lloyd George’s words. Duty and Patriotism have fallen away; Honour takes its place alongside Hope and peace as allegorical decoration; Sacrifice remains undiminished: unmeasurable, sheer – but its meaning, too, has been transformed by the war. It is here confronted with the consequence of its meaning.
Discounting the allegorical ‘Defenders’ there are no military figures on the monument. The steel helmet on the tomb is the only clear symbolic link with the war it commemorates. The figures at the base of the pylons strain upward, straining to rise above their grief, to surmount it until, like the figures nestling in the sky above them, they can overcome it. This vertiginous transcendence is counterpoised by the earthward gaze of the woman. Mute with sorrow she makes no appeal to the heavens but fixes her eyes on the ground, making an accommodation with grief, residing in loss.
Owen, wrote C. Day Lewis, ‘had no pity to spare for the suffering of bereaved women’. Vimy Ridge, by contrast, seems less a memorial to the dead, to the abstract ideal of Sacrifice, than to the reality of grief: a memorial not to the Unknown Soldier but to Unknown Mothers.
I remember reading of a soldier’s visit to the mother of a dead friend: ‘“I’ve lost my only boy,” was all she said, then became mute with grief.’
And then, as sometimes happens, this word ‘grief’ that I have used many times floats free of meaning and becomes a sound, an abstract arrangement of letters whose sense is suddenly lost. Grief, grief, grief. I say the word to myself until, gradually, it is reunited with the meaning it has always had.
I was living in New Orleans when the Gulf War ended. The city was swathed in yellow ribbons and each night I watched news reports about soldiers returning home to their loved ones, their sweethearts. Hugs and tears, brass bands playing, kisses, babies born while their fathers were away in the desert of Kuwait.
But what about the soldier with no girlfriend, no wife, no sweetheart to return to? The loner. Returning to nothing, surrounded by tickertape reunions, reminding me of a photograph from the Great War there was no one around to take.
Sepia weather. Shouldering his kit, making for the railway station. Heading home through force of habit. Holding his peace, coughing. The sky sagging over damp shires. The names of stations. Dead men’s faces. Rain falling on smoke-stained towns. From now on this is what life will be: staring through a rain-grimed window, waiting for the journey to be over with. Houses and brooks passing by. Fields of wet nettles.
* * *
From the car, glancing back, the sculptures clinging to the sides of the two pylons give them the look of war-ravaged trees: blasted white trunks from which the stumps of branches protrude.
‘The charred skeletons of the trees’
Barbusse’s terse entry in his War Diary is echoed, repeated or e
xpanded upon in almost every account of the war. Harold Macmillan thought ‘the most extraordinary thing about the modern battlefield is the desolation and emptiness of it all. Nothing is to be seen of war or soldiers – only the split and shattered trees.’ Writing to Ezra Pound in June 1917, Wyndham Lewis noted that ‘shells never seem to do more than shave the trees down to these ultimate black stakes . . .’
Trees were not the only things to display the resilience of the vertical. There were remains of buildings like ‘the famous Cloth Hall looking stark and naked with one wall standing’ in the centre of Ypres. Or there were the ubiquitous calvaries (‘One ever hangs where shelled roads part’), the most famous of which, again in Ypres, in the cemetery, remained miraculously intact after a dud shell lodged between the cross and the figure of the suffering Christ. As often as not these roadside crucifixes were sinister and troubling reminders of mortality rather than images of redemption. Having endured a long, terrifying wait on. ‘Mount Calvary’ – the Germans can all the time be heard mining beneath them – the squad in Raymond Dorgeles’ Wooden Crosses is finally relieved. As they march quickly away, leaving other men to take their place on the powder keg, Dorgeles looks back: ‘The Calvary stood out terrible, a dreadful thing against the green night, with its battered stumps of trees like the uprights of a cross.’ A history of the Gloucesters recalls that
‘Totenlandschaft’
The cemetery at Richebourg was an eerie spot; it had been completely churned up by shell-fire: tombs torn open to reveal skeletons that had lain there for years. The crucifix, as was so often the case, remained standing.
With its shattered trees and ‘eerie’ calvaries this war-ravaged landscape felt, in Sassoon’s words, ‘like the edge of the world’. On wet days ‘the trees a mile away were like ash-grey smoke rising from the naked ridges, and it felt very much as if we were at the end of the world’.
Fussell uses passages like these to show how English writers viewed the war through a filter of ‘ritual and romance’ – specifically, in Sassoon’s case, William Morris’s The Well at the World’s End. Ironically, this world’s end landscape in which the English poets found themselves was the realization in hideous, distorted form of the great visions of German Romanticism.
The ruins of Ypres Cathedral, summer 1916
Freed from their immediate context, passages like these add up to an evocation of landscape that had been set down on canvas over a century earlier by Caspar David Friedrich. His Abbey Under Oak Trees of 1810 shows ravaged trees and the remains of a church rising through the mist; a funerary procession of figures bears a coffin through graves scattered haphazardly across the foreground. The German poet Karl Theodor Korner referred to this picture in 1815 as a Totenlandschaft, ‘a landscape of the dead’. Exactly a century later Robert Musil, serving as an officer in the Austrian army, used precisely the same word to describe the scene he had witnessed on the Italian front.
As the war took its toll, even archetypal Romantic remnants like the ruined walls of abbeys were frequently blasted beyond recognition. At the edge of the allied world, near Ypres, all that could be seen was ‘a sea of mud. Literally a sea.’ In 1917 Blunden looked out across ‘a dead sea of mud’ and Stephen Graham, revisiting the area in 1920, was confronted by a ‘landocean’. When the film director D. W. Griffith travelled to the Western Front as part of his preparation for the film Hearts of the World, he was disappointed by the dramatic potential of the war:
As you look out over No Man’s Land there is literally nothing that meets the eye but an aching desolation of nothingness . . . No one can describe it. You might as well try to describe the ocean.
The wife of an artist friend of Friedrich’s was similarly disappointed by the 1809 painting The Monk by the Sea: there was nothing to look at. ‘By any earlier standards,’ notes art historian Robert Rosenblum,
The Monk by the Sea, by Caspar David Friedrich
she was right: the picture is daringly empty, devoid of objects . . . devoid of everything but the lonely confrontation of a single figure, a Capuchin monk, with the hypnotic simplicity of a completely unbroken horizon line, and above it a no less primal and potentially infinite extension of gloomy, hazy sky.
With only a minimum of changes, Rosenblum’s words can serve equally well as a description of a panoramic photograph by William Rider-Rider which reproduces Friedrich’s vision in the devastated battlefield of Passchendaele.
The scene is divided evenly between land and sky. A line of blasted trees separates the shattered foreground from the land-ocean, the sea of mud, which, as in The Monk by the Sea, reaches to the horizon. Instead of receding into the distance, these trees disappear beyond the edges of the frame. There is no perspective. The vanishing-point is no longer a more or less exact point, but all around. A new kind of infinity: more of the same in every direction, an infinity of waste. The sky lies in tatters in the mud. It is impossible to tell what time of day the photo was taken. There is no direct source of light – just the grey luminosity of the sky. In the middle of the picture, instead of Friedrich’s monk, there is an unknown soldier, smoking. Nothing is moving. Hence, despite the endless desolation, the strange serenity of the photograph.
An infinity of waste
Ruins, for the Romantics, fulfilled the useful function of being enduring monuments to transience: what faded as grandeur survived as ruins. As testaments to their own survival, ruins, typically, had the story of their own ruination inscribed within them. Wordsworth established an imaginative template with the stories of silent suffering read in the ruins of ‘Michael’ or ‘The Ruined Cottage’. So pervasive was the cult of ruination that a ruin became a place where a certain set of responses lay perfectly intact.
The Great War ruined the idea of ruins. Instead of the slow patient work of ruination observed in Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’, artillery brought about instant obliteration. Things survived only by accident or chance – like the calvary at Ypres – or mistake. Destruction was the standard and the norm. Cottages and villages did not crumble and decay – they were swept away.
In France, researching his book on the Battle of the Somme in March 1917, John Masefield described the area around Serre as
skinned, gouged, flayed and slaughtered, and the villages smashed to powder, so that no man could ever say there had been a village there within the memory of man.
In Barbusse’s Under Fire the squad are making their way to the village of Souchez when the narrator realizes they are already there:
In point of fact we have not left the plain, the vast plain, seared and barren – but we are in Souchez!
The village has disappeared . . . There is not even an end of wall, fence, or porch that remains standing.
Revisiting the scenes of battle near Passchendaele in 1920, Stephen Graham finds himself – or loses himself, more accurately – in what Barbusse calls a ‘plain of lost landmarks’:
The old church of Zandwoorde cannot now be identified by any ruins – one has to ask where it was. Even the bricks and the stones seem to have been swept away.
Considering the same area of land half a century later, Leon Wolff puts the scale of destruction in its historical context: ‘In a later war, atomic bombs wrecked two Japanese cities; but Passchendaele was effaced from the earth.’
Shunning such emotive turns of phrase, Denis Winter emphasizes that the Somme presented a scene of devastation even more thorough than that observed in Belgium: ‘Aerial photos of Passchendaele in its final stages show grass and even trees. By autumn 1916, on the other hand, there was no vestige of grass on the Somme.’
Passchendaele, Albert and other villages in the Somme were rebuilt, but to some of the villages around Verdun the inhabitants never returned. Fleury, Douaumont and Cumières vanished from the map for ever.
Ruins rise from the ashes of the Great War with the Nazis and Albert Speer’s ‘Theory of Ruin Value’. Instead of being remnants of the past, Speer’s ruins are projected into a distant future – a futu
re stretching even beyond the thousand-year Reich. With Hitler’s enthusiastic approval Speer set about designing structures and using materials to ensure that, even after generations of decay, the ivy-grown columns and crumbling walls of the Reich would have the ruined splendour of the great models of antiquity.
In the occupied countries the all-obliterating destruction of the Great War could be raised by the Nazis to the level of strategic principle. The fate of the Czech village of Lidice has been described by Albert Camus. The houses were burned to the ground, the men were shot, the women and children deported. After that
special teams spent months at work levelling the terrain with dynamite, destroying the very stones, filling in the village pond and, finally, diverting the course of the river . . . To make assurance doubly sure, the cemetery was emptied of its dead who might have been a perpetual reminder that once something existed in this place.
The passion for Remembrance – for building memorials, for recording the names of the dead – can be better understood in the wake of such destruction. Solace and comfort can be found in the capacity of ruins to survive the human tragedies they result from and record. But the destruction first witnessed in the Great War was so thorough that it seemed capable of obliterating all trace of itself. Men were blown to pieces or disappeared into mud, villages were lost without trace. All that would remain, it seemed, would be ‘a sponge, an infernal swamp for souls in pain’.
Soldiers returned from this zone of obliteration to an England virtually untouched by war. The Second World War left London and other major cities cratered and ravaged by the Blitz. After the Great War the architecture and landscape of England were unchanged except, here and there, for relatively slight damage from air raids. Apart from the injured, there was no sign of a war having taken place. Written in October 1918, Cynthia Asquith’s words were prescient: