The Missing of the Somme (16 page)

In its glittering whiteness Allward’s monument seems the shorn embodiment of Lloyd George’s words. Duty and Patriotism have fallen away; Honour takes its place
alongside Hope and peace as allegorical decoration; Sacrifice remains undiminished: unmeasurable, sheer – but its meaning, too, has been transformed by the war. It is here confronted with the
consequence of its meaning.

Discounting the allegorical ‘Defenders’ there are no military figures on the monument. The steel helmet on the tomb is the only clear symbolic link with the war it commemorates. The
figures at the base of the pylons strain upward, straining to rise above their grief, to surmount it until, like the figures nestling in the sky above them, they can overcome it. This vertiginous
transcendence is counterpoised by the earthward gaze of the woman. Mute with sorrow she makes no appeal to the heavens but fixes her eyes on the ground, making an accommodation with grief, residing
in loss.

Owen, wrote C. Day Lewis, ‘had no pity to spare for the suffering of bereaved women’. Vimy Ridge, by contrast, seems less a memorial to the dead, to the abstract ideal of Sacrifice,
than to the reality of grief: a memorial not to the Unknown Soldier but to Unknown Mothers.

I remember reading of a soldier’s visit to the mother of a dead friend: ‘“I’ve lost my only boy,” was all she said, then became mute with
grief.’

And then, as sometimes happens, this word ‘grief’ that I have used many times floats free of meaning and becomes a sound, an abstract arrangement of letters whose sense is suddenly
lost. Grief, grief, grief. I say the word to myself until, gradually, it is reunited with the meaning it has always had.

I was living in New Orleans when the Gulf War ended. The city was swathed in yellow ribbons and each night I watched news reports about soldiers returning home to their loved
ones, their sweethearts. Hugs and tears, brass bands playing, kisses, babies born while their fathers were away in the desert of Kuwait.

But what about the soldier with no girlfriend, no wife, no sweetheart to return to? The loner. Returning to nothing, surrounded by tickertape reunions, reminding me of a photograph from the
Great War there was no one around to take.

Sepia weather. Shouldering his kit, making for the railway station. Heading home through force of habit. Holding his peace, coughing. The sky sagging over damp shires. The names of stations.
Dead men’s faces. Rain falling on smoke-stained towns. From now on this is what life will be: staring through a rain-grimed window, waiting for the journey to be over with. Houses and brooks
passing by. Fields of wet nettles.

From the car, glancing back, the sculptures clinging to the sides of the two pylons give them the look of war-ravaged trees: blasted white trunks from
which the stumps of branches protrude.

‘
The charred skeletons of the trees’

Barbusse’s terse entry in his
War Diary
is echoed, repeated or expanded upon in almost every account of the war. Harold Macmillan thought ‘the most
extraordinary thing about the modern battlefield is the desolation and emptiness of it all. Nothing is to be seen of war or soldiers – only the split and shattered trees.’ Writing to
Ezra Pound in June 1917, Wyndham Lewis noted that ‘shells never seem to do more than shave the trees down to these ultimate black stakes . . .’

Trees were not the only things to display the resilience of the vertical. There were remains of buildings like ‘the famous Cloth Hall looking stark and naked with one wall standing’
in the centre of Ypres. Or there were the ubiquitous calvaries (‘One ever hangs where shelled roads part’), the most famous of which, again in Ypres, in the cemetery, remained
miraculously intact after a dud shell lodged between the cross and the figure of the suffering Christ. As often as not these roadside crucifixes were sinister and troubling reminders of mortality
rather than images of redemption. Having endured a long, terrifying wait on. ‘Mount Calvary’ – the Germans can all the time be heard mining beneath them – the squad in
Raymond Dorgeles’
Wooden Crosses
is finally relieved. As they march quickly away, leaving other men to take their place on the powder keg, Dorgeles looks back: ‘The Calvary
stood out terrible, a dreadful thing against the green night, with its battered stumps of trees like the uprights of a cross.’ A history of the Gloucesters recalls that

With its shattered trees and ‘eerie’ calvaries this war-ravaged landscape felt, in Sassoon’s words, ‘like the edge of the world’.
On wet days ‘the trees a mile away were like ash-grey smoke rising from the naked ridges, and it felt very much as if we were at the end of the world’.

Fussell uses passages like these to show how English writers viewed the war through a filter of ‘ritual and romance’ – specifically, in Sassoon’s case, William
Morris’s
The Well at the World’s End.
Ironically, this world’s end landscape in which the English poets found themselves was the realization in hideous, distorted form of
the great visions of German Romanticism.

Freed from their immediate context, passages like these add up to an evocation of landscape that had been set down on canvas over a century earlier by Caspar David Friedrich. His
Abbey Under
Oak Trees
of 1810 shows ravaged trees and
the remains of a church rising through the mist; a funerary procession of figures bears a coffin through graves scattered
haphazardly across the foreground. The German poet Karl Theodor Korner referred to this picture in 1815 as a
Totenlandschaft
, ‘a landscape of the dead’. Exactly a century later
Robert Musil, serving as an officer in the Austrian army, used precisely the same word to describe the scene he had witnessed on the Italian front.

As the war took its toll, even archetypal Romantic remnants like the ruined walls of abbeys were frequently blasted beyond recognition. At the edge of the allied world, near
Ypres, all that could be seen was ‘a sea of mud. Literally a sea.’ In 1917 Blunden looked out across ‘a dead sea of mud’ and Stephen Graham, revisiting the area in 1920, was
confronted by a ‘landocean’. When the film director D. W. Griffith travelled to the Western Front as part of his preparation for the film
Hearts of the World
, he was
disappointed by the dramatic potential of the war:

The wife of an artist friend of Friedrich’s was similarly disappointed by the 1809 painting
The Monk by the Sea
: there was nothing to look at. ‘By any earlier
standards,’ notes art historian Robert Rosenblum,

With only a minimum of changes, Rosenblum’s words can serve equally well as a description of a panoramic photograph by William Rider-Rider which reproduces Friedrich’s vision in the
devastated battlefield of Passchendaele.

The scene is divided evenly between land and sky. A line of blasted trees separates the shattered foreground from the land-ocean, the sea of mud, which, as in
The Monk by the Sea
,
reaches to the horizon. Instead of receding into the distance, these trees disappear beyond the edges of the frame. There is no perspective. The vanishing-point is no longer a more or less exact
point, but all around. A new kind of infinity: more of the same in every direction, an infinity of waste. The sky lies in tatters in the mud. It is impossible to tell what time of day the photo was
taken. There is no direct source of light – just the grey luminosity of the sky. In the middle of the picture, instead of Friedrich’s monk, there is an unknown soldier, smoking. Nothing
is moving. Hence, despite the endless desolation, the strange serenity of the photograph.

Ruins, for the Romantics, fulfilled the useful function of being enduring monuments to transience: what faded as grandeur survived as ruins. As testaments to their own survival, ruins,
typically, had the story of their own ruination inscribed within them. Wordsworth established an imaginative template with the stories of silent suffering read in the ruins of ‘Michael’
or ‘The Ruined Cottage’. So pervasive was
the cult of ruination that a ruin became a place where a certain set of responses lay perfectly intact.