The Missing of the Somme (7 page)

The role of horses in memorials has historically been to raise St George above the clutches of the dragon or to hoist the victorious general to a more commanding height above
the claims of the
everyday. In either case the horse serves as an additional pedestal.
¹²

In Chipilly, on the Somme, the Memorial to the 58th (London) Division by H. Gauquié is of a soldier and his wounded horse. The horse’s legs have collapsed, its eyes are rolling in
panic. The soldier has one arm around the horse’s neck; with the other he strokes its jaw, using his forearm to support its thrashing head. It takes all the soldier’s strength to
comfort the wounded horse but his lips touch its face as tenderly as a lover’s. Both seem about to sink into the stone mud beneath them.

‘A very good groom and driver. Takes good care of his animals.’

The driver tends the wounded horse he has led into war. Describing himself as ‘a herdsman’ and ‘a shepherd of sheep’, Owen tended his men like ‘a
cattle-driver’. In action the soldiers ‘herded from the blast / Of whizz-bangs’ before dying ‘as cattle’. Widespread in writing from the war, the image of the officer
as shepherd and Other Ranks as sheep is especially suggestive, notes Paul Fussell, ‘when the Other Ranks are wearing their issue sheepskin coats with the fur outside’. As so often
happens in the war, reality runs ahead of metaphor: in 1917 regiments of the French army marched to the front
baa
-ing like lambs on their way to the slaughter.

Earlier in the same year Sassoon had noted that troops on their way to France seemed ‘happy in a bovine way . . . They are not “going out” to
do
things, but to have
things
done
to them.’ In almost identical terms Wyndham Lewis considered that Hemingway had depicted a new kind of man brought into being by the war, a man who
‘lives or affects to live
submerged
. He is in the multitudinous ranks of
those to whom things happen
– terrible things, and of course stoically borne.’

Three quarters of a century later, similar impressions are articulated in a larger historic context by Benedict Anderson:

It is a suggestion confirmed and reinforced by the
way
these numbers met their deaths. Sixty per cent of casualties on the Western Front were from shell-fire, against which shelter was
the infantryman’s only defence. Artillery fire transformed the foot soldier from an active participant in conflict to an almost passive victim of a force unleashed randomly around him.
‘Being shelled,’ Louis Simpson claimed later, ‘is actually the main work of an infantry soldier.’

Even the artillery officers who dispensed death were tools in the hands of the war machine, calibrating and adjusting something whose destructive might was inbuilt and pre-determined. The real
aggressor was industrial technology itself. ‘One does not fight with men against
matériel
,’ the French commander-in-chief, Pétain, was fond of saying; ‘it
is with
matériel
served by men that one makes war.’

If shelling meant that courage would increasingly consist of endurance rather than gallantry, the introduction of gas condemned the soldier to a state of unendurable
helplessness. Once an enemy gun emplacement had been knocked out, the danger from that source ceased immediately. Once a gas attack had been launched, all soldiers – even those who had
initiated it – were simply at the mercy of the elements.

The first lethal gas, chlorine, was an inefficient weapon compared with phosgene and mustard gas which came later. Urinating in a handkerchief and breathing through it – as Robert Ross
persuades his men to do in Timothy Findley’s novel
The Wars
– was often protection enough. Against mustard gas – which attacked the skin and eyes as well as the lungs
– no protection was available. Since it could not be evaded, resisted or fled from, it eliminated the possibility not only of bravery but of
cowardice
, the dark backing which
heroism, traditionally, had depended on to make itself visible.

Mustard gas was designed to torment rather than kill. Eighteen times more powerful than chlorine, phosgene was invisible and lethal – but effective masks soon became available. For their
survival, then, soldiers were at the mercy of the same industrial technology that was evolving new means of destroying them.

The pattern for the century had been set: the warrior of tradition becomes little more than a guinea pig in the warring experiments of factories and laboratories. Cowering becomes heroism in
passive mode. The soldier of the Great War comes increasingly to resemble the civilian sheltering from aerial attack in the Second. ‘The hero became the victim and the victim the hero.’
Men no longer waged war, it has often been
said; war was waged on men. It therefore made no difference if the early zest for war had, by the autumn of 1916, begun to exhaust
itself; by then the conflict had acquired an unstoppable momentum of its own.

All of which tempts us to forget that, in spite of Anderson’s suggestion, the boys marching off to die for their country were hoping to
kill
for their country. We have become so
accustomed to thinking of the slaughter of the war that we forget that the slaughtered were themselves would-be slaughterers. For all their abhorrence of war the poets of protest like Owen, Sassoon
and Graves continued – for very different reasons – to wage it. Dominic Hibberd has pointed out how the official citation for Owen’s Military Cross refers to his having
‘personally manipulated a captured enemy M[achine] G[un] . . . and inflicted considerable losses on the enemy’; in the
Collected Letters
Owen’s family offer a milder
rewrite of the citation, in which he ‘personally captured an enemy Machine Gun . . . and took a number of prisoners’. Sassoon seems to have oscillated between bouts of frenzied violence
and bitter loathing of the war that unleashed this strain in him. Graves recalls that he ‘had never seen such a fire-eater as [Sassoon] – the number of Germans whom I killed or caused
to be killed could hardly be compared with his wholesale slaughter’.

As is so often the case, Barbusse was the first to offer protest in major imaginative form at not simply the suffering the war inflicted on men, but at men’s capacity, in time of war, to
inflict suffering on others. In ‘Dawn’, the final chapter of
Under Fire
, a soldier sums up himself and his fellows as ‘incredibly pitiful wretches, and savages as well,
brutes, robbers, and dirty devils’. A little later one of the group of ‘sufferers’
says simply: ‘We’ve been murderers.’ Together the group of
suffering murderers cries ‘shame on the soldier’s calling that changes men by turn into stupid victims or ignoble brutes’.

One of the reasons for the war’s enduring power is the way that, in the midst of so much brutality and carnage, compassion and kindness not only failed to wither but often
flowered.

The most moving episodes in the war always involve the awakening of a sense of the enemy’s shared humanity. Often this is initiated by the simplest gesture – an enemy soldier
offering prisoners cigarettes or a drink from his canteen. On Christmas Day 1914 there was a truce along the whole length of the Western Front. In some circumstances, especially where the gap
between the two lines of trenches was small, this became tacitly extended into the ‘live and let live’ policy whereby each side refrained from antagonizing the other. ‘For either
side to bomb the other,’ Charles Sorley had realized as early as July 1915,

Most poignant of all are the occasions when tenderness springs directly from an appalled awareness of the pain inflicted on
the enemy. A German battalion
commander recalls that after the British began their retreat from the battlefield at Loos in September 1915, ‘no shot was fired at them from the German trenches for the rest of the day, so
great was the feeling of compassion and mercy for the enemy after such a victory.’

Henry Williamson remembers coming across

Episodes like these are scattered throughout memoirs and oral testimonies from the war. Civilians bayed for blood and victory; combatants, meanwhile, had become passive instruments of their
nations’ will. In the words of Arthur Bryant:

In
Under Fire
the shattered survivors of French and German units sleep side by side in the mud. This moment of
exhausted solidarity is then worked up into the
climactic vision of fraternity in which war will have no place. The experience of the trenches gives rise to Barbusse’s socialist-pacifist vision of a possible future. In this light the
mutinies that rocked the French army in the spring of 1917 were like grumbling premonitions of revolution. The mutinies were suppressed, discipline was restored, conditions – food, leave
– were improved. A similar configuration of experience, however, could lead to a more violently protracted form of discontent as there emerged from the conflict ‘men whom the war had
ruined . . . who incorporated the renovating ideals of the socialist tradition, the cult of the earth, the taste of violence that had grown in the mud of the trenches.’

‘That was a laugh,’ remarked a German soldier on being told the war was over. ‘We ourselves are the war.’

In London the Armistice Day ceremonies of 1921 had been disrupted by a demonstration by the unemployed, whose placards read: ‘The Dead are remembered but we are
forgotten.’ In one of his
Last Poems
, published posthumously in 1932 (the year after Blunden’s edition of Owen), D. H. Lawrence presents a prophetic vision of the deepening
depression and political unrest of the thirties as an expression of the ‘disembodied rage’ of the dead who died in vain, who ‘moan and throng in anger’. Never explicitly
identified with the war, these ‘unhappy dead’ are yet impossible to disassociate from it. Set on a ‘day of the dead’ in November, the poem makes it seem as if the army of
the surrogate dead that marched past the Cenotaph has now joined the massed ranks of the disillusioned, the unemployed, the dispossessed. The war that
was to end all wars will
lead inexorably to another, a world made safe for democracy seethes with this betrayal of the discontented dead:

In the face of unemployment, inflation and the other indignities and privations of peacetime, the shared suffering of the trenches offered an almost mythic embodiment of total belonging: the
immersion of the individual within a rigidly hierarchical community of equals. For the movement that articulated this ideal in Germany, peace was a continuation of the war by means which,
ultimately, led to its full-scale resumption after a simmering twenty-year interlude.

Sassoon had noted how soldiers became almost happy in the knowledge that they were abandoning their own volition to the directives of the army; Nazism subsumed the individual will to the will of
the Reich, the Führer. An ideological imperative was built from the martial ideal of obedience which the army had instilled in its soldiers.

‘The Third Reich comes from the trenches,’ said Rudolf Hess. But so too does the end of the idea of obedience as unequivocally heroic. A British survivor of the Somme remembers
how