The Missing of the Somme (11 page)

Although I always dwell on the period of enthusiastic enlistment, I move attentively but fairly quickly through the period 1914–15. It is not until the great battles of attrition that I am
content to move at the pace of the slowest narrative. From the German offensive of 1918 onwards I am once again impatient and it is not until November, the armistice and its aftermath, that the
speed of history and my reading of it are again in equilibrium.

For me, in other words, the Great War means the Western Front: France and Flanders, from the Somme to Passchendaele. Essentially, then, mine is still a schoolboy’s fascination. Uncertain
of dates and eager for battles, I pause again over a passage I had marked years before, when I
was
a schoolboy, in Leon Wolff’s
In Flanders Fields
:

All of which is of no interest except in so far as my own interests coincide with the remembered essence of the conflict. Is it not appropriate and inevitable that I should move
quickly through the period of the war’s relative mobility before getting stuck into every detail of the stalemate of 1916–17? Rather than being a quirk of temperament, perhaps this is
how the war insists on being remembered, on
remembering itself
. . .

After meeting him in Craiglockhart in August 1917, Owen began immediately and consciously to absorb the influence of Sassoon. Enclosing a draft of the poem ‘The
Dead-Beat’, Owen explained in a letter how, ‘after leaving him, I wrote something in Sassoon’s style’. Sassoon also lent Owen a copy of
Under Fire
, which he read in
December. Sassoon took a quotation from Barbusse’s novel as an epigraph for
Counter-Attack
and Owen used passages as the basis of images in his poems. ‘The Show’ and
‘Exposure’.

If Owen found it helpful to see his own experience of the war through first Sassoon’s and then Barbusse’s words, it has since become impossible to see the war except through the
words of Owen and Sassoon. Literally, since so many books take their titles from one –
Remembering We Forget, They Called it Passchendaele, Up the Line to Death
– or the other
–
Out of Battle, The Old Lie, Some Desperate Glory
– of them. Owen’s lines in particular offer a virtual index of the themes and tropes featured in these books: mud
(‘I too saw God through . . .’); gas (‘GAS! Quick, boys!’); ‘Mental Cases’;
self-inflicted wounds (‘S.I.W.’); the
‘Disabled’; homoeroticism (‘Red lips are not so red . . .’); ‘Futility’ . . .

So pervasive is his influence that a poem about the Second World War, Vernon Scannell’s ‘Walking Wounded’, seems less an evocation of an actual scene than a verse essay on
Owen. Owen’s ‘stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle’ becomes the ‘spandau’s manic jabber’ (the rhythmic similarity enhanced still further by the Owenesque near
rhyme of ‘jabber’ and ‘rattle’). The wounded, when they enter, look like they have tramped straight out of ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’:

Scannell was aware of this; as Fussell points out, he even wrote a poem about how ‘whenever war is spoken of’, it is not the one he fought in but the one
‘called Great’ that ‘invades the mind’.

The difficulty for recent novelists is that the same thing also happens when they are dealing with the Great War itself.

Recent novels about the war have the benefit of being more precisely written, more carefully structured than the actual memoirs, which tend, with the magnificent exception of
All Quiet on the Western Front
, to be carelessly written and structured. Robert Graves’
Goodbye to All That
, Richard Aldington’s
Death of a Hero
, Guy
Chapman’s
A Passionate Prodigality
, Frederic Manning’s
The Middle Parts of Fortune
(also known as
Her Privates We
) and Sassoon’s
The Complete
Memoirs of
George Sherston
all contain impressive passages, but none has the imaginative cohesion of purpose and design or the linguistic intensity and subtlety to
rival the English translation of Erich Maria Remarque’s masterpiece.
¹⁶

The problem with many recent novels about the war is that they almost inevitably bear the imprint of the material from which they are derived, can never conceal the research on which they depend
for their historical and imaginative accuracy. Their authenticity is mediated; they feel like secondary texts. In 1959 Charles Carrington complained that certain passages in Leon Wolff’s
In Flanders Fields
read like ‘a pastiche of the popular war books which everyone was reading twenty-five years ago’. Thirty-five years on, Wolff’s evocative historical
study of the Flanders campaign is likely to be a major source book for anyone wishing to fictionalize the war. We have, in other words, entered the stage of second-order pastiche: pastiche of
pastiche.

In the Afterword to the 1989 edition of
Strange Meeting
(the title is, of course, from Owen), her novel about the friendship that develops between two English officers at the front,
Susan Hill notes that as well as immersing herself in memoirs and letters, she had, in writing her book, to make ‘an imaginative leap’ and ‘live in the trenches’. Though
successful in its own terms, this leap is over-determined by the material amassed in the run-up to it. Especially in the sections of the novel which try to pass themselves off
as unmediated primary sources – the letters supposedly written by David Barton, the younger of the two central characters.

We have noticed a tendency, during the war, to look forward to a time in the future when the participants’ actions could be looked back on; here is the opposite process of historic
back-projection. Barton’s letters fail to ring true – not because he would not have expressed sentiments like this, but because, ironically, they correspond so exactly with those
established as the historical legacy of the war. Their authenticity derives from exactly the process of temporal mediation they have,
as letters
, to disclaim. In this instance it is
difficult not to recall the famous passage from
A Farewell to Arms
in which Hemingway established the template for Barton-Hill’s sentiments:

In a later letter Barton observes, parenthetically, that if British soldiers are attending to the wounded, the Germans ‘often hold their fire . . . as we do’.
Again, it is the verifiability of the observation that renders its dramatic authenticity suspect. Barton’s remark is the product, we feel, not of the contingency of his own experience but the
judiciousness of Hill’s research.

The imaginative fabric of Sebastian Faulks’ impressive war novel
Birdsong
absorbs the research so thoroughly that only a few of these leaks appear. Faulks’ own observation,
that one of his characters ‘seemed unable to say things without suggesting they were quotations from someone else’ nevertheless has ironic relevance to some passages in the book. Just
back from leave, an officer gives vent to his loathing of the civilians living comfortably back in England: ‘Those fat pigs have got no idea what lives are led for them,’ he exclaims.
‘I wish a great bombardment would smash down Piccadilly into Whitehall and kill the whole lot of them.’ An entirely authentic sentiment, but one too obviously derived from a famous
letter of Owen’s (see p. 29 above) to ring
individually
true.

Given the near impossibility of remaining beyond the reach of Sassoon and Owen, one solution is to include them in the fictive world of a novel. Pat Barker has done exactly this in two fine
novels,
Regeneration
and
The Eye in the Door
. Set in Craiglockhart, the former opens with a transcription of Sassoon’s famous declaration and dramatizes many of the crucial
moments in his relationships with Dr W. H. R. Rivers and Owen (including his detailed amendments to early versions of ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’).

Unlike Hill, Faulks and Barker, Eric Hiscock actually served in the war and saw action near Ypres in the spring of 1918. Born in 1900, he did not publish his memoir
The
Bells of Hell Go Ting-a-ling-a-ling
until 1976, six years after the first edition of
Strange Meeting
. The fact that he has no gifts as a writer makes his case more revealing. On one
occasion he notes that the

Reality recedes with each ‘as’ until the final heartfelt declaration can barely sustain the weight of its own conviction. Even moments of extreme personal danger are
rendered secure and comfortable by the familiar conventions by which they are expressed. ‘Terrified, I clawed the stinking mud as the bullet whistled round my head and shoulders and I waited
for death.’ The whole war is compressed into a single cliché.

In
The Bloody Game
(another Sassoon-derived title) Fussell mentions that some have considered Hiscock’s memoir ‘not as factually accurate as it pretends to be’.
Whether it is a true account is not the issue here. What is important is that, for Hiscock, the linguistic and thematic conventions of the genre are more powerful than the original experience;
indeed the original experience can only be revealed by the accretion
of clichés it is buried beneath. The homely crudity of Hiscock’s language makes him
more
– not less – susceptible to mediated expression. A lack of linguistic self-consciousness exacerbates the tendency to express the experience of war through the words of
others. Hiscock unwittingly acknowledges this when, as a way of adding resonance to an incident, he concludes by observing ‘if that wasn’t a theme for Siegfried Sassoon, I don’t
know what was’. In terms of the writing that results from his experiences Hiscock may as well not have participated personally in the events of his own story.

The problems built in to Hill’s naturalist novel and Hiscock’s memoir disappear in a book like Timothy Findley’s
The Wars
, which heightens the linguistic and narrative
strategies on which it depends. The problem of mediation is resolved by accentuating it. The novel’s superb setpieces – in which the protagonist Lieutenant Ross shoots an injured horse
in the hold of the troopship, becomes lost in Flanders fog, or shelters from a gas attack – seem wholly authentic because Findley avails himself of the full range of narrative gambits which
have become available in the years since the war. Hill’s characteristic register is a vaguely twenties literary English; Findley’s jagged self-enhancing fragments anticipate the
technique of Michael Ondaatje’s Second World War novel,
The English Patient
. Ross’s sensations are recorded with a linguistic resourcefulness that is nowhere achieved in the
memoirs. After a deafening barrage, to pick the tiniest of examples, Ross’s ‘ears popped and the silence poured in’.

The structure of the book incorporates and depends on the research that has gone into its writing: transcripts of interviews, letters, old photographs . . . ‘What you people
who weren’t yet born can never know,’ reads one such transcription,

Findley moves, often within the space of a couple of paragraphs, from the contingencies of a moment-by-moment present tense to the vast historical overview. Instead of an imaginative leap into
the trenches, in other words, he enters the time of photographs. Sometimes, when there is no ‘good picture available except the one you can make in your mind’, present and past,
description and speculation resolve into each other. The staple tropes of the front are reinvented: