The Missing of the Somme (2 page)

Things were, of course, less settled than the habitual view
of pre-August 1914 tempts us to believe. For many contemporary observers the war tainted the past, revealing and
making explicit a violence that had been latent in the preceding peace. Eighty years on, this sense of crouched and gathering violence has been all but totally filtered out of our perception of the
pre-war period. Militant suffragettes, class unrest, strikes, Ireland teetering on the brink of civil war – all are shaded and softened by the long, elegiac shadows cast by the war.

European civilization may have been ‘breaking down even before war destroyed it’, but our abiding sense of the quietness of the Edwardian frame of mind is, overwhelmingly, derived
from and enhanced by the holocaust that followed it. The glorious summer of 1914 seems, even, to have been generated by the cataclysm that succeeded it.

In a persuasive passage, Johan Huizinga admonished the historian to

But history does not lie uniformly over events. Here and there it forms drifts – and these drifts are at their deepest between the years 1914 and 1918. Watching footage of
the Normandy landings, we can experience D-Day
as it happened
. History hangs in the balance, waiting to be made. The Battle of the Somme, by contrast, is deeply buried in its own
aftermath. The euphoric intoxication of the early days of the French Revolution – ‘Bliss was it in that dawn’ – remains undiminished by the terror lying
in wait a few chapters on. The young men queuing up to enlist in 1914 have the look of ghosts. They are queuing up to be slaughtered: they are already dead. By Huizinga’s terms,
the Great War urges us to write the opposite of history: the story of effects generating their cause.

These incantatory rhythms and mantra-like repetitions are intoned every year on Remembrance Day. They are words we hear but rarely see in print. We know them – more or
less – by heart. They seem not to have been written but to have pulsed into life in the nation’s collective memory, to have been generated, down the long passage of years, by the
hypnotic spell of Remembrance they are used to induce.

But they
were
written, of course, by Laurence Binyon, in September 1914:
before
the fallen actually fell. ‘For the Fallen’, in other words, is a work not of
remembrance but of anticipation, or more accurately, the
anticipation of remembrance
: a foreseeing that is also a determining.

On 22 August 1917 at Pilkem Ridge near Ypres, Ernest Brooks took one of the iconographic photographs of the Great War. Head bowed, rifle on his back, a soldier is silhouetted against the going
down of the sun, looking at the grave of a dead comrade, remembering him. A photograph from the war – the Battle of Third Ypres (or Passchendaele as it is better known) was still raging, the
armistice was fifteen months
distant – it is also a photograph of the way the war will come to be remembered. It is a photograph of the future, of the future’s view
of the past. It is a photograph of Binyon’s poem, of a sentiment. We
will
remember them.

If several of the terms by which we remember the war were established in advance of its conclusion, many crucial elements were embodied in a single dramatic event two years
before it started.

Between November 1911 and January 1912 two teams of men – one British, headed by a naval officer, Robert Falcon Scott, the other Norwegian, headed by Roald Amundsen
– were engaged in the last stage of a protracted race to the South Pole. Using dogs and adapting themselves skilfully to the hostile environment, the Norwegian team reached the
Pole on 15 December and returned safely. Scott, leader of an ill-prepared expedition which relied on strength-sapping man-hauling, reached the Pole on 17 January. Defeated, the five-man team faced
a gruelling 800-mile trudge back to safety. By 21 March, eleven miles from the nearest depot of food and fuel, the three exhausted surviving members of the expedition – Scott, Dr Edward
Wilson and Henry Bowers – pitched their tent and sat out a blizzard. At some point Scott seems to have made the decision that it was better to stay put and preserve the record of their
struggle rather than die in their tracks. They survived for at least nine days while Scott, in Roland Huntford’s phrase, ‘prepared his exit from the stage’ and addressed letters
to posterity: ‘We are setting a good example to our countrymen, if not by getting into a tight place, by facing it like men when we get there.’ Despite its failure, the expedition,
wrote Scott, ‘has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past’. The tradition of heroic death which
aggrandizes his own example is also invigorated by it: ‘We are showing that Englishmen can still die with a bold spirit, fighting it out to the end . . . I think this makes an example for
Englishmen of the future.’

On 12 November, in the collapsed tent, the bodies and their documents were found by a rescue party and the legend of Scott of the Antarctic began to take immediate effect. ‘Of their
suffering, hardship and devotion to one another,’ wrote a member of the rescue team, ‘the world will soon know the
deeds that were done were equally as great as any
committed on Battlefield and won the respect and honour of every true Britisher.’

Scott’s headstrong incompetence had actually meant that, from an early stage, the expedition had been riddled by tension. Captain Oates – the ‘very gallant Englishman’ of
legend – had earlier written that ‘if Scott fails to get to the Pole he jolly well deserves it’. Although clad in the guise of scientific discovery, Scott’s expedition
contributed nothing to the knowledge of polar travel unless it was to emphasize ‘the grotesque futility of man-hauling’. But with Scott, futility (the title of one of only a handful of
poems published by Wilfred Owen in his lifetime) becomes an important component of the heroic. That Scott had turned the expedition into an affair of ‘heroism for heroism’s sake’
only enhanced the posthumous glory that greeted news of his death when it reached England on 11 February the following year.

A memorial service ‘for one of the most inefficient of polar expeditions, and one of the worst of polar explorers’ was held at St Paul’s, and Scott’s failure took its
place alongside Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar as a triumphant expression of the British spirit. Scott’s distorting, highly rhetorical version of events was taken up enthusiastically and
unquestioningly by the nation as a whole. At the naval dockyard chapel in Devonport, the sermon emphasized ‘the glory of self-sacrifice, the blessing of failure’. By now the glorious
failure personified by Scott had become a British ideal: a vivid example of how ‘to make a virtue of calamity and dress up incompetence as heroism’.

That the story of Scott anticipates the larger heroic calamity of the Great War hardly needs emphasizing. As a now-forgotten writer put it, he had given his

In Huntingdon, on Armistice Day 1923, a war memorial was unveiled. The statue is of a soldier resting, one foot propped on the wall behind him. The protruding knee supports his left arm which in
turn supports his chin in a quizzical echo of Rodin’s
Thinker
. His other hand steadies the rifle and bayonet propped beside him. The figure was sculpted by Kathleen Scott, widow of
Scott of the Antarctic.

Discussion about the form memorials like this should take was widespread and well advanced before the war ended. By 1917 associations and clubs across the country were meeting
to establish appropriate means of remembrance.
¹
By the early
twenties the nation’s grief had been sculpted into a broadly agreed
form. Although permitting of many variations, this was the form sketched in September 1916 when the
Cornhill Magazine
argued against allegory in favour of ‘simplicity of statement .
. . so that the gazer can see at once that the matter recorded is great and significant, and desires to know more’.

At the end of the war a counter-case was still being made for memorials which would have practical rather than simply poetic value: hospitals, homes, universities. Such proposals were more in
keeping with the mood of 1945 than 1918 when the
need
was for a memorial idiom and architecture unencumbered by questions of utility. In 1945 that architecture and idiom were in place: all
that was needed was to add new names and dates. The real task was to rebuild an economy and infrastructure shattered by war.

Whatever the human cost, the Second World War had an obvious practical purpose and goal – one that became especially clear retrospectively after footage of Hitler’s death camps
became public. After the Great War people had little clear idea of why it had been fought or what had been accomplished except for the loss of millions of lives. This actually made the task of
memorializing the war relatively easy.

Memorials to the Second World War and the Holocaust are still being constructed all over the world; the form they should take is still being debated. Controversy – over the
‘Bomber’ Harris statue in London, for example – punctuates each phase of the Second World War as it is replayed along
the length of its fiftieth anniversary.
The form of memorials to the Great War, by contrast, was agreed on and fixed definitively and relatively quickly. By the mid-thirties the public construction of memory was complete. Since then only
a few memorials have been built: addenda to the text of memory. All that needed to be added was time: time for the past to seep into future memory and take root there.

The exact number of people who died in the Great War will never be known. France and Germany each lost more than a million and a half men; Russia, two million. Three-quarters
of a million of the dead were British – a figure which rises to almost a million when the losses of the Empire as a whole are considered.

During the war the dead were buried haphazardly, often in mass graves. By the time of the great battles of attrition of 1916–17 mass graves were dug in advance of major offensives. Singing
columns of soldiers fell grimly silent as they marched by these gaping pits en route to the front-line trenches. Those who died in the midst of fiercely protracted fighting could lie and rot for
months or years before being buried. Others would be buried in isolated individual graves or small, improvised cemeteries. Sir Edwin Lutyens, one of the architects responsible for the cemeteries we
see today, visited France in 1917 and was moved by the hurriedly constructed wartime graves. On 12 July he jotted down his impressions in a letter to his wife:

Such feelings, as Lutyens himself realized, were transitory; for the future more enduring monuments were needed. Accordingly, after the armistice, under the auspices of the
Imperial War Graves Commission, work began on establishing the cemeteries as permanent memorials to the dead.
²

Despite protests, culminating in a debate at the House of Commons on 4 May 1920 in which the proposals were condemned as ‘hideous and unchristian’, it was decided that there would be
no repatriation or private memorials. All British and Empire soldiers would be buried – or would remain buried – where they fell. Undifferentiated by rank, uniform headstones –
cheaper to produce and easier to preserve than crosses, compatible with a range of religious (dis)belief – would achieve an ‘equality in death’; the name of every soldier who died
would be recorded, either in a cemetery or – where no body was found – on one of a number of memorials. At the base of each headstone there would be space for the next of kin to add
inscriptions of their own.