The Missing of the Somme

by Geoff Dyer

  I am beginning to rub my eyes at the prospect of peace. I think it will require more courage than anything that has gone before . . . one will at last fully recognize that the dead are not only dead for the duration of the war.

  It was as if a terrible plague had swept invisibly through the male population of the country – except there were no bodies, no signs of burial, no cemeteries even. Ten per cent of the males under forty-five had simply disappeared.

  Life went on. ‘We didn’t really miss the men who didn’t come back,’ a native of Akenfield remarks. ‘The village stayed the same.’ An accurate analysis, it turns out, of the demographic consequences of the war; in the 1921 national census the age distribution curve compared with 1901 and 1966 ‘reveals hardly the slightest difference’. In the cold light of population statistics, in other words, the losses of the terrible battles were soon made good.

  The problem, then, was to find a way of making manifest the memory of those who were missing – who did not figure in statistics like these. How to make visible this invisible loss? How to do the work of ruins? How to inscribe the story of what had happened on a death-haunted landscape which was, apparently, unmarked by the greatest tragedy to have affected the nation? Again we come back to Owen’s ‘Anthem’, which, by cataloguing the ways in which the dead will not be remembered – ‘no prayers nor bells’ – etches their memory in the dusk of the shires.

  In a fragment omitted from the published version of Minima Moralia Adorno observed that ‘what the Nazis did to the Jews was unspeakable: language had no word for it’. And yet, ‘a term needed to be found if the victims . . . were to be spared the curse of having no thoughts turned unto them. So in English the concept of genocide was coined.’ As a result, Adorno continues, ‘the unspeakable was made, for the sake of protest, commensurable’.

  What happened in the Great War remained incommensurable. ‘Horror’ and ‘slaughter’ have become popular terms of shorthand response; at a higher level of emotional and verbal refinement there is Owen’s ‘pity’. Successive waves of rhetorical elaboration could never contain the experience in which they originated – this, paradoxically, is what gives the poetry its appeal: the cry of the poems is unanswerable. This is what was heard in the two minutes’ silence of Armistice Day and is heard still in the perpetual silence of the cemeteries. Remembrance is the means by which the incommensurability of the Great War is acknowledged and expressed.

  Parts of the Western Front, like the area of the Somme, had been so completely devastated that the French government contemplated making them into national forests. Soon after the armistice, however, peasants began drifting back to their old farms where they were granted three years’ rent-free tenancy. Battlefields were levelled and cleared of war debris and dead; houses were rebuilt. Stephen Graham’s The Challenge of the Dead offers an eyewitness account of the early stages of the Western Front’s transition from war to peace. Again and again in the course of his travels he comes across parties of soldiers exhuming bodies from the earth. Amidst this harvest of death the first signs of returning life serve only to transform a featureless quagmire to a blighted wilderness, a landscape at once pre- and post-historic:

  . . . trees not quite dead but sprouting green from black trunks and then to blasted trees dead to the core. After a mile or so farmhouses and cultivation cease and one enters the terrible battle area of Passchendaele, all pits, all tangled with corroded wire – but now as if it were in tumultuous conflict with Nature . . . The stagnancy has not dried up, but festers still in black rot below the rushes. Double shell-holes, treble shell-holes, charred ground, great pits, bashed-in dug-outs, all overgrown with the highest of wild flowers . . .

  In 1917 Masefield wrote letter after letter to his wife, cataloguing the devastation he was witnessing in the area of the Somme. Even while surrounded by destruction on an unimaginable scale, he predicted that ‘when the trenches are filled in, when the plough has gone over them, the ground will not long keep the look of war’. By the late twenties he was being proved right. When R. H. Mottram went back twenty years after the end of the war, he found ‘all semblance gone, irretrievably gone’. If at first the fear had been that the area was beyond renovation, now veterans became worried that insufficient traces would remain of what had taken place. In 1930 Vera Brittain wrote:

  Nature herself conspires with time to cheat our recollections; grass has grown over the shell-holes at Ypres, and the cultivated meadows of industrious peasants have replaced the hut-scarred fields of Etaples and Camiers where once I nursed the wounded in their great retreat of 1918.

  Carl Sandburg’s poem ‘Grass’ transforms this vast capacity for rejuvenation from a source of anxiety to one of comfort.

  And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.

  Shovel them under and let me work.

  Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:

  What place is this?

  Where are we now?

  I am the grass.

  Let me work.

  Fields stretch away yellow and green under a perfect sky. I walk along a footpath to a small cemetery on the top of a low hill. At the edge of the path is a small pile of shells. Dense with rust, they look like relics of the Bronze or Iron Age, from a time before there were cities or books.

  Even the grass cannot work hard enough to keep these traces of the past buried for good. ‘A farmer on the Western Front cannot prune a tree without ruining his saw,’ claims a character in Ondaatje’s The English Patient, ‘because of the amount of shrapnel shot into it during the [Great] War.’ Each year’s ploughing brings new bodies to the surface. Each year, writes David Constantine,

  the ground breaks out in an eczema of iron,

  Lead and the bones of men and the poor horses . . .

  The Missing of the Somme

  Three p.m. The sun is blazing. The last mist melted hours ago. Trees gather the sky’s blueness around themselves. The fields on either side of the road are blurred red by poppies. I take off my shirt and soon my rucksack is clammy with sweat. By this time on 1 July 1916, under a sky as clear and hot as this, 20,000 British soldiers had been killed; another 40,000 were wounded or missing.

  As I make my way towards it, the memorial at Thiepval seems almost ugly, its hulking immensity dominating the landscape for miles around.

  At the car park on the edge of the site a sign states that this memorial stands on sacred ground. Visitors are asked not to bring dogs here, not to picnic, to try to preserve the beauty and tranquillity of the place.

  There is no one else here. A wind moves through the jade-green trees. Green and black seem shades of each other. The grass is clipped razor-short, blazing bright green as though its colour is intensified by being so confined: potential inches of colour crammed into a centimetre. I can imagine nowhere more beautiful.

  On 28 April 1917, Masefield wrote a letter describing the scene he witnessed here:

  Corpses, rats, old tins, old weapons, rifles, bombs, legs, boots, skulls, cartridges, bits of wood & tin & iron & stone, parts of rotting bodies & festering heads lie scattered about. A more filthy evil hole you cannot imagine.

  At the edge of the grass there is a long curving stone seat, where I sit and watch the British and French flags breezing perfectly from the summit of the huge monument. For once even the Union Jack does not look ugly.

  The sun burns on the letters high up on the memorial: THE MISSING OF THE SOMME.

  By contrast to the missing it commemorates, the Thiepval Memorial is palpably here, unmissable.18 Designed by Lutyens in High Empire style (if there is such a thing), there is no humility about it, no backing down, no regret.

  Permanent, built to last, the monument has none of the vulnerability of the human body, none of its terrible propensity for harm. Its predominant relation is to the earth – not, as is the case with a cathedral, to the sky. A cathedral reaches up, defies gravity effortlessly, its effect is entirely vertiginous. And unlike a cathedral which is so graceful (fu
ll of grace) that, after a point, it disappears, becomes ethereal, the Thiepval Memorial, after a point, simply refuses to go any higher. It is stubborn, stoical. Like the deadlocked armies of the war, it stands its ground.

  The contrast with a cathedral is telling in another, broader sense. In keeping with Lutyens’ general preference, the Memorial is stripped of Christian symbolism; there was, he felt, no need for it. For many men who survived, the Battle of the Somme (which, in memory, represents the core experience and expression of the Great War) put an end to the consoling power of religion. ‘From that moment,’ a soldier has said of the first day’s fighting, ‘all my religion died. All my teaching and beliefs in God had left me, never to return.’ In some ways, then, the Thiepval Memorial is a memorial if not to the death, then certainly to the superfluousness of God. Commemorated here is the faith of the ‘empty heaven’ evoked in a moving passage by Manning:

  These apparently rude and brutal natures comforted, encouraged, and reconciled each other to fate, with a tenderness and tact which was more moving than anything in life. They had nothing; not even their own bodies which had become mere implements of warfare. They turned from the wreckage and misery of life to an empty heaven, and from an empty heaven to the silence of their own hearts. They had been brought to the last extremity of hope, and yet they put their hands on each other’s shoulders and said with a passionate conviction that it would be all right, though they had faith in nothing, but in themselves and in each other.

  I cross the grass and walk up the shadow-mounted steps of the Memorial itself. A few wreaths have been left by the Great War Stone, their red petals glowing brightly against the pale stone. From here I can see that the monument is built on sixteen huge legs which come together in interlocking arches; also that it is made of brick. Concrete can be poured in a mass but bricks have to be placed individually just as, on each of the four sides of the sixteen legs, the names of the missing had to be carved on bands of white stone facing. (The design of the sixteen legs presumably originated in the need to create enough surface area to accommodate all the names in such a way – no more than five or six feet above head height – that they are easily readable.) Most names are here, arranged by regiments. Game W 27446, Game W 27448. There are several Dyers. High up, two plaques – French on one side, English on the other – explain that the names are recorded here of 73,077 men who lost their lives in the Battle of the Somme and to whom the fortunes of war denied the honour of proper burial.

  I remember John Berger in a lecture suggesting that ours has been the century of departure, of migration, of exodus – of disappearance. ‘The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.’ If this is so, then the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing casts a shadow into the future, a shadow which extends beyond the dead of the Holocaust, to the Gulag, to the ‘disappeared’ of South America and of Tiananmen.

  There had been military disasters before the Battle of the Somme, but these – the Charge of the Light Brigade, for example – served only as indictments of individual strategy, not of the larger purpose of which they were a part. For the first time in history the Great War resulted in a sense of the utter waste and futility of war. If the twentieth century has drifted slowly towards an acute sense of waste as a moral and political issue, then the origins of the ecology of compassion (represented by the peace movement, most obviously) are to be found in the once-devastated landscape of the Somme.

  That is why so much of the meaning of our century is concentrated here. Thiepval is not simply a site of commemoration but of prophecy, of birth as well as of death: a memorial to the future, to what the century had in store for those who were left, whom age would weary.

  At the far side of the memorial there is a small cemetery. On the Cross of Sacrifice at the edge of the cemetery I read:

  THAT THE WORLD MAY REMEMBER THE COMMON SACRIFICE

  OF TWO AND A HALF MILLION DEAD HERE

  HAVE BEEN LAID SIDE BY SIDE SOLDIERS OF FRANCE

  AND OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE IN ETERNAL COMRADESHIP.

  The cemetery is divided in two halves: French crosses on one side, English headstones on the other. A place where time and silence have stood their ground. In the distance, wheat fields and low hedges, trees. I walk along rows of crosses on each of which is written the single word: inconnu. Row after row. On the English side there are the pale headstones:

  A SOLDIER

  OF THE GREAT WAR

  KNOWN UNTO GOD

  In front of each grave there are flowers: flame-bursts of yellow, pink, red, orange. Apart from roses I recognize none of the flowers; the rest remain unknown, unnamed.

  The only sound is of humming bees, of light passing through trees, striking the grass. Gradually I become aware that the air is alive with butterflies. The flowers are thick with the white blur of wings, the rust and black camouflage of Red Admirals, silent as ghosts. I remember the names of only a few butterflies but I know that the Greek word psyche means both ‘soul’ and ‘butterfly’. And as I sit and watch, I know also that what I am seeing are the souls of the nameless dead who lie here, fluttering through the perfect air.

  It is early evening by the time I make my way to Beaumont-Hamel. I walk along a footpath to a small cemetery on the top of a low hill. From the cemetery gate I can see the crosses of four other small cemeteries.

  The headstones are arranged in three lines, facing east. It is a perfect spot, without even the drone of cars to disturb it. The light is softening, stretching out over the fields. Soft and sharp, gentle and bright. I take out the register of graves. Cemetery Redan Ridge Number One: 154 soldiers lie here, 73 unidentified. As I look through the book, the sun makes the pages glow the same colour as the Great War Stone.

  Few people come here: the first entry in the visitors’ book was made in 1986, the last ten days ago. On 18 August 1988 a girl from the Netherlands had written: ‘It is because of the lonelyness.’

  Light, field, the crosses of the other cemeteries. The faint breeze makes the pages stir beneath my fingers. It is the opposite of lonely, this cemetery: friends are buried here together – so what truth do these strange words express? The harder I try to decipher them, the more puzzling they become until, recognizing how ingrained is my mistake, trying to break a code that is not even there, I let them stand for themselves, their mystery and power undisturbed, these words that explain everything and nothing.

  Scarves of purple cloud are beginning to stretch out over the horizon, light welling up behind them. The sun is going down on one of the most beautiful places on earth.

  I have never felt so peaceful. I would be happy never to leave.

  So strong are these feelings that I wonder if there is not some compensatory quality in nature, some equilibrium – of which the poppy is a manifestation and symbol – which means that where terrible violence has taken place the earth will sometimes generate an equal and opposite sense of peace. In this place where men were slaughtered they came also to love each other, to realize Camus’s great truth: that ‘there are more things to admire in men than to despise’.

  Standing here, I know that some part of me will always be calmed by the memory of this place, by the vast capacity for forgiveness revealed by these cemeteries, by this landscape.

  At this moment I am the only person on earth experiencing these sensations, in this place. At the same time, overwhelming and compounding this feeling, is the certainty that my presence here changes nothing; everything would be exactly the same without me.

  Perhaps that is what is meant by ‘lonelyness’ – knowing that even at your moments of most exalted emotion, you do not matter (perhaps this is precisely the moment of most exalted emotion) because these things will always be here: the dark trees full of summer leaf, the fading light that has not changed in seventy-five years, the peace that lies perpetually in wait.

  The sky is streaked crimson by the time I leave the cemetery of Redan Ridge Number One. I make my way back toward
s the road through dark fields. Tomorrow, a year from now, it will be exactly the same: birds lunging and darting towards the horizon; three crosses silhouetted against the blood-red sky; a man walking along the curving road; lights coming on in distant farmhouses – and each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

  NOTES

  Place of publication is London unless otherwise indicated. Full sources are given in the Notes only when the source is not obvious from the text or the Bibliography. Multi-part quotes may extend across more than one page, but the Notes reference is for the first part only.

  p. 3 ‘On every mantelpiece . . .’: Yvan Goll, ‘Requiem for the Dead of Europe’, in Jon Silkin (ed.), The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, p. 244.

  p. 3 ‘Memory has a . . .’: John Updike, Memories of the Ford Administration (Hamish Hamilton, 1993) p. 9.

  p. 4 ‘in his ghastly . . .’: Wilfred Owen, ‘Disabled’, Collected Poems, p. 67.

  p. 7 ‘the turning-point in . . .’: Men without Art, extract reprinted in Julian Symons (ed.), The Essential Wyndham Lewis, p. 211.

  p. 8 For an extended discussion of pre-1914 as a period of latent war see Daniel Pick, War Machine (1993), pp. 192–5.

  p. 8 ‘breaking down even . . .’: A. J. P. Taylor, Europe: Grandeur and Decline (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1991), p. 185.

  p. 8 ‘maintain towards his . . .’: ‘The Idea of History’, in Fritz Stern (ed.), The Varieties of History, 2nd edn (Macmillan, 1970), p. 292.

  p. 11 ‘prepared his exit . . .’ and ‘We are setting . . .’: Scott and Amundsen: The Race to the South Pole, revised edn (Pan, 1983), p. 508.

  p. 11 ‘has shown that . . .’: ibid., p. 523.

  p. 11 ‘We are showing . . .’: ibid., p. 508.

  p. 11 ‘Of their suffering . . .’: Thomas Williamson, quoted by Huntford, ibid., pp. 520–21.