The Missing of the Somme

Geoff Dyer

THE MISSING OF THE SOMME

Geoff Dyer is the author of four novels, a critical study of John Berger, and five other books, including But Beautiful, which was awarded the Somerset Maugham Prize, and Out of Sheer Rage, which was a National Book Critics Circle finalist. He lives in London.

www.geoffdyer.com

ALSO BY GEOFF DYER

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

The Ongoing Moment

Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It

Paris Trance

Out of Sheer Rage

The Search

But Beautiful

The Colour of Memory

Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger

A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL, AUGUST 2011

Copyright © 1994 by Geoff Dyer

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton, London, in 1994, and subsequently published in paperback by Phoenix, an imprint of Orion Books Ltd, London, in 2009.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

Ebook ISBN 9780307743237

Cover design: Carson Dyle

Author photograph © Matt Stuart

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1_r2

For my mother and father

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

The Missing of the Somme

Notes

Select Bibliography

‘Remember: the past won’t fit

into memory without something left over;

it must have a future.’

Joseph Brodsky

‘A kaleidoscope of hypothetical contingencies …’

T. H. Thomas, reviewing Basil Liddell Hart’s

The Real War in 1931

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1 The anticipation of memory

Silhouette: seeking a comrade’s grave, Pilckem, 22 August 1917

(Imperial War Museum)

1.2 ‘One thinks JOY the moment no other monument is needed’ — Lutyens

Temporary graves marked on the battlefield, Pozières, 16 September 1917 (Imperial War Museum)

1.3 The surrogate dead

Soldiers marching past the temporary Cenotaph, 11 November 1919 (Mail Newspapers plc)

1.4 The construction of memory

Memorial stones (Hulton Deutsch)

1.5 What has he seen?

Battle-fatigued soldier (Imperial War Museum)

1.6 ‘And the poor horses …’ — Constantine

The 58th (London) Division Memorial at Chipilly (Mary Middlebrook)

1.7 The weight of the past

Royal Artillery Monument: the shell-carrier (Jeremy Young)

1.8 Dead weight

Royal Artillery Monument: recumbent figure (Jeremy Young)

1.9 Charles Sargeant Jagger: memorial at Paddington station

(Jeremy Young)

1.10 They are all over the country these Tommies …

The Holborn Memorial (Jeremy Young)

1.11 Elland Memorial

(Jeremy Young)

1.12 The self-contained ideal of remembrance

The Streatham Memorial (Jeremy Young)

1.13 Time

The Southwark Memorial (Imperial War Museum)

1.14 Mourning for all mankind?

The Canadian Memorial near St Julien (Mark Hayhurst)

1.15 The only sound …

Gassed by John Singer Sargent (Imperial War Museum)

1.16 The Canadian Memorial on Vimy Ridge

(Mark Hayhurst)

1.17 Grief…

Canadian Memorial on Vimy Ridge (Mark Hayhurst)

1.18 ‘Totenlandschaft’

Scene of devastation, Château Wood, Ypres, 29 October 1917

(Imperial War Museum)

1.19 The ruins of Ypres Cathedral, summer 1916

(Imperial War Museum)

1.20 The Monk by the Sea, by Caspar David Friedrich

(Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)

1.21 An Infinity of Waste

Passchendaele, November 1917

(Imperial War Museum)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my friends Paul Bonaventura, Chris Mitchell and Mark Hayhurst for reading an early draft of the manuscript and making many useful suggestions. (I am especially indebted to Mark whose quick reactions prevented us from getting killed — thanks to Paul’s reckless driving — in Flanders.)

I am grateful to the editors of Esquire, the Independent, the Observer and New Statesman & Society for giving me space to try out draft versions of some of these pages; also to Patrick Early for the opportunity to lecture (in Belgrade of all places) on Wilfred Owen — and to David Punter for his helpful response to that lecture.

Thanks also to Ian Watson in Paris for encouragment and provocative suggestions, to Jeremy Young for his photographs, to Jane Pugh for the loan of an album of pictures, and to Xandra Hardie, Charles Drazin and Alexandra Pringle.

An award from the Kay Blundell Trust enabled me to complete the manuscript.

My ongoing debt to John Berger is too extensive to be adequately acknowledged here.

NOTE

Some quotations are not attributed in the text; full sources for all citations can be found in the notes. Throughout, Remembrance with an upper case ‘R’ refers to ‘official’ procedures such as the annual service at the Cenotaph; remembrance with a lower case ‘r’ to the more general and varied ways by which the war is remembered.

When I was a boy my grandfather took me to the Museum of Natural History. We saw animals, reptiles and sharks but, today, what I remember most clearly are the long uneven lines of butterflies framed in glass cases. On small cards the names of every specimen on display had been scrupulously recorded.

Row after row, bright and neat as medal ribbons.

‘On every mantelpiece stand photographs wreathed with ivy, smiling, true to the past…’

Dusty, bulging, old: they are all the same, these albums. The same faces, the same photos. Every family was touched by the war and every family has an album like this. Even as we prepare to open it, the act of looking at the album is overlaid by the emotions it will engender. We look at the pictures as if reading a poem about the experience of seeing them.

I turn the dark, heavy pages. The dust smell of old photographs.

The dead queuing up to enlist. Marching through the dark town, disappearing beyond the edge of the frame. Some turn up later, in the photos from hospital: marching away and convalescing, nothing in between. Always close to hand, the countryside seems empty in these later pictures, a register of absence. Dry stone walls and rivers. Portraits and group portraits. Officers and other ranks. The loved and the unloved, indistinguishable from each other.

‘Memory has a spottiness,’ writes Updike, ‘as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.’ Each of these photos is marred, spotted, blotched; their imperfections make them seem like photos of memories. In some there is an encroaching white light, creeping over the image, wiping it out. Others are fading: photos of forgetting. Eventually nothing will remain but blank spaces.

A nurse in round glasses and long uniform (‘Myself’ printed beneath in my grandmother’s perfect hand). A group of men in hospital. Two with patches over their eyes, three with arms in slings. One

in his ghastly suit of grey,

Legless, sewn short at the elbow.

A stern-faced sister stands at the end of the back row, each name diligently inked beneath the picture. My mother’s father is the second on the left, in the back row.

Born (illegitimate) in Worthen in Shropshire, eighteen miles from Oswestry where Wilfred Owen was born. Farm labourer. Able only to read and write his name. Enlisted in 1914. Served on the Somme as a driver (of horses), where, according to family legend, he once went up to the front-line trenches in place of a friend whose courage had suddenly deserted him. Later, back in the reserve trench, he shovelled the remains of his best friend into a sandbag. (Every family has the same album, every family has a version of the same legend.) Returned to Shropshire in 1919 and resumed the life he had left.

Worked, went to war, married, worked.

He died aged ninety-one, able still only to write his name.

Everything I have said about my grandfather is true. Except he is not the man second from the left in the photograph. I do not know who that is. It makes no difference. He could be anyone’s grandfather.

Like many young men, my grandfather was under age when he turned up to enlist. The recruiting sergeant told him to come back in a couple of days when he was two years older. My grandfather duly returned, added a couple of years to his age and was accepted into the army.

Similar episodes are fairly common in the repertoire of recruitment anecdotes, but I never doubted the veracity of this particular version of it, which my mother told several times over the years. It came as a surprise, then, to discover from his death certificate that my grandfather was born in November 1893 (the same year as Owen), and so was twenty when war broke out. One of the commonly circulating stories of the 1914 generation had been so thoroughly absorbed by my family that it had become part of my grandfather’s biography.

He is everyone’s grandfather.

*

Seven-thirty a.m. Mist lies over the fields of the Somme. Trees are smudged shapes. Nothing moves. Power lines sag and vanish over absent hedges. Birds call invisibly. Only the road can be sure of where it is going.

I stop for breakfast — an apple, a banana, yoghurt slurped from the carton — and consult the map I bought yesterday. A friend who was driving from Paris to catch a dawn ferry at Calais had given me a lift to Amiens. From there I hitched in the direction of Albert because, from my newly acquired map, it was the nearest station to the villages whose names I vaguely recognize: Beaumont-Hamel, Mametz, Pozières … I want to visit the cemeteries on the Somme but have no clear idea of what they are like or which ones are particularly worth visiting. On my map, near Thiepval, is printed in heavy type: ‘Memorial Brit.’ When I began hitching this morning, I did not know what I would find or where I would go — I still don’t, except that at some point in the day I will visit Thiepval. For now I cram everything back in my rucksack and continue walking.

Within an hour, exactly as forecast, the mist starts to thin. Level slopes of fields appear. The dusty blaze of rape. Dipping flatness. I walk towards a large cemetery, the most distant rows of headstones barely visible.

The cemetery is separated from the surrounding field by a low wall, dissolved in places by the linger of mist. Close to this wall a large cross appears as a mossy blur, like the trunk of a tree. The noise of the gate being unlatched sends birds flocking from branches and back. The gravel is loud beneath my feet. Near the gate, on a large stone — pale, horizontal, altar-like — is written:

THEIR NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE

Between this stone and the cross are rows of white headstones, bordered by perfect grass. Flowers: purple, dull red, flame-yellow.

Most of the headstones give simply the regiment, name, rank and, where it is known, the date of the soldier’s death, sometimes his age. Occasionally quotations have been added, but the elaborate biblical sentiments are superfluous; they neither add to nor detract from the uniform pathos of the headstones, some of which do not even bear a name:

A SOLDIER

OF THE GREAT WAR

KNOWN UNTO GOD

The cross has a bronze sword running down the centre, pointing to the ground. Gradually the mist thins enough for the cross to cast a promise of shadow, a darker haze, so faint it is barely there. Pale sunlight.

The high left-hand wall of the cemetery is a memorial to the New Zealand dead with no known graves ‘who fell in the Battles of the Somme September and October 1916’. Inscribed along its length are 1,205 names.

Near the gate is a visitors’ book and register of graves. The name of the cemetery is Caterpillar Valley. There are 5,539 men buried here.

‘We will remember them’

The Great War ruptured the historical continuum, destroying the legacy of the past. Wyndham Lewis sounds the characteristic note when he calls it ‘the turning-point in the history of the earth’, but there is a sense in which, for the British at least, the war helped to preserve the past even as it destroyed it. Life in the decade and a half preceding 1914 has come to be viewed inevitably and unavoidably through the optic of the war that followed it. The past as past was preserved by the war that shattered it. By ushering in a future characterized by instability and uncertainty, it embalmed for ever a past characterized by stability and certainty.

Things were, of course, less settled than the habitual view of pre-August 1914 tempts us to believe. For many contemporary observers the war tainted the past, revealing and making explicit a violence that had been latent in the preceding peace. Eighty years on, this sense of crouched and gathering violence has been all but totally filtered out of our perception of the pre-war period. Militant suffragettes, class unrest, strikes, Ireland teetering on the brink of civil war — all are shaded and softened by the long, elegiac shadows cast by the war.

European civilization may have been ‘breaking down even before war destroyed it’, but our abiding sense of the quietness of the Edwardian frame of mind is, overwhelmingly, derived from and enhanced by the holocaust that followed it. The glorious summer of 1914 seems, even, to have been generated by the cataclysm that succeeded it.

In a persuasive passage, Johan Huizinga admonished the historian to

maintain towards his subject an indeterminist point of view. He must constantly put himself at a point in the past at which the known factors still seem to permit different outcomes.

But history does not lie uniformly