The Missing of the Somme (6 page)

The world had had the colour bombed out of it. Sepia, the colour of mud, emerged as the dominant tone of the war. Battle rendered the landscape sepia. ‘The year itself looks sepia and
soiled,’ writes Timothy Findley of 1915, ‘muddied like its pictures.’

This is why – to return to an earlier theme – the photographs of men queuing up to enlist seem wounded by the experience that is still to come: they are
tinted
by the
trenches, by Flanders mud. The recruits of 1914 have the look of ghosts. They are queuing up to be slaughtered: they are already dead.

This characteristic sensation – Larkin’s ‘MCMXIV’ begins with a photo of ‘long uneven lines’ of men queuing up to enlist – is articulated by Owen in
‘The Send-Off’, a poem describing recruits about to entrain for France:

The landscape they leave in these first two lines is a premonition of the one ‘a few’ may return to, ‘up half-known roads’, in the last. At the moment of departure they
are already marching through the landscape of mourning. The summer of 1914 is shadowed by the dusk of drawn blinds. Before boarding the train they have joined the ranks of the dead:

But Owen’s poem does not, so to speak, stop there. The train pulls out into a future that seems, to us, to stretch away from the Great War and extend to the memory of another, more recent
holocaust:

‘Agony stares from each grey face.’

Relative to the scale of the slaughter, very few pictures of the British dead survived the Great War.
⁹
This was due principally to
restrictions on reporting. Only official photographers were allowed at the front; ordinary press photographers were almost totally excluded from the battle areas; front-line soldiers themselves
were discouraged from carrying cameras (or keeping diaries).

Any photographs that
did
get taken were subject to strict censorship so that no images prejudicial to the war effort found their way into print. After the war the archives were vetted
so that the number of photographs of British dead was whittled down still further
¹⁰
. Like all the most efficient restrictions,
these
successive measures worked consensually rather than simply repressively. Reflecting, establishing and perpetuating a broad agreement between state, photographers and public as to what fell within
the limits of acceptable taste, they defined that which they claimed to be defined by.

The pictures that have been preserved show isolated or small groups of dead soldiers. They give no sense of death on the scale recorded by a German Field Marshal on the Eastern Front:

On the Western Front, months after the Battle of the Somme had ended, John Masefield wrote how the dead still ‘lay three or four deep and the bluebottles made their faces black’.

Photographs of the missing are themselves missing.

Typically, pictures from the front line show not the dead, but people who have witnessed death. Like this well-known photograph (
here
) of a soldier suffering from battle
fatigue.
What does this face express? It is difficult to say because any word of explanation has to be qualified by its opposite: there is the most intense appeal for compassion
– and an utter indifference to our response; there is reproach without accusation; a longing for justice and an indifference to whether it comes about.

We stare at the picture like Isabelle Rimbaud – sister of the poet – who, in August 1914, took water to a group of exhausted soldiers coming out of battle. ‘Where do they come
from?’ she wondered. ‘What have they seen? We should greatly like to know, but they say nothing.’

This picture, too, is mute. It is immune to our gaze. We are looking into the eyes of a man who has seen the untellable.

In a letter written on the last day of 1917 Owen wrote to his mother ‘of the very strange look’ he had noticed on soldiers’ faces at Etaples. It was, he
said,

Looking across the Channel before he did exactly that, Owen quoted a favourite passage from Rabindranath Tagore: ‘When I go from hence, let this be my parting word, that what I have seen
is unsurpassable.’ Owen’s poems are overwhelmingly concerned with this, the fact of having seen:

He had come to France to help his men, he said, by leading them and ‘indirectly by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can’. In
so doing he affirms, repeatedly, his reliability as a witness:

He focuses frequently – as in the passage from ‘Insensibility’ quoted above – on ‘the blunt and lashless eyes’ of men he
has seen, men who have been blinded by what they have seen:

The anger in his poems always comes from this: from the fact of having witnessed what civilians at home could never conceive of seeing. This reaches its most intense expression in the
transitional passage in ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’:

Owen, the best-known poet of the First World War, wrote that he was ‘not concerned with Poetry’. Robert Capa, the best-known photographer of the Second, declared that he was
‘not interested in taking pretty pictures’. During the Spanish Civil War he took the most famous war photograph of all time, which showed – or purported to – the precise
moment of a Republican soldier’s death in action. In his
photographs of the Second World War we come across the dead almost casually, in houses and streets. A photograph
from December 1944 shows a frozen winter scene with bare trees, cattle and huts in the background. A GI advances across the photo towards a body lying in the middle of the field. Some way off,
beyond the margins of the frame, in the next photograph, there will be another body. Through Capa’s photos, in other words, we follow a trail of bodies. This trail leads, ultimately, to the
photos of mass death at the core of our century: bodies piled up in concentration camps. Capa, personally, had no intention of photographing the concentration camps, because they ‘were
swarming with photographers, and every new picture of horror served only to diminish the total effect’.

Theodor Adorno said famously that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz. Instead, he failed to add, there would be photography.

Since the concentration camps we have seen hundreds, thousands of photographs of the dead: from Cambodia, Beirut, Vietnam, Algeria, Salvador, Sarajevo. After the Second World War the work of
Capa – an invented name anyway – came less to suggest an individual’s work and, increasingly, to identify the kind of photograph associated with him. The original dissolved into
the hundreds of reproductions that came in his wake. Photographs of the dead are now ten a penny. More and more news bulletins come with the warning that some of the images in them might upset some
viewers. Not only is ours a time when anyone – from Presidents of the United States to nameless peasants – might die on film; this has been the time when, to a degree, people
only
die on film. Like many
people I have seen hundreds of bodies on film and never one in real life: an exact reversal of the typical experience of the Great War.

The drift of photography since then has been from looking into the eyes of men who have seen death to seeing things
through
their eyes.

A real photograph of my mother’s father: in profile, astride a horse, about to take water up to the front. In another frame, crammed between the glass and a photo showing
him standing easy, are four medals. On one, attached to a rainbow-coloured ribbon, is written:
THE GREAT WAR FOR CIVILISATION
1914–1919. Another, with a ribbon of
fading orange-yellow stripes and blue edges, shows a figure on horseback cantering over a skull. Looking at these medals, I get the impression they were given away willy-nilly: souvenirs to ensure
that no one went away empty-handed and everyone had something to show for their pains.

(Army form Z. 18)

The history of my family is the history of certificates like this.

Steady and Reliable – these are the qualities which have distinguished us through two world wars.

My father was given a similar reference before he was made redundant from the Gloster Aircraft Company after the Second World War. Years later, when he was made redundant again (aged sixty), he
was once more commended for the reliability and steadiness he had displayed over twenty years.

‘Takes great care of his animals.’ The Major who filled out this certificate might have been
describing
an animal. ‘Steady and reliable’ – like a dog. Go
and find a job with that. Go out into the world with my blessing.

Certificates played their part in enabling me to dispense with the qualities displayed by my father and grandfather. I left school and headed to Oxford with my A Level certificates and my
top-of-the-class references. I graduated without being given a certificate proving I had even been there. I had entered a way of life in which certificates and recommendations were silently and
invisibly assumed and so could be dispensed with.

My deepest sense of kinship with my family is activated by this form of my grandfather’s – not just my love: my class feeling, my ambition, my loyalty. That form – army
certificate Z. 18 – is why this book has the shape – the form – it does.

‘
Tenderness: something on animals and pity, something on tenderness . . .’

In footage and photographs of the war there are horses everywhere. So many of them it is easy to think you are watching an early Western, set in an especially dismal period of
the American Civil War. In St Jude’s Church, Hampstead, there is a memorial to the 375,000 horses killed in the war. In
All Quiet on the Western Front
, after an artillery barrage,
the air is full of the screams of wounded horses. The belly of one of them is ripped open. He becomes tangled in his intestines and trips, stumbles to his feet again. ‘I tell you,’ says
one of the soldiers, ‘it is the vilest baseness to use horses in the war.’
¹¹

The cries that fill the air are worse than those of men who ‘could not cry so terribly’. The soldiers ‘can bear almost anything’; but this, claims the narrator, Paul, in
a passage that anticipates Picasso’s
Guernica
, ‘is unendurable. It is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation, wild with anguish, filled with terror, and
groaning.’