The Missing of the Somme (8 page)

The passage contains its own implicit contradiction, yielding where it seeks to uphold, tacitly acknowledging that it was precisely the experience of the Great War that brought obedience and
servitude into tainted proximity. Henceforth obedience would have some of the qualities of submission and complicity – culminating, for victims and perpetrators alike, in the Holocaust
– and all heroism would have about it some of the quality of refusal, rebellion and – a key term in the next war –
resistance
. D. H. Lawrence had noticed this submissive
quality of courage among recruits in Cornwall: ‘They are all so brave, to suffer,’ he wrote in July 1916, ‘but none of them brave enough, to reject suffering.’

Perhaps the real heroes of 1914–18, then, are those who refused to obey and to fight, who actively rejected the passivity forced upon them by the war, who reasserted their right not to
suffer, not to have things done to them.

Which is why, despite a series of diversions, wrong turnings and U-turns, I made such an effort to find the village of Bailleulmont.

In the communal cemetery there, tucked away from the tangle of civilian graves, is a group of military headstones.
Unusually, they are made of brown stone, on one of which is
inscribed:

Like over 300 others, four of the soldiers buried here in Bailleulmont were shot for desertion or cowardice. Two of them – Ingham and Alfred Longshaw – were friends
who served together – at the Somme – deserted together, were executed together and now lie together. For years Ingham’s family believed he had simply ‘died of wounds’
– as the inscriptions on the headstones of other executed men maintain – but when his father was informed of the truth he insisted on this inscription being added to the headstone.

A campaign was recently mounted to have executed deserters pardoned. A letter printed in the
Independent
provides a vivid illustration of the extent to which our idea of heroism has
changed:

The deserter’s grave has become a hero’s grave; pride has come to reside not in the carrying out of duty but in its humane dereliction.
¹³

‘I’ve seen ’em, I’ve seen ’em . . .’

The war goes on, silently, visibly. The same faces, the same ground. Men march up to the front, waving steel helmets. Artillery barrages. Lots of carrying: ammunition, shells,
supplies. Larking around in the trenches. Lunch. More marching. More artillery. The attack. The first few prisoners brought in. The odd casualty. The landscape taking a pounding (with special
emphasis on mine craters). A rubbled village. Walking wounded returning. Troops coming back with prisoners, miserable shaven-headed Hun . . .

I am in the Imperial War Museum, watching a compilation of documentary films from the war. Each film seems identical to all the others. Their form is as fixed as the gridlock of trenches in
which they are set.

The camera stops everything. Soldiers can’t keep their eyes off it. During a pre-battle service no one listens to the
padre: everyone is too busy watching the camera.
Watching and grinning. The war is a grinning contest which the allies are winning (Jerry can only muster a weary smile). Only the most badly wounded – whom we never actually see – can
resist grinning at the camera. Being so camera-conscious gives rise, inevitably, to some strikingly bad acting. Never more so than in the famous faked sequence of troops apparently going over the
top in
The Battle of the Somme
(first shown, to a public horrified by its realism, on 21 August 1916) which was actually filmed at a training ground. A soldier falls, dies, looks back to
the camera and then folds his arms neatly across his chest.

The smoking, by contrast, is entirely convincing. At any time at least half the people in shot are puffing away. They smoke so much you suspect they are trying to build up resistance to possible
gas attacks. To our eyes these films are vintage cigarette ads – especially since a good proportion of these smokers are only days or hours away from getting blown to bits and so the
possibility of developing lung cancer in twenty years is a luxurious pipedream. Still, what with smoking, gas, artillery, noise, damp and generally poor conditions of hygiene and sanitation, war,
in these films, seems characterized by a general disregard for the health of the soldier.

All the more remarkable, then, that nothing too serious results from it. Gilbert Adair has pointed out that in Hollywood films of the Vietnam War ‘every American character who happens to
find himself within the camera’s field of vision is
already
in danger’. In this documentary view of the First World War the camera frame is a safe haven, a refuge from danger.
To be on film is to be out of harm’s way.

Hardly anyone dies and they’re all Germans anyway. As
for the Tommies they have the odd arm wound, sometimes a head bandage, usually just a limp. After the battle
friend and foe alike tramp back together – Tommy supporting Fritz – as if from a fiercely contested rugby match in atrocious conditions. After the game it’s all handshakes,
friendliness and slapstick fraternization: a British soldier changes hats with a German prisoner (the title reads ‘Tommy and Fritz change hats’). Everyone looks on. All in all the
battles of the Somme and Ancre look pretty harmless affairs.

Harmless and, from an allied point of view, entirely successful. The role of the German army is to suffer terrible bombardment and then surrender in numbers so vast the whole army must have been
rounded up by 1917 at the latest.

So it goes on. Everyone looks the same. Everywhere looks the same. Every battle looks the same. And so, while titles and maps give an impression of a succession of easy victories, the films
undermine themselves: if it’s all so straightforward, why this need to fight another identical battle, over an identical patch of ground a few months later? What we end up with is, as Samuel
Hynes almost accurately puts it,

Destiny is the wrong word here, for it implies a purpose, a goal, and thereby contradicts his main point that ‘nothing really
happens
’. Not a destiny, then, but a
condition
.

After a couple of hours of this condition I am stupefied by boredom. My interest is revived briefly by a sequence showing an officer in cavalry uniform – cap, boots,
riding coat,
riding
a tank. An innovation so novel that on titles the word is always flanked by inverted commas, the ‘tank’ is the real star of these films. Ugly, slow, it
lumbers up to the battlefield and then lumbers back again, unscathed and terrifying, an ungainly iron beetle. A bucking beetle, an iron bronco rather, for as it dips and grinds over the cratered
field the officer perched atop tries desperately to keep a stiff upper body.

After this humorous interlude the war reverts to the plodding, plotless norm. The same faces, the same ground. I imagined I could watch footage endlessly and am surprised by my longing for
modern documentary framing, for the raw material of history to be recut, edited down further, reshaped and contextualized. I almost find myself wishing there were a few of those interviews with
ageing generals (‘Yes, I like to think I did for them both with my plan of attack.’) that I’d hated in
The World at War
.

The war goes on, silently, visibly. The same faces, the same ground. A title says something about our tireless armies marching without rest and I feel I’m the tireless viewer yomping
without pause through the battles of Ancre, the Somme, Arras – I’ve long stopped noticing which is which or taking notes. I sit for another quarter of an hour, slumping deeper and
deeper in my chair. Eventually I can bear it no longer. I get up, bang on the projectionist’s door and plead, ‘O Jesus, make it stop!’

He is only too happy to call a truce. He can knock off a bit early for lunch too. Live and let live. As I walk out I
half expect to be presented with a white feather by more
diligent researchers.

This is what the war is like for us. We can stop it at will. We gaze at photographs of soldiers in the trenches. Snow, dirt, cold, death. When we have been there long enough, we get up and
leave, turn the page and move on.

The war was filmed at 16 to 18 frames per second on hand-cranked cameras. Modern projectors – like the one in the museum’s screening room – run at 24 frames
per second and so the action flickers quickly by.

As part of an installation in the museum’s main building a special projector has been set up to show an endless loop of parts of
The Battle of the Somme
at the correct speed. Men
marching to the front, survivors limping back. This is the middle segment of that continuous line of men first seen entraining for France and glimpsed later winding its way past the Cenotaph. An
endless loop: a river of men, moving towards death. They are dead and they are going to die. Marching to the front, endlessly, so slowly that they never cease marching. In Craiglockhart, Sassoon
remembered the war in an almost identical image:

Because the original cameras were hand-cranked, it is impossible to synchronize the projector exactly. Consequently the action is often slower than it should be. Like a photo
taken at a shutter speed so slow it actually moves, the picture ‘ghosts’.

‘The past is never dead,’ wrote William Faulkner. ‘It’s not even past.’

Before going over the top, an officer said that his men ‘seemed more or less in a trance’. Charles Bean, the official Australian historian of the war, noted that after action
‘the men appeared to be walking in a dream and their eyes looked glassy and starey’. Another survivor recalls going through battle ‘like a sleepwalker’. David Jones notes of
combat-weary soldiers that ‘they come as sleepwalkers whose bodies go unbidden of the mind, without malevolence, seeking only rest’.
¹⁴

In Manning’s
The Middle Parts of Fortune
, a company of men are about to march to the front to join a major offensive on the Somme. The men looked at each other ‘with strange
eyes, while the world became unreal and empty, and they moved in a mystery, where no help was’. When the order to move off is given there comes

In one of the best passages in his memoirs, Sassoon watched an exhausted Division
returning
from an offensive on the Somme:

Sassoon was ‘overawed’ by what he had witnessed; it seemed as though he ‘had watched an army of ghosts’. In that characteristic wartime attitude of projected retrospect
Sassoon felt he ‘had seen the war as it might be envisioned by some epic poet a hundred years hence’. Almost ninety years later this film is the epic, endless poem of the war.

Bearing a wounded comrade over his shoulder, a soldier floats towards the camera. Silent, ghostlike, slow.

Watching the sleep-walking figures we enter dream time, dead time: the remembered dreams of the dead.

A river of men, flowing towards death. Marching to the front, endlessly. Survivors limping back, lessly.

One thing emerges plainly from all this footage: war, for the ordinary soldier, was a continuation of labouring by other means. The battlefield was a vast open-air factory
where hours were long, unions not permitted and safety standards routinely flouted. It thereby combined the worst aspects of agricultural labour and industrial shiftwork. The ‘mysterious army
of horsemen, ploughmen and field workers who’, in Ronald Blythe’s words, ‘fled the wretchedness of the land in 1914’ discovered, in Flanders, an intensification of
wretchedness. Miners found themselves engaged in exactly the same activity they had pursued in peacetime – except here their aim in burrowing beneath the earth was to lay hundreds of pounds
of high explosive beneath the enemy’s feet. The Germans, meanwhile, were engaged in similar operations and sometimes the two tunnel systems broke through to each other. Hundreds of feet
beneath the earth ‘men clawed at each other’s throats in these tunnels and beat each other to death with picks and shovels’.