The Missing of the Somme (12 page)

No eyewitness account is more evocative than this, precisely because Findley acknowledges that the most vivid feature of the Great War is that
it took place in the past.

It therefore takes an effort of considerable historical will to remember that before the war Thiepval, Auchonvillers and Beaumont-Hamel were just places like any others, that the Somme was a
pleasant river in the
département
of the same name. But in 1910, in Faulks’
Birdsong
, when Stephen Wraysford arrives at Amiens, that is all it is, a place –
where he falls for the wife of the local factory-owner with whom he is lodging. They are consumed by passion, but brooding over the doomed love affair is the greater doom that will soon consume the
earth beneath their feet.

In the course of their outings they see ‘a small train waiting to take the branch line into Albert and Bapaume’. A second train takes them ‘from Albert out along the small
country line beside the Ancre, past the villages of Mesnil and Hamel to the station at Beaumont’. Another pushes its way south ‘where the Marne joined the river Meuse, whose course
linked Sedan to Verdun’: a network of innocent connections that will soon define the geography of the Western Front. In Amiens Cathedral Stephen has a vision of the ‘terrible piling up
of the dead’ of centuries, which is also a premonition of what is to come. On
oppressive, sultry afternoons husband, wife and lover go punting in the stagnant backwaters
of the Somme. Thiepval is a spot to take afternoon tea. The future presses on the lovers like the dead weight of geological strata. The Great War took place in the past – even when it lay in
the future.

To us it
always
took place in the past.

The issue of mediation has been compounded by Paul Fussell, who I am reading again as preparation for our trip to Flanders. If it was impossible to write about the war except
through Owen’s and Sassoon’s eyes, it is now difficult to read about it except through the filter of Fussell’s ground-breaking investigation and collation of its dominant themes.
Whenever we read the war poets, we effectively borrow Fussell’s copies to do so and – even when we dissent from his judgements – cannot ignore his annotations and underlinings.
Fussell has himself become a part of the process whereby the memory of the war becomes lodged in the present. His commentary has become a part of the testimony it comments on. (Reading him –
or anyone else for that matter – I am searching for
what is not there
, for what is missing, for what remains to be said.) If Hill’s
Strange Meeting
is an example of
primary mediation, then
The Great War and Modern Memory
raises the possibility of secondary or critical mediation.

Even the ceremonies of Remembrance are subject to mediation. Now that the two world wars are commemorated with a service at the Cenotaph on the Sunday closest to the eleventh of November, it is
– as the term Remembrance Day suggests – the act of remembering together that is being remembered. Contemporary works like
A Twentieth-Century
Memorial
by Michael Sandle (born in 1936) – a skeletal Mickey Mouse manning, or
mousing
, a bronze machine-gun – are memorials to the near extinction of
the war memorial as a viable form of public sculpture.

And this book? Like the youthful Christopher Isherwood who wanted to write a novel entitled ‘A War Memorial’, I wanted to write a book that was not about ‘the
War itself but the effect of the idea of [the War] on my generation’. Not a novel but an essay in mediation: research notes for a Great War novel I had no intention of writing, the themes of
a novel without its substance . . .

I see Ypres and the surrounding area through the words of Stephen Graham and Henry Williamson . . . We arrive there in the afternoon darkness and book into an expensive cheap
hotel. There are
FIRE EXIT
signs on every door, brown covers on the beds. Towels the size of napkins, burn marks on the dresser. Our room is the sort which demands that even
nonsmokers spend the first conscious minutes of the day propped up in bed, exhaling smoke at the hangover ceiling.

In the evening we walk to the
Grote Markt
, the vast square in the centre of town. After Ypres was flattened during the war, many buildings – like the fourteenth-century Cloth Hall
that dominates the
Markt
– were rebuilt just as they had been. Williamson returned here in 1927 to find Ypres unrecognizably ‘clean and new and hybrid-English’. Sixty
years of ageing have given it the look of a pleasant if slightly gloomy somethingth-century town, scrupulously preserved.

After a couple of beers we make our way to the Menin
Gate, the memorial to the Missing of the Ypres salient. The names of 54,896 men who died between 1914 and 15 August 1917
are carved here. Designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield, it is a version of a triumphal arch, so extended as to seem almost like a tunnel. Steps in the middle of this tunnel take us up to the outside
of the memorial. From here we can see the leafy water of the canal beyond the Gate. Damp air. Stillness waiting on itself.

We walk back down inside the memorial and then beyond it, across the canal. From this distance the buildings stretching away from the Gate seem to crouch beneath it. And yet, at the same time,
it belies its own scale and you wonder if it is really as big as it seems. Everything about the memorial suggests that it should work powerfully on you, but its effect is oddly
self-cauterizing.

By 1927 when Sassoon scrawled these words – metaphorically speaking – on the recently inaugurated Menin Gate, his tone of maimed derision had become a matter of reflex. If
‘this pomp’ of ‘peace-complacent stone’ is a misrepresentation and denial, then so, equally, is Sassoon’s response to it. Refusing to accommodate the possibility of
atonement for ‘the unheroic Dead’ on whose behalf he is lobbying, Sassoon yet conveys – and thereby yields to – the memorial’s own version of itself when he writes of
the ‘intolerably nameless names’.

In his novel
Fields of Glory
Jean Rouaud describes life in
the kind of ‘sullen swamp’ that, for Sassoon, is the enduring truth of the Ypres
battlefield:

Rouaud here affirms the underlying longing that links those ‘who struggled in the slime’ and the memorial arch on which they are commemorated. Lord Plumer was not
bandying empty rhetoric when, at the inauguration of the Gate, he declared on behalf of the bereaved: ‘He is not missing; he is here.’

Memorials to the Missing are not about people, they are about names: the nameless names.

It is almost eight o’clock. A few people have congregated beneath the arches. The clocks begin to chime damply. Traffic comes to a halt. Two buglers take up position beneath the Gate and
play The Last Post.

The two minutes’ silence on the second anniversary of the armistice was broken by The Last Post, ‘acute, shattering, the very voice of pain itself – but pain triumphant,’
according to
The Times
. In
Death of a Hero
the burial of George Winterbourne is concluded by the same ‘soul-shattering, heart-rending . . . inexorable
chains of rapid sobbing notes and drawn-out piercing wails’ that are heard here at the same time every day of the year.

A boy cycles past. One of the buglers gestures quietly for him to stop. The sound of the bugles ricochets from the walls of the memorial. Echoes chase themselves between the arches. The last
notes fade away, beckoning into silence. Afterwards silence lies on the dark canal, a silence in which every note is preserved intact.

Traffic resumes. We drift away, eat dinner, drink some more. It is very cold. Perhaps it is just the weather, perhaps it would be different in the summer – though one feels this is the
season when the town comes into its own – but Ypres seems, in Stephen Graham’s phrase, ‘a terrible place still’. Graham was writing about the Ypres of 1920, when
‘death and the ruins completely out-weigh[ed] the living’. The ruins have been replaced by replicas of the original buildings, there is nothing wrong with the town – though it is
not the kind of place you would come for a honeymoon – but you can see what Graham meant when he wrote that

Especially in our dismal hotel room. We lie on our beds, half pissed. Mark is reading
Death’s Men
; Paul,
They Called It Passchendaele
; I read
The Challenge of the
Dead
. Eventually the
other two drop off to sleep. I go on reading. I ‘lie listless, sleepless, with Ypres on the heart, and then suddenly a grand tumult of
explosion, a sound as of the tumbling of heavy masonry’.

Paul snoring.

We drive along the flat roads of Flanders through the dregs of autumn. Every crossroads is smeared with tractor mud. It has stopped raining and started to drizzle.
‘Intermittent’ is the nearest we get to turning off the wipers – the Ypres, as we prefer to call them. The landscape is a sponge, soaking up rain. Turnips or beets – root
vegetables of some kind, in any case – are piled up at entrances to fields.

Because the car is rented, we drive at top speed through every puddle and slick of mud, rally-cross style. Soon it is plastered with muck. From now on we refer to it as the tank:
‘Let’s park the tank’, ‘The tank needs petrol . . .’ Mainly, because it is so cold, we say, ‘Let’s get back in the tank.’

Near St Julien we come to Frederick Chapman Clemesha’s Canadian Memorial: the bust of a soldier mounted on and merging into a pillar of square stones. Head tipped
forward, facing not towards the enemy lines of old but back towards Ypres. Rain smoking around him, dripping from the brim of his tin helmet. Thin trees in the distance. Sky grey as the
rainstreaked stone of the monument.

We are in no hurry to leave. The memorial makes no appeal and no demands. It commands its solemn patch of land. Withstanding rain and time, we stand with it, this imperturbable monument.

Beyond that it is difficult to say what feelings the memorial evokes. Not pity, not pride, not sadness even. Henry Williamson acknowledged this uncertainty while remaining ostensibly untroubled
by it. For him it is a ‘memorial to all soldiers in the war’. Having found a way of articulating the statue’s refusal to yield to an easily identifiable response, he generalizes
still further: it ‘mourns for all mankind’ – at which point the actual statue all but
disappears in a fog of generalized emotion. It is a grand gesture and a
self-defeatingly banal one: if all mankind is to be mourned, there would be no need to single out for special lamentation this particular

In
Fields of Glory
Jean Rouaud describes a gas attack in terms that recall the rolling fog of
Bleak House
or the slinking catlike fog of Eliot’s
‘Prufrock’:

The leisurely sentence unfolds infinitely slowly, gradually revealing the harm that this apparently harmless stain on the air can do until, finding yourself running out of breath with several
clauses still to go, you are suddenly struggling for the full stop. The initial lyrical lilt of the scene is soon rent apart
by ‘the violent cough that tears the lungs
and the pleura and brings bloody froth to the lips, the acrid vomiting that doubles up the body’.

John Singer Sargent’s painting
Gassed
shows a line of ten men making their way through the mass of other gas victims sprawling on the ground on either side of
them. Their eyes are bandaged and, as in Brueghel’s
Parable of the Blind
, each man has his hand on the shoulder of the one in front. In the middle of the group a soldier turns away
to vomit. Another, near the front, raises his leg high, expecting a step. An orderly guides and steadies the two men at the head of the line. Further off, to the right of the low sun, another group
are making their way uncertainly forward.