The Missing of the Somme (13 page)

The soldiers in the foreground lie sleeping or resting, propped on one another. One drinks from a canteen. In the sky there are planes where birds should be, flying haphazardly.

Henry Tonks, another war artist who was with Sargent when he saw the gassed soldiers, recalls the scene:

In
Gassed
there is little suffering. Or rather, what suffering there is is outweighed by the painting’s compassion. In spite of the vomiting figure the scene has almost nothing in
common with Owen’s vision of the gas victim whose blood comes ‘gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs’. What Sargent has depicted, instead, is the solace of the blind: the
comfort of putting your trust in someone, of being safely led. At the same time the light itself seems enough to restore their sight, light so soft that it will soothe even their gas-ravaged eyes.
Pain is noisy, clamorous. In Sargent’s painting coughing and retching are absorbed by the tranquillity of the evening. The lyricism at the opening of Rouaud’s description is beginning
to make itself felt again as air and men convalesce, reasserting their capacity for tenderness.

The scene is already touched, in other words, by the beauty of the world as it will be revealed when their vision is restored.

The only sound, that is . . . But no, I am getting ahead of myself.

In the first months of the war football was used as an incentive to enlistment; the war, it was claimed, offered the chance
to play ‘the greatest
game of all’. By the end of 1914 an estimated 500,000 men had enlisted at football matches. By the following spring, professional football had been banned: matches, it was feared, were so
popular that (a reversal of the initial strategy) they
deterred
men from enlisting.

At the front the enthusiasm for the game continued unabated. Whether a match actually took place in No Man’s Land between German and English troops on Christmas Day 1914 is doubtful; even
if it did not, it is entirely appropriate that the day’s events should have generated the myth of a football match as the embodiment of fraternization.

The most famous footballing episode was Captain Nevill’s kicking a ball into No Man’s Land on the first day of the Somme. A prize was offered to the first man to dribble the ball
into the German trenches; Nevill himself scrambled out of the trench in pursuit of his goal and was cut down immediately. (Perhaps the Somme was not only an indictment of military strategy but also
of the British propensity for the long-ball game.) Lawrence’s admonition – that tragedy ought to be a great big kick at misery – could not have been fulfilled more literally.

Move close to Sargent’s painting, closer than its size compels. Through the legs of the gassed soldiers – and especially in the gap opened in the line by the
vomiting man – you can glimpse a game of football being played in the background. One team in red, the other in blue, the ball in mid-air, suspended in the lovely evening light.

The only sounds not absorbed by the light are the shouts of the game, just audible to the line of blinded men.

Road signs direct us through history as well as geography: Poelcapelle, Zonnebeke, Passchendaele. ‘There were many words that you could not stand to
hear and finally only the names of places had dignity,’ wrote Hemingway in
A Farewell to Arms
. A generation later Philip Toynbee remembers, as a boy, ‘murmuring the name
Passchendaele
in an ecstasy of excitement and regret’. Vernon Scannell too was mesmerized by the ‘litany of proper names’ which crop up, in various permutations, again
and again in his poems: ‘Passchendaele, Bapaume, and Loos, and Mons’; ‘Cambrai, Bethune, Arras, Kemmel Hill’; ‘Passchendaele, Verdun, The Menin Road . . .’

I cannot remember when in my childhood I first heard of places like these. But I know I heard them – the Somme especially – at home, before I came across them in history books or at
school. It was at the Somme that history engaged my family, that my family entered history. Like Shurdington, Cranham, Birdlip, Leckhampton and Churchdown, the name was part of the soil in which
the history of my family was rooted. This intertwining of the villages and landmarks of Gloucestershire with those of Flanders and Picardy is also the defining characteristic of the poetry of Ivor
Gurney.

Appropriately, his first volume of poetry, published in 1917, was entitled
Severn and Somme
; in the letters and poems he wrote from the trenches, and afterwards in the long years of
mental illness, he exclaims again and again how – a source of comfort and torment – the landscape of northern France resembles his beloved Gloucestershire. At Crucifix Corner ‘all
things said Severn’; in another poem the same spot reminds him of Crickley. Near Vermand, ‘the copse was like a Cranham copse with scythed curve’, like
‘Cotswold her spinnies if ever . . .’ Hearing a cuckoo in ‘a shattered wood . . . what could [he] think of but Framilode, Minsterworth, Cranham, and the old haunts
of home’. Recalling the time he was gassed at ‘bad St Julien’ (long after that first attack, in September 1917), the poem ‘Farewell’ sets the dual landscapes of
‘Ypres’, ‘Somme and Aubers’ and ‘Gloucester’, ‘Cheltenham’, ‘Stroud’ swirling around each other.

Gurney was born in 1890 and served in the Gloucesters, the same regiment as my father’s father. The last fifteen years of his life were spent at the City of London Mental Home, but when he
died, in 1937, he was buried just outside Gloucester. Running past the bottom of our garden, Hatherley Brook passes within half a mile of the church at Twigworth where he is buried.

We drive into Passchendaele. The power of this name has not diminished with the years. As words, ‘Auschwitz’ and ‘Dachau’ have become over-burdened by
their rhetorical power as synonyms for evil. If not in print then certainly in conversation Belsen has become a common metaphor for extreme skinniness. Passchendaele, despite the carnage associated
with it, is rarely heard except to designate the Battle of Third Ypres. Instead of passing into common linguistic currency, then, these place-names have acquired an almost sacred ring. They have
perhaps become over-loaded with holiness, especially Passchendaele. For those who were there, Passchendaele was so awful, so horrific, that it became almost a joke. Paul reads aloud the accounts of
two survivors quoted by Lyn Macdonald: ‘Tuesday, 2 October. Back in the battery
again, but what have we come back to? Passchendaele!’ Another recalls that

This tone of disaffected endurance is not confined to place-names.

Paul Fussell sees the war, via Hardy, as a huge ‘satire of circumstance’ in which irony emerges as the only adequate mode of expression. Hence, he notes satirically, ‘
The
Oxford Book of War Poetry
might just as well be titled
The Oxford Book of Satire
.’ The war for Fussell is a text which he has read more perceptively and persuasively than anyone
else. The participants are consequently judged in literary terms: Haig is reproved for a ‘want of imagination and innocence of artistic culture’; the ‘hopeless absence of
cleverness’ about one of his plans is ‘entirely characteristic of its
author
’. In such company ‘it is refreshing to turn to a wittier tradition’, to Sir
Herbert Plumer, for example, ‘a sort of intellectual’s hero of the British Great War’. Not surprisingly the war demanded from its generals ‘the military equivalent of wit
and invention’ – exactly the qualities so abundantly displayed by a ‘sophisticated observer’ like Fussell himself. For Fussell, in short, irony is synonymous with
sophistication – which makes it especially ironic that the war’s most deeply ironic mode is probably the ‘mustn’t grumble’ proletarian grumble. (Sassoon did not simply
try to depict the war in realist terms; he tried to find a poetic diction of
moaning
.)

Of the prose writers it is Frederic Manning who – despite a tendency to lop off every aspirate in sight – has best conveyed this pervasive idiom:

Trench songs like ‘The Old Battalion’, used to famous effect in
Oh What a Lovely War
, are musical elaborations of exactly this brand of deadpan resignation. First performed
by Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in 1963,
Oh What a Lovely War
reached a wider audience in 1969 when it was filmed by Richard Attenborough. I half saw the film a couple of
times, but, disliking music hall and the theatre in equal measure, it never made any impression on me. It wasn’t until I read it as a text – in wilful defiance, as Sassoon might have
put it, of a prefatory note which warns that ‘this is a play script and should be read as such’ – that I found a version I could respond to. The satirical attacks on Haig and the
generals still seem to rely on crude caricature, but the trench scenes contain some of the best writing about the war. Writers may have resorted to irony, but the soldiers here rely on its more
humane equivalent: the piss-take.

On Christmas Eve the Germans sing ‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht’; the British respond with a carol of their own:

In the course of the play almost all of the themes touched on in this book are dealt with in similar style. In place of a meditation on
Gassed
we have:

Listening to ‘those poor wounded bleeders moaning in noman’s-land’, a soldier notes that it ‘sounds like a cattle market’. The literary endeavours
of the writer-soldiers – and the birth of the war’s written mythology – receive similarly short shrift:

Appropriately and perfectly, the play ends with a song which, like that defining passage in Barbusse, looks ahead to the impossibility of conveying what happened in the trenches:

Oh What a Lovely War
was not ‘written’ in the conventional sense; it grew out of a close collaboration by all the
members of the Theatre Workshop. In a
characteristic aside Fussell, by contrast, notes that ‘it is really hard to shake off the conviction that this war has been written by someone’. The great value of Lyn Macdonald’s
books is that they are not texts so much as carefully arranged accumulations of raw material which have not been ‘worked up’ as they have in
Oh What a Lovely War
. Preserved in
1914
or
Somme
are the voices of men – like my grandfather – who never sought to record their experiences on paper. The tropes identified by Fussell are reproduced in a
different, ‘lower’ or non-literary register which simultaneously qualifies and verifies many of his claims.