The Missing of the Somme (15 page)

Years later, by which time his marriage to Nicole is showing signs of strain and he is falling for another, younger woman, Dick and his friends make their tour of the Newfoundland trenches.

We arrive there on a November morning. The sky is armistice-white. The trenches are still preserved but without
the barbed wire – removed, finally, because sheep kept
getting tangled up in it – the grass-covered shell-holes make the place look like a particularly difficult golf course.

Fitzgerald, by contrast, deliberately begins the section of the novel which describes Dick’s visit, ‘Casualties’, so as to make it seem, for a moment, either as if the scene is
taking place in the middle of the actual war or – and it amounts to the same thing – as if the war is still being waged in 1925:

A few minutes later, by which time it has become clear that the friends are simply visitors rather than combatants – though they are, of course, ‘casualties’ – Fitzgerald
vouchsafes to Dick one of the most famous, beautiful and telling of all passages about the war.

Despite the cold there were a handful of other visitors at the Memorial Park. The smaller cemeteries are deserted. Sometimes there are intervals of three or four weeks in the visitors’
books. Often people come to visit one particular grave: a great uncle, a grandfather. They are always touching, these personal inscriptions in the book, especially when the pilgrimage is the
fulfilment of a lifetime’s ambition.

Most comments, though, are generic: ‘RIP’, ‘Remembering’, ‘We Will Remember Them’, ‘Lest We Forget’, ‘Very Moving’. Sometimes there is
a jaunty salute: ‘All the best, lads’, ‘Sleep well, boys’. As well as commenting on the cemetery itself – ‘Peaceful’, ‘Beautiful’ – many
people offer larger impressions of the war: ‘Such a waste’, ‘No more war’, ‘Never again’. All comments are heartfelt, even those like ‘They died for
freedom’ or ‘For Civilization’, which, testifying to the enduring power of ignorance, end up meaning the opposite of what is intended: ‘They died for nothing.’ At the
Connaught Cemetery for the massacred Ulster Division several visitors from Northern Ireland have written ‘No surrender’. One entry, from Andy Keery, reads: ‘No surrender. Proud to
come from Ulster.’ Beneath it his friend has written: ‘No surrender. I came with Andy.’ Occasionally people quote a couple of lines of poetry. I add my own little couplet:

Sometimes people’s comments are so idiosyncratic as scarcely to make sense: ‘The bloke on the tractor spoiled it for me by his reckless driving. Signed anon’ – the
unknown visitor. On 10 October 1992 at Tyne Cot Greg Dawson wrote, ‘We really showed those fascists a thing or two!’ Another person had drawn a Star of David and written, ‘What
about the 6 million Jews?’ Beneath it someone else had written, ‘Wrong war, mate.’ This quickly becomes something of a catchphrase between the three of us: irrespective of its
relevance, any remark elicits the droll rejoinder, ‘Wrong war, mate.’

At the Sheffield Memorial a diligent student wrote a short essay pointing out, in closely reasoned detail, that blame for the Somme rested, ultimately, on Churchill’s shoulders. He even
added a footnote citing A. J. P. Taylor, complete with page reference, place and date of publication. Reluctant to get drawn into the minutiae of scholarly debate, another visitor had simply
scrawled in the margin: ‘Rubbish!’

Sometimes a dialogue does evolve, most obviously at one of the Redan Ridge cemeteries. The theme of the discussion here is exactly that announced by the anti-Taylorite at the Sheffield Memorial:
rubbish.

There are three tiny, beautifully located cemeteries at Redan Ridge. Next to one of them is a stinking mound of farm rubbish. An entry from 10 July 1986 expresses the characteristic sentiments
of most visitors: ‘It’s such a shame
they must rest with a rubbish pit beside them.’
¹⁷
Several pages on, after
numerous endorsements of these remarks, the first dissenting voice appears: ‘If visitors fail to recognize the true pathos behind their visits here only to latch on to the presence of a
rubbish dump, then
their
presence here disgusts me.’

This attempt to scotch the debate only inflames it. The characteristic tone becomes aggressively indignant: ‘The rubbish is a thinly disguised insult to the memory of Pte. Tommy
Atkins.’ Adding injury to insult the next person to join in notes: ‘It’s quite apt: human waste next to more of it.’ Comments like this mean that from now on the ire of
those offended by the rubbish is directed not only against the farmer who dumped it but against those who implicitly condone him – and who, in turn, become steadily more aggressive in their
responses: ‘Sod the rubbishtip – these men lived and died in it. Isn’t rubbish a part of life?’

That’s a moot point, but for quite a few months now the rubbish has been playing a more important part in the visitors’ book than the cemetery. Gradually the debate itself becomes
the main subject of debate. The cemetery was ousted by the rubbishtip; now both are only incidental to the real focus of attention: the visitors’ book itself. You can imagine it being
integrated into battlefield tours, becoming the main reason for people’s visit. Conscious of this, someone has written:
‘Quite frankly the wastage of human life is
worthy of more comment than a ridiculous rubbish-tip saga.’

Every attempt to have the last word, however, demands a response and so the rubbish debate and the debate about the rubbish debate perpetuate themselves. It comes as something of a
disappointment to read, on 9 September 1991: ‘Glad the rubbish has finally gone.’

I note all this down on 9 November 1992. It is the second time I have been here and there is a strange pleasure in standing in exactly the same spot again. I find the proof of
my last visit, in my own handwriting, in the visitors’ book. It was a different season then; now the sky sags like mud over the brown earth. The air is cold as iron. Rain is blowing
horizontal. The smell of rotting farmyard waste pervades the scene. I write:

The pages of these visitors’ books are clipped in a green ringhooped binder. When there are no pages left, new ones are clipped in. What happens to the old ones? Burned? Filed away in
archives? If the latter, then perhaps an academic will one day salvage all these pages and use this hoard of raw data as the basis of a comprehensive survey of attitudes to the war, the ways in
which it is remembered and misremembered. There is certainly enough material to fill a book: people who come here are moved and want to record their feelings, explain themselves.

And
this
book, really, is just an extended entry, jotted on pages ripped from the visitors’ book of a cemetery on the Somme.

What with the weather and the escalating cost of the trip, we decide to abandon our plan to be at Thiepval for Armistice Day. I am all for continuing with the big push to Ors,
where Owen is buried, but by now serious questions are being raised about my leadership. Paul and Mark are refusing to budge.

‘You’ll damn well go where I order you,’ I say at last.

‘What are you going to do? Court-martial us?’ says Mark.

‘Yeah. Fuck off, Hitler,’ says Paul.

‘Wrong war, mate,’ chant Mark and I.

We decide to head back to Vimy Ridge (missed on the way down due to a navigational error) before beating a retreat to Boulogne.

Since Armistice Day has been incorporated into Remembrance Day, there is little point remaining here until the eleventh, but, as we drive towards Vimy, I ponder the significance of dates –
4 August 1914, 1 July 1916, 11 November 1918 – and the extent to which the ebbing and flowing of the memory of the Great War are determined by the gravitational pull of the calendar.

In his study of Holocaust memorials, James Young points out how

The actual date of the event to be commemorated often falls as arbitrarily as a person’s birthday. In the case of the Great War, which ended
punctually at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the temporal significance of the moment and day on which hostilities ceased was consciously pre-determined. If the
intention was to bring the future memory of the war into the sharpest possible focus, it could hardly have been better arranged: the various ceremonies of Remembrace could not have worked so
powerfully without this precise temporal anchoring. Since the Second World War, this anchoring has been lost. Remembrance Day can now drift three days clear of the eleventh of November. Hence the
sense noted earlier that at the Cenotaph it is the act of remembering together that is being remembered. Past and present are only imperfectly aligned.

In other ways they are being pulled into closer proximity. This was felt especially strongly in 1993, the centenary of Owen’s birth and the seventy-fifth anniversary of his death: another
example of the way in which the war has become memorialized in the poet’s image. The same year also saw the seventy-fifth anniversary of the armistice. 4 August 1994 marked the eightieth
anniversary of the outbreak of war. All of these dates are signposts pointing to one of the ways in which the memory of the Great War exerts itself more powerfully as it recedes in time. This has
less to do with recent events in Sarajevo than the simple sense that we are drawing gradually closer to the time when the war took place exactly a hundred years ago. In terms of remembrance the
years 2014–2018 will represent the temporal equivalent of a total eclipse.
By then no one who fought in the war will be alive to remember it.

Like the Newfoundland Memorial, the other major Canadian memorial, at Vimy Ridge, is located in an expanse of parkland in which the original trenches have been neatly
maintained. A road winds up to the park through thick woods. Then, suddenly, the monument looms into view: two white pylons, each with a sculpted figure perched precariously near the top. Sunlight
knifes through the clouds.

Twin white paths stretch across the grass. The steps to the monument are flanked by two figures, a naked man and a naked woman. The stone is dazzling white. It is difficult to estimate the
height of the pylons. A hundred feet? Two hundred? Impossible to say: there is nothing around to stand comparison with the monument. It generates its own scale, dwarfing the idea of measurement. At
its base, between the two pylons, is a group of figures thrusting a torch upwards towards the figures perched high above. The distance between them is measureless.

Carved on the walls are the names of Canada’s missing: 11,285 men with no known graves. I walk round to the east side of the monument where a group of figures are breaking a sword. Far
off, in the other corner, is another similar group whose details I cannot make out at this distance. Between them, brooding over a vast sea of grass, is the shrouded form of a woman, her stone
robes flowing over the ground. The figure spans millennia of grieving women, from pietàs showing the weeping Virgin to photos of widowed peasant women wrapped in shawls against the cold.
Below her, resting on a tomb, are a sword and steel helmet, the shadows of the twin pylons stretching out across the grass.

The Memorial took eleven years to construct. Unveiled, finally, in 1936, it was the last of the great war memorials to be completed. Walter Allward, the sculptor and designer, explained its
symbolism in the following terms. The grieving woman represents Canada, a young nation mourning her dead; the figures to her left show the sympathy of Canada for the helpless; to her right the
Defenders are breaking the sword of war. Between the pillars, Sacrifice throws the torch to his comrades; high up on the pylons are allegorical figures of Honour, Faith, Justice, Hope, Peace . . .
This string of virtues
recalls a speech made by Lloyd George in September 1914 in which he itemized