The Missing of the Somme (5 page)

Owen is regularly invoked to challenge or undermine the official procedures of Remembrance in this way, but our
memory of the Great War actually depends on
the mutual support of these two ostensibly opposed coordinates: the Unknown Soldier and the poet everyone knows.

Owen was born in Shropshire on 18 March 1893. He was teaching in France when war was declared but volunteered for the Artists’ Rifles in 1915. Under the influence of Sassoon, whom he met
at Craiglockhart Hospital in 1917 while suffering from shell-shock, he began writing the war poems on which his reputation rests. He returned to France and was killed in action a week before the
armistice, aged twenty-five.

The extreme brevity of his life is brought out by Jon Stallworthy’s
Wilfred Owen
, the standard biography. Since Stallworthy diligently allots more or less the same amount of space
to each phase of Owen’s life, by the time we come to the part we’re most interested in, the period of his major poems, we realize with a shock that there is only a fraction of the book
left. It is as if the remaining 700 pages of a standard-sized life have simply been ripped out. Not only that, but in his last weeks we lose sight of Owen as an individual (there are no eyewitness
accounts of his death) and have to resort to the wide-angle of regimental history. Dominic Hibberd has fleshed out this period somewhat in
Wilfred Owen: The Last Year
, but both books stop
where Owen’s life really begins – with his death.

In his lifetime Owen published only five poems (‘Song of Songs’, ‘The Next War’, ‘Miners’, ‘Hospital Barge’ and ‘Futility’). Seven
appeared in Edith Sitwell’s
Wheels
anthology of 1919; a slim selection, edited by Sassoon, came out the following year; Edmund Blunden’s more substantial edition was published
in 1931. This means that Owen’s poems came
to the notice of the public not as gestures of
protest
but as part of a larger structure of
bereavement
.

The period from the armistice onwards saw the construction of memorials throughout England and cemeteries throughout Flanders and northern France. Climaxing with a flash flood of war memoirs and
novels in the late 1920s,
⁷
this phase of protracted mourning was formally completed with the inauguration of the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at
Thiepval in 1932.

The extent to which the strands of this fabric of loss are intertwined can be glimpsed by the way that in 1931 Blunden borrowed the ‘official’ vocabulary of Remembrance to lament
‘how great a
glory
had departed’ from the world of poetry with Owen’s death.

In the years following the armistice the anti-war spirit was so strong that, as the mature Eric Blair (George Orwell) noted, ‘even the men who had been slaughtered were held in some way to
blame’. But the hope that the anti-war case had been clinched for good, on the other hand – by the war poets particularly and by Owen especially – proved short-lived.

Christopher Isherwood, who was born in 1904, the year after Orwell, recalls that ‘we young writers of the middle twenties were all suffering, more or less consciously, from a
feeling of shame that we hadn’t been able to take part in the European War’. The war for Isherwood was a subject of ‘all-consuming morbid interest’, ‘a
complex of terrors and longings’. Longing could sometimes outweigh terror as the Orwell-Isherwood generation ‘became conscious of the vastness of the experience they had missed’.
Hence the fascination of the Spanish Civil War, Orwell goes on, ‘was that it was so like the Great War’.

Looking back, C. Day Lewis considered that it was Owen’s poetry which ‘came home deepest to my generation, so that we could never again think of war as anything but a vile, if
necessary, evil’. But this generation was faced with other, apparently greater evils; hence W. H. Auden’s ‘easy acceptance of guilt in the fact of murder’ in his 1937 poem
‘Spain’. Owen may have exposed, as Stephen Spender claimed in an essay of the same year, ‘the propagandist lie which makes the dead into heroes in order that others may imagine
that death is really quite pleasant’, but this revealed truth was not without its own allure. Philip Toynbee, a veteran of the Spanish War, recalls that Owen’s poems ‘produced
envy rather than pity for a generation that had experienced so much’. Keats, the most powerful influence on Owen before his encounter with Sassoon, had declared himself to be ‘half in
love with easeful death’, but Owen had apparently done little to diminish the fear of violent death. ‘Even in our anti-war campaigns of the early thirties,’ remembers Toynbee,
‘we were half in love with the horrors we cried out against.’

The realities of the war, then, were not simply overlaid by an organized cult of Remembrance (Cenotaph, Unknown Soldier, two minutes’ silence, poppies, etc.). Rather, our idea
of the war, with its elaborately entwined, warring ideas of ‘myth’ and ‘reality’, was actively constructed through elaborately entwined, warring versions of
memory in the decade and a half following the cessation of actual hostilities.

So it comes about that the war seems, to us, to have been fought less over territory than the way it would be remembered, that the war’s true subject is remembrance. Indeed the whole war
– which was being remembered even as it was fought, whose fallen were being remembered before they fell – seems not so much to be tinted by retrospect as to have been fought
retrospectively.

Owen’s famous preface insists that his ‘subject is War, and the pity of War’ (rather than honour or glory), but his subject might also be termed Memory, and the projection of
Memory. His poetry redefines rather than simply undermines Binyon’s words (‘We will remember them’) which also work by projected retrospect. Despite their apparent
inappropriateness Owen’s poems are now invisibly appended, like exquisitely engraved graffiti, to memorial inscriptions in honour of ‘The Glorious Dead’.

In Wanlockhead in north Dumfriesshire, the village memorial takes the form of a mourning soldier atop a marble plinth. Beneath the statue’s feet is written ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est Pro
Patria Mori’, a phrase whose meaning has been wrenched by Owen’s poem irrevocably away from the simplicity of the intended sentiment. The old lie has acquired a new ironic truth. By the
time Sassoon concludes his 1933 poem ‘An Unveiling’, a mock-oration for London’s ‘War-gassed victims’, the Latin has been so Owenized as to render further satirical
twisting superfluous.

R. H. Mottram hoped the
Spanish Farm Trilogy
might be seen as ‘a real Cenotaph, a true War memorial’; Richard Aldington wanted
Death of a Hero
to stand as ‘a
memorial in its ineffective way to a generation’ – but it was only Owen who succeeded, as Sassoon, Blunden, Graves and the rest could not, in memorializing the war in the image of his
work. The perfect war memorial – the one which best expresses our enduring memory of the war – would show men bent double, knock-kneed, marching asleep, limping, blind, blood-shod.
Either that or – and it amounts to the same thing – it should be a statue of Owen himself.

Owen addressed the issue of his own legacy in ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, a poem which anticipates the time when it will stand as the response to its own appeal: ‘What
passing-bells for these who die as cattle?’ Sassoon made a vital contribution here, substituting ‘Doomed’ for ‘Dead’ in an earlier draft so that his friend’s
poem, like Binyon’s, is about those who
are going to have died
. Blunden wrote a poem entitled ‘1916 seen from 1921’ – Owen had written a dozen poems like that four
years earlier.

The final line of ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ refers to the custom of drawing down household blinds as a sign of mourning – of displaying loss – but it is
also a disquieting image of concealment, of the larger process whereby the state and the
military hid their culpability from scrutiny. These blinds stayed firmly down until
Cabinet papers and War Office records became available to researchers in the sixties. Only in the last couple of years, however, have we learnt how Haig, for example, in another telling instance of
the way the war seems to have been fought retrospectively, systematically rewrote his diary to make his intentions accord with – and minimize his responsibility for – what actually
resulted from his command. Denis Winter, whose controversial endeavours have cast damaging light on the way the state colluded in perpetuating Haig’s preferred version of events, concludes
that ‘the official record of the war – political as well as military – [was] systematically distorted both during the war as propaganda and after it, in the official
history’. The amount of material he has unearthed in Canadian and Australian archives also emphasizes how effectively documents passed on to the Public Record Office in Britain had been
‘vetted so as to remove those which contradicted the official line’. Even when the blinds are raised, the sudden rush of light reveals how much is – and will remain –
concealed, missing.

Winter’s obsessive scrutiny of the Haig records and their incriminating gaps has destroyed the last shreds of Haig’s reputation; with Owen a similar process has been under way in the
opposite direction. His manuscripts have been scrutinized by Jon Stallworthy so that almost every variant of every line is now available. The work of no British poet of this century has been more
thoroughly posthumously edited and preserved or, despite Yeats famously excluding him from the
Oxford Book of Modern Verse
(on the grounds that ‘passive suffering is not a theme for
poetry’), more widely anthologized.
In the twenties Haig’s reputation was embalmed in an official vacuum of secrecy; likewise, nothing was known of Owen’s life
or his development as a poet. In his 1920 edition of Owen’s poems Sassoon declared that aside from the poems any ‘records of [Owen’s] conversation, behaviour or appearance, would
be irrelevant and unseemly’. Until Blunden’s edition – which included a memoir and what have since become well-known extracts from the letters – he seemed, in Philip
Larkin’s phrase, ‘almost a spirit called into being by the Great War’s unprecedented beastliness to assert compassion and humanity’. His poems ‘existed for some ten
years in a vacuum, as if they were utterances of The Spirit of the Pities in some updated
The Dynasts
’.
⁸

In the early twenties everything about the war – except the scale of loss – was suspended in a vacuum which all the memorials and rites of Remembrance were in the process of trying,
in different ways, to fill. Husbands, sons, fathers were missing. Facts were missing. Everywhere the overwhelming sense was of lack, of absence. Overwhelmingly present was ‘the pall of death
which hung so sorrowful, stagnant and static over Britain’.

To a nation stunned by grief the prophetic lag of posthumous publication made it seem that Owen was speaking
from the other side of the grave. Memorials were one sign of the
shadow cast by the dead over England in the twenties; another was a surge of interest in spiritualism. Owen was the medium through whom the missing spoke.

They are going to have died
: this is the tense not only of the poems of Owen (who carried photos of the dead and mutilated in his wallet) but also of photographs from
the war. Although he was thinking only of photographs, both are, in Roland Barthes’ phrase, ‘prophecies in reverse’. With this in mind, like Brodsky contemplating photographs of
Auden, ‘I began to wonder whether one form of art was capable of depicting another, whether the visual could apprehend the semantic.’

It is difficult, now, to imagine the Great War in colour. Even contemporary poems like Gurney’s ‘Pain’ depict the war in monochrome:

‘I again work more in black and white than in colour,’ Paul Klee noted on 26 October 1917. ‘Colour seems to be a little exhausted just now.’ Many photographs – like
those from the first day of the Somme – were taken under skies of Kodak blue, but, even had it been available, colour film would – it seems to us – have rendered the scenes in
sepia. Coagulated by time, even fresh blood seems greyish brown.

Photos like this are not simply true
to
the past; they are
photos
of
the past. The soldiers marching through them seem to be tramping through ‘the
great sunk silences’ of the past. The photos are colour-resistant. They refuse to come out of the past – and the past is sepia-tinted. Peter Porter in his poem ‘Somme and
Flanders’ notes how ‘Those Harmsworth books have sepia’d’; Vernon Scannell in ‘The Great War’ refers to the ‘sepia November’ of armistice.

And if, as Gilbert Adair has suggested, Auden’s poems of the thirties are somehow ‘in black and white’, then Owen’s, by extension, are in sepia monochrome. It is
impossible to colour them in; like photographs, they too are colour-resistant.

In Blunden too ‘vermilion’, ‘damask’, the ‘pinks and whites’ of roses and ‘golden lights’ of daisies are out of place: