The Missing of the Somme (17 page)

The Great War ruined the idea of ruins. Instead of the slow patient work of ruination observed in Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’, artillery brought about instant obliteration. Things
survived only by accident or chance – like the calvary at Ypres – or mistake. Destruction was the standard and the norm. Cottages and villages did not crumble and decay – they
were swept away.

In France, researching his book on the Battle of the Somme in March 1917, John Masefield described the area around Serre as

In Barbusse’s
Under Fire
the squad are making their way to the village of Souchez when the narrator realizes they are already there:

Revisiting the scenes of battle near Passchendaele in 1920, Stephen Graham finds himself – or loses himself, more accurately – in what Barbusse calls a ‘plain of lost
landmarks’:

Considering the same area of land half a century later, Leon Wolff puts the scale of destruction in its historical context: ‘In a later war, atomic bombs wrecked two Japanese cities; but
Passchendaele was effaced from the earth.’

Shunning such emotive turns of phrase, Denis Winter emphasizes that the Somme presented a scene of devastation even more thorough than that observed in Belgium: ‘Aerial photos of
Passchendaele in its final stages show grass and even trees. By autumn 1916, on the other hand, there was no vestige of grass on the Somme.’

Passchendaele, Albert and other villages in the Somme were rebuilt, but to some of the villages around Verdun the inhabitants never returned. Fleury, Douaumont and Cumières vanished from
the map for ever.

Ruins rise from the ashes of the Great War with the Nazis and Albert Speer’s ‘Theory of Ruin Value’. Instead of being remnants of the past, Speer’s
ruins are projected into a distant future – a future stretching even beyond the thousand-year Reich. With Hitler’s enthusiastic approval Speer set about designing structures and using
materials to ensure that, even after generations of decay, the ivy-grown columns and crumbling walls of the Reich would have the ruined splendour of the great models of antiquity.

In the occupied countries the all-obliterating destruction of the Great War could be raised by the Nazis to the level of strategic principle. The fate of the Czech village
of Lidice has been described by Albert Camus. The houses were burned to the ground, the men were shot, the women and children deported. After that

The passion for Remembrance – for building memorials, for recording the names of the dead – can be better understood in the wake of such destruction. Solace and
comfort can be found in the capacity of ruins to survive the human tragedies they result from and record. But the destruction first witnessed in the Great War was so thorough that it seemed capable
of obliterating all trace of itself. Men were blown to pieces or disappeared into mud, villages were lost without trace. All that would remain, it seemed, would be ‘a sponge, an infernal
swamp for souls in pain’.

Soldiers returned from this zone of obliteration to an England virtually untouched by war. The Second World War left London and other major cities cratered and ravaged by the Blitz. After the
Great War the architecture and landscape of England were unchanged except, here and there, for
relatively slight damage from air raids. Apart from the injured, there was no
sign of a war having taken place. Written in October 1918, Cynthia Asquith’s words were prescient:

It was as if a terrible plague had swept invisibly through the male population of the country – except there were no bodies, no signs of burial, no cemeteries even. Ten per cent of the
males under forty-five had simply disappeared.

Life went on. ‘We didn’t really miss the men who didn’t come back,’ a native of Akenfield remarks. ‘The village stayed the same.’ An accurate analysis, it
turns out, of the demographic consequences of the war; in the 1921 national census the age distribution curve compared with 1901 and 1966 ‘reveals hardly the slightest difference’. In
the cold light of population statistics, in other words, the losses of the terrible battles were soon made good.

The problem, then, was to find a way of making manifest the memory of those who were missing – who did not
figure
in statistics like these. How to make visible this invisible
loss? How to do the work of ruins? How to inscribe the story of what had happened on a death-haunted landscape which was, apparently, unmarked by the greatest tragedy to have affected the nation?
Again we come back to Owen’s ‘Anthem’, which, by cataloguing
the ways in which the dead will not be remembered – ‘no prayers nor bells’
– etches their memory in the dusk of the shires.

In a fragment omitted from the published version of
Minima Moralia
Adorno observed that ‘what the Nazis did to the Jews was unspeakable: language had no word for it’. And
yet, ‘a term needed to be found if the victims . . . were to be spared the curse of having no thoughts turned unto them. So in English the concept of genocide was coined.’ As a result,
Adorno continues, ‘the unspeakable was made, for the sake of protest, commensurable’.

What happened in the Great War remained incommensurable. ‘Horror’ and ‘slaughter’ have become popular terms of shorthand response; at a higher level of emotional and
verbal refinement there is Owen’s ‘pity’. Successive waves of rhetorical elaboration could never contain the experience in which they originated – this, paradoxically, is
what gives the poetry its
appeal
: the cry of the poems is unanswerable. This is what was heard in the two minutes’ silence of Armistice Day and is heard still in the perpetual
silence of the cemeteries. Remembrance is the means by which the incommensurability of the Great War is acknowledged and expressed.

Parts of the Western Front, like the area of the Somme, had been so completely devastated that the French government contemplated making them into national forests. Soon after
the armistice, however, peasants began drifting back to their old farms where they were granted three years’ rent-free tenancy. Battlefields were levelled and cleared of war debris and dead;
houses were rebuilt. Stephen Graham’s
The Challenge
of the Dead
offers an eyewitness account of the early stages of the Western Front’s transition
from war to peace. Again and again in the course of his travels he comes across parties of soldiers exhuming bodies from the earth. Amidst this harvest of death the first signs of returning life
serve only to transform a featureless quagmire to a blighted wilderness, a landscape at once pre- and post-historic:

In 1917 Masefield wrote letter after letter to his wife, cataloguing the devastation he was witnessing in the area of the Somme. Even while surrounded by destruction on an unimaginable scale, he
predicted that ‘when the trenches are filled in, when the plough has gone over them, the ground will not long keep the look of war’. By the late twenties he was being proved right. When
R. H. Mottram went back twenty years after the end of the war, he found ‘all semblance gone, irretrievably gone’. If at first the fear had been that the area was beyond renovation, now
veterans became worried that insufficient traces would remain of what had taken place. In 1930 Vera Brittain wrote:

Carl Sandburg’s poem ‘Grass’ transforms this vast capacity for rejuvenation from a source of anxiety to one of comfort.

Fields stretch away yellow and green under a perfect sky. I walk along a footpath to a small cemetery on the top of a low hill. At the edge of the path is a small pile of
shells. Dense with rust, they look like relics of the Bronze or Iron Age, from a time before there were cities or books.

Even the grass cannot work hard enough to keep these traces of the past buried for good. ‘A farmer on the Western Front cannot prune a tree without ruining his saw,’ claims a
character in Ondaatje’s
The English Patient
, ‘because of the amount of shrapnel shot into it during the [Great] War.’ Each year’s ploughing brings new bodies to the
surface. Each year, writes David Constantine,

The Missing of the Somme

Three p.m. The sun is blazing. The last mist melted hours ago. Trees gather the sky’s blueness around themselves. The fields on either side of the road are blurred red by
poppies. I take off my shirt and soon my rucksack is clammy with sweat. By this time on 1 July 1916, under a sky as clear and hot as this, 20,000 British soldiers had been killed; another 40,000
were wounded or missing.

As I make my way towards it, the memorial at Thiepval seems almost ugly, its hulking immensity dominating the landscape for miles around.

At the car park on the edge of the site a sign states that this memorial stands on sacred ground. Visitors are asked not to bring dogs here, not to picnic, to try to preserve the beauty and
tranquillity of the place.

There is no one else here. A wind moves through the jade-green trees. Green and black seem shades of each other. The grass is clipped razor-short, blazing bright green as though its colour is
intensified by being so confined: potential inches of colour crammed into a centimetre. I can imagine nowhere more beautiful.

On 28 April 1917, Masefield wrote a letter describing the scene he witnessed here:

At the edge of the grass there is a long curving stone seat, where I sit and watch the British and French flags breezing perfectly from the summit of the huge monument. For once even the Union
Jack does not look ugly.

The sun burns on the letters high up on the memorial:
THE MISSING OF THE SOMME
.

By contrast to the missing it commemorates, the Thiepval Memorial is palpably here, unmissable.
¹⁸
Designed by Lutyens in High Empire style (if there is
such a thing), there is no humility about it, no backing down, no regret.

Permanent, built to last, the monument has none of the vulnerability of the human body, none of its terrible propensity for harm. Its predominant relation is to the earth – not, as is the
case with a cathedral, to the sky. A cathedral reaches up, defies gravity effortlessly, its effect is entirely vertiginous. And unlike a cathedral which is so graceful (full of grace) that, after a
point, it disappears, becomes ethereal, the Thiepval Memorial, after a point, simply refuses to go any higher. It is stubborn, stoical. Like the deadlocked armies of the war, it stands its
ground.

The contrast with a cathedral is telling in another, broader sense. In keeping with Lutyens’ general preference, the Memorial is stripped of Christian symbolism; there was,
he felt, no need for it. For many men who survived, the Battle of the Somme (which, in memory, represents the core experience and expression of the Great War) put an end to the
consoling power of religion. ‘From that moment,’ a soldier has said of the first day’s fighting, ‘all my religion died. All my teaching and beliefs in God had left me, never
to return.’ In some ways, then, the Thiepval Memorial is a memorial if not to the death, then certainly to the superfluousness of God. Commemorated here is the faith of the ‘empty
heaven’ evoked in a moving passage by Manning: