The Missing of the Somme (3 page)

Such an undertaking was without precedent but not without a prehistory. The war dead may not have merited cemeteries of their own in earlier centuries, but in some ways the military cemeteries
of the Great War represent the culmination and systematic application of developments in
civilian
cemetery design. These developments were themselves emblematic of the way attitudes
towards death had been changing since the Enlightenment. As the spectre of plague receded, so, in George Mosse’s striking phrase, ‘the image of the grim reaper was replaced by the image
of death as eternal sleep’. A growing awareness of the link between poor hygiene and illness – and a corresponding association between foul odours and death – saw cemeteries being
built away from crowded towns in quiet, shaded settings, in environments conducive to rest. Setting and symbolism encouraged a mood of pantheistic reflection rather than penitence and fear.

Three architects – Lutyens, Sir Herbert Baker and Sir Reginald Blomfield – were given overall responsibility for implementing the principles established by the
Commission: white headstones undifferentiated by rank, the Great War Stone with the inscription ‘Their name liveth for evermore’ (chosen by Rudyard Kipling) from
Ecclesiasticus
. Lutyens wanted the cemeteries to be non-denominational, but was forced to accept the inclusion of Blomfield’s Cross of Sacrifice: the sword of war sheathed by the
cross, a simple reconciliation of the martial and the Christian.

With so many graves scattered over the battlefields, bodies had sometimes to be exhumed from the smaller cemeteries and re-interred in larger, or ‘concentration’, plots –
though frequently these ‘new’ sites were themselves extensions of original battlefield cemeteries. Some were named after regiments or battalions, but, wherever possible, the wartime
names were retained: Railway Hollow, Blighty Valley, Crucifix Corner, Owl Trench . . .

Even after this process of rationalization hundreds of British and Commonwealth cemeteries were spread over Flanders and northern France. The first were completed by 1920, but work continued
throughout the decade. By 1934, in the
département
of the Somme alone, 150,000 British and Commonwealth dead had been buried in 242 cemeteries. In total 918 cemeteries were built on
the Western Front with 580,000 named and 180,000 unidentified graves. A few cemeteries were kept – and remain – ‘open’ to bury bodies discovered after the official searches
had been completed, in September 1921. Between then and the outbreak of the Second World War, in spite of the major battlefields having
been searched as many as six times, the
remains of 38,000 men were discovered in Belgium and France. The bodies of the missing still continue to reappear: pushed to the surface by the slow tidal movement of the soil, unearthed by farmers
ploughing their fields.

The design is always broadly similar, but each cemetery – due to its location, size, layout and the selection of flowers – has its own distinctive character and feel. Some, like the
Serre Road cemeteries, are, in Kipling’s phrase, vast ‘silent cities’. Others are very small, tucked away in a corner of a field, in the crook of a stream, at the shaded edge of a
wood.

All, whether large or small, are scrupulously maintained, immaculate. This is strange: cemeteries, after all, are expected to age. In these military cemeteries there is no ageing: everything is
kept as new. Time does not exist here, only the seasons. The cemeteries look now exactly as they did sixty years ago.

Then as now the official idiom of Remembrance stressed not so much victory or patriotic triumph as Sacrifice. Sacrifice may have been a euphemism for slaughter but, either way, the significance
of victory was overwhelmed by the human cost of achieving it. As if acknowledging that, in this respect, there was little to choose between victory and defeat, between the British and German
experience of the war, memorial inscriptions were not to ‘Our’ but to ‘
The
Glorious Dead’.

The war, it begins to seem, had been fought in order that it might be remembered, that it might live up to its memory.

Even while it was raging, the characteristic attitude of the war was
to look forward to the time when it would be remembered.
‘“The
future!”’ exclaims Bertrand, one of the soldiers in Henri Barbusse’s
Under Fire
.

Published in France as
Le Feu
in 1916 and translated into English the following year, Barbusse’s novel was the first major work of prose to give fictional expression to the
experience of the war. A direct influence on Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, it established an imaginative paradigm for much subsequent writing about the war. The passage quoted is crucial, not simply
for the content of Bertrand’s speech but
for the manner in which Barbusse presents it. The sculptural similes are especially telling. With his ‘marble
muteness’ and face like a statue Bertrand becomes, literally, a monument to this present which will, he alleges, be wiped out.

In the final chapter of the book there is a related, equally revealing passage. Following a terrible bombardment the soldiers wake to a nightmare dawn and fall to talking about the impossibility
of conveying what went on during the war to anyone who was not there.

The person whose opinions begin this passage speaks ‘sorrowfully, like a bell’. Anticipating Owen – ‘What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?’ – the
discussion turns to whether there can be any adequate recognition of those who have suffered so much. Barbusse also anticipates Owen in his response: by itemizing everything that will be forgotten.
‘We will remember them,’ intones Binyon. ‘“We
shall
forget!”’ exclaims one of Barbusse’s soldiers,

Sassoon’s later claim – ‘Remembering, we forget’ – is inverted: a memorial is constructed from the litany of what will be forgotten. At the end of it all, as with a
memorial, there are ‘only the names left’.

‘We’re forgetting-machines,’ exclaims another of Barbusse’s soldiers. Accompanying the draft preface Owen wrote for a proposed collection of his poems was a list of
possible contents; next to the first poem, ‘Miners’, is scribbled ‘How the future will forget’. Constantly reiterated, the claim that we are in danger of forgetting is one
of the ways in which the war ensured it would be remembered. Every generation since the armistice has believed that it will be the last for whom the Great War has any meaning. Now, when
the last survivors are within a few years of their deaths, I too wonder if the memory of the war will perish with the generation after mine. This sense of imminent amnesia is, has been
and – presumably – always will be immanent in the war’s enduring memory.

The issue, in short, is not simply the way the war generates memory but the way memory has determined – and continues to determine – the meaning of the war.

Taken from his earlier poem ‘Recessional’, Kipling’s words ‘Lest we Forget’ admonish us from memorials all over the country. Forget what? And what will befall us if
we
do
forget? It takes a perverse effort of will to ask such questions – for, translated into words, the dates 1914–18 have come to mean ‘that which is incapable of being
forgotten’.

Sassoon expended a good deal of satirical bile on the hypocrisy of official modes of Remembrance but no one was more troubled by the reciprocity of remembering and forgetting. He may claim, in
‘Dreamers’, that soldiers draw ‘no dividends from time’s tomorrows’, but he is determined that they will have a place in all our yesterdays.

As early as March 1919, the poem ‘Aftermath’ opens with the aghast question, ‘
Have you forgotten yet?
. . .’ Sassoon’s tone is no less admonitory than
Kipling’s – ‘
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget
’ – but in place of august memorials he wants to cram our nostrils
with the smell of the trenches:

The Glorious Dead

Beating his familiar drum, Sassoon, in his 1933 sequence ‘The Road to Ruin’, imagined ‘the Prince of Darkness’ standing in front of the Cenotaph,
intoning:

Over the years, passing by in a bus or on a bike, I have seen the Cenotaph so often that I scarcely notice it. It has become part of the unheeded architecture of the everyday.
The empty tomb has become the invisible tomb.

In the years following the armistice, however, especially in 1919 and 1920, the Cenotaph, in Stephen Graham’s words, ‘gather[ed] to itself all the experience and all that was sacred
in the war’.

A victory parade had been planned for 19 July 1919, but the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, opposed any proposals for national rejoicing which did not include ‘some tribute to the
dead’. Lutyens was duly asked to devise a temporary, non-denominational ‘catafalque’. In a matter of hours he sketched the design for what became the Cenotaph.

The wood and plaster pylon was unveiled on schedule, but such was the emotion aroused by its stern, ascetic majesty that it was decided – ‘by the human sentiment of millions’,
as Lutyens himself wrote – to replace it with an identical permanent version made of Portland stone.

In the meantime the temporary structure remained in place for the first anniversary of Armistice Day when the two minutes’ silence was first introduced.

Since the Second World War, when it was decided to commemorate the memory of the dead of both wars on the Sunday closest to the eleventh of November, the effect of the silence has been muted. On
the normally busy weekdays between the wars – especially in 1919 and 1920 – the effect of ‘the great awful silence’ was overwhelming, shattering.

In 1919, at eleven a.m., not only in Britain but throughout the Empire, all activity ceased. Traffic came to a standstill. In workshops and factories and at the Stock Exchange no one moved. In
London not a single telephone call was made. Trains scheduled to leave at eleven delayed their departures by two minutes; those already in motion stopped. In Nottingham Assize Court a demobbed
soldier was being tried for murder. At eleven o’clock the whole court, including the prisoner, stood silently for two minutes. Later in the day the soldier was sentenced to death.

On 12 November 1919 the
Manchester Guardian
reported the previous day’s silence:

The following year the silence and the unveiling of the permanent Cenotaph were complemented by another even more emotive component of the ceremony of Remembrance: the burial of the Unknown
Warrior.

Eight unmarked graves were exhumed from the most important battlefields of the war. Blindfolded, a senior officer selected one coffin at random.
⁴
In an
elaborate series of symbol-packed rituals ‘the man who had been nothing and who was now to be
everything’ was carried through France with full battle honours and
transported across the Channel in the destroyer
Verdun
(so that this battle and the soldiers of France also found a place in the proceedings). On the morning of the 11th the flag-draped
coffin was taken by gun carriage to Whitehall, where, at eleven o’clock, the permanent Cenotaph was unveiled.