The Missing of the Somme (4 page)

The weather played its part. The sun shone through a haze of cloud. There was no wind. Flags, at half mast, hung in folds. No wind disturbed the silence which descended once again. Big Ben
struck eleven. The last stroke dissolved over London, spreading a silence through the nation. ‘In silence, broken only by a nearby sob,’ reported
The Times
, ‘the great
multitude bowed its head . . .’ People held their breath lest they should be heard in the stillness. The quiet, which had seemed already to have reached its limit, grew deeper and even
deeper. A woman’s shriek ‘rose and fell and rose again’ until the silence ‘bore down once more’.

O God, our help in ages past.

The silence stretched on until, ‘suddenly, acute, shattering, the very voice of pain itself – but pain triumphant – rose the clear notes of the bugles in The Last
Post’.

From the Cenotaph the carriage bearing the Unknown Warrior made its way to Westminster Abbey. Inside, the same intensity of emotion was reinforced by numerical arrangement: a thousand bereaved
widows and mothers; a hundred nurses wounded or blinded in the war; a guard of honour made up of
a hundred men who had won the Victoria Cross, fifty on each side of the nave.
The highest-ranking commanders from the war were among the pallbearers: Haig, French and Trenchard. The king scattered earth from the soil of France on to the coffin. ‘All this,’
commented one observer, ‘was to stir such memories and emotions as might have made the very stones cry out.’

A similarly ironic palaver surrounds the choosing of the French Unknown Soldier in Bertrand Tavernier’s 1989 film
La Vie et rien d’autre
(
Life and Nothing
But
).

A photograph of the temporary Cenotaph of 1919: soldiers marching past, huge crowds looking on. There is nothing triumphant about the parade. The role of the army is not to
celebrate victory but to represent the dead. This is an inevitable side-effect of the language of Remembrance being permeated so thoroughly by the idea of sacrifice. In honouring the dead,
survivors testified to their exclusion from the war’s ultimate meaning – sacrifice – except vicariously as witnesses. The role of the living is to offer tribute, not to receive
it. The soldiers marching past the Cenotaph, in other words, comprise an army of the surrogate dead.

In an effort to give some sense of the scale of the loss, Fabian Ware, head of the Imperial War Graves Commission, pointed out that if the Empire’s dead marched four abreast down
Whitehall, it would take them three and a half days to pass the Cenotaph.
⁵
Over a million of the living passed by between its unveiling on 11 November and the
sealing of the Unknown Warrior’s tomb a week later. The correspondence between Ware’s image and what actually took place in
1920 is such that to anyone looking at
this photo the soldiers seem like the dead themselves, marching back to receive the tribute of the living. Ware’s hypothetical idea was made flesh. ‘The dead lived again,’ wrote a
reporter in
The Times
.

‘A crowd flowed over Westminster Bridge. So many, / I had not thought death had undone so many,’ wrote T. S. Eliot in
The Waste Land
.

The line of soldiers marching past the Cenotaph stretches out of sight, out of time. If we followed the line, it would take us back to another photograph, of men marching away to war. These two
images are really simply two segments of a single picture of the long march through the war. There is a single column of men, so long that by the time those at the back are marching off from the
recruiting stations, heading to trains, those at the front – the dead – are marching past the Cenotaph.

An early draft of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Apologia Pro Poemate Meo’ is entitled ‘The Unsaid’. In an accidental echo of Owen, John Berger has written that the two
minutes’ silence

The Cenotaph is the starkest embodiment of Berger’s claim. It is a representation in three dimensions of the silence that surrounded it for two minutes on Armistice Day. The public wanted
a permanent version of the Cenotaph to record – to hold – the silence that was gathered within it and which, thereafter, would emanate from it. During the silence it had seemed,
according to
The Times
, as if ‘the very pulse of Time stood still’. In recording that silence, the Cenotaph would also be an emblem of timelessness. A temporary
version of the Cenotaph was an impossible contradiction: it had to be permanent.

For two minutes in each of the years that followed, the silence of the monument was recharged. Since the Second World War and the diminished power of the Sunday Silence, that silence has drained
from the Cenotaph. The clamour of London encroaches on it annually; its silence is becoming inaudible, fading.

In the 1920s neither the permanent Cenotaph nor the Unknown Warrior could satisfy the passion for remembrance. In many ways the means of remembrance, like the war itself, were
selfgenerating. In 1921 the British Legion instituted the sale of Flanders poppies – eight million of them – which has continued, in manufactured form, to the present day. Two years
after its inauguration in 1927, the British Legion Festival of Remembrance introduced its most distinctive and moving feature whereby a million poppies, each one representing a life, flutter down
on to the servicemen assembled below.

Monuments, meanwhile, were being unveiled throughout Britain; cemeteries were being built in France and Belgium; the names of the dead appeared on regimental memorials and rolls of honour in
places of work and trade associations, cities and villages, universities and schools.
⁶

While this made the human cost of the war more apparent, the scale of the loss, it turned out, could actually be comforting. The pain of mothers, wives and fathers was
subsumed in a list of names whose sheer scale was numbing. In the course of the war the casualties had been played down. Then, realizing that grief could be rendered more manageable if
simultaneously divided and shared by a million, the scale of sacrifice was emphasized. Publicizing the scale of the loss was the best way to make it bearable.

And was there not, amidst all this grief, a faint shudder or shiver of excitement at the unimaginable vastness of it all? The war had set all kinds of records in terms of scale: the greatest
bombardments ever seen, the biggest guns, shells and mines, the biggest mobilization, the greatest loss of life (‘the million dead’). Was there not a faint glow of pride, an unavoidable
undertow of semantic approval, in terming the war ‘Great’?

Covered by a patina of sorrow though it may be, something of this quality perhaps endures to this day, perpetuated by writers who, myself included, prefer this appellation with all its elegiac
resonance to that stark numerical designation, ‘The First World War’.

‘Horrible beastliness of war’

‘Great’ or ‘First World’, any book about the war, or commentary on the literature or art it produced, will stress its
horror
. The largest entry
in the latent index of any such book will always be: ‘War, horror of’. Before we have even settled down to read the first stanza of Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, we
are already murmuring to ourselves the old mantra, ‘the horror of war’.

War may be horrible, but that should not distract us from acknowledging what a horrible cliché this has become. The coinage has been worn so thin that its value seems only marginally
greater than ‘Glory’, ‘Sacrifice’ or ‘Pro Patria’, which ‘horror’ condemns as counterfeit. The phrase ‘horror of war’ has become so
automatic a conjunction that it conveys none of the horror it is meant to express.

Partly this over-use is a product of decorum. One cannot, in good taste, dwell on death, mutilation and injury without stressing their horror. Horror, consequently, becomes a mere formality, a
form of words. One is reminded, also, of washing-powder commercials, which have relied for so long on prefixing brand names with ‘new improved’ that the expression has actually come to
mean ‘same old’. The words have bleached themselves out, become an unnoticed part of the brand name. To convey the new and improved nature of the product you have to add a prefix to the
prefix: New Improved New Improved Ariel.

‘The horror of war’ has become similarly self-erasing. A review from
The Times Educational Supplement
, quoted on the back of the paperback edition of Lyn Macdonald’s
1914–1918:
Voices and Images of the Great War
, stresses ‘the sickening repetitive monotony of hopeless horror’. ‘Horror’ on its own, in
other words, has no power to horrify. The more you pile it on like this, the faster linguistic wear proceeds. Having emphasized that the scenes in Paul Nash’s paintings are not simply
appalling but ‘grimly appalling’, Nigel Viney, in
Images of Wartime
, soon finds himself descending into ‘the very depths of infinite horror’.

The most horrific aspect of the Great War was the waste of lives as men were sent to the front in battles of meaningless attrition. Is their cause served appropriately, one wonders, by a verbal
strategy which relies, for its meaning, on constantly reinforcing attrition?

Strings of shuddering adjectives dull the reaction they are intended to induce. The calm, measured tread of Elaine Scarry’s formulation, by contrast, is terrible in its simplicity:
‘The main purpose and outcome of war is injuring.’

‘Before the Great War there was no war poetry as we now conceive the term,’ writes Peter Parker in
The Old Lie
; ‘instead there was martial
verse.’ So pervasive were the conventions of feeling produced by this tradition that in 1914 the eleven-year-old Eric Blair could write a heartfelt poem – ‘Awake, young men of
England’ – relying entirely on received sentiment. In exactly the same way, an eleven-year-old writing fifty years on could, in similar circumstances, come up with a heartfelt poem
expressing the horror of war – while also relying solely on received sentiment.

In some ways, then, we talk of the horror of war as instinctively and enthusiastically as Rupert Brooke and his
contemporaries jumped at the chance of war ‘like
swimmers into cleanness leaping’.

This is not just a linguistic quibble. Off-the-peg formulae free you from thinking for yourself about what is being said. Whenever words are bandied about automatically and easily, their meaning
is in the process of leaking away or evaporating. The ease with which Rupert Brooke coined his ‘think only this of me’ heroics by embracing a ready-made formula of feeling should alert
us to – and make us sceptical of – the ease with which these sentiments have been overruled by another. Isaac Rosenberg acutely condemned Rupert Brooke’s ‘begloried
sonnets’ for their reliance on ‘second-hand phrases’. But there is a similarly second- or third-hand whiff to critic Keith Sagar’s indignant characterization of Armistice
Day as