The Missing of the Somme

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my friends Paul Bonaventura, Chris Mitchell and Mark Hayhurst for reading an early draft of the manuscript and making many useful suggestions. (I am especially indebted to Mark whose quick reactions prevented us from getting killed — thanks to Paul’s reckless driving — in Flanders.)

I am grateful to the editors of Esquire, the Independent, the Observer and New Statesman & Society for giving me space to try out draft versions of some of these pages; also to Patrick Early for the opportunity to lecture (in Belgrade of all places) on Wilfred Owen — and to David Punter for his helpful response to that lecture.

Thanks also to Ian Watson in Paris for encouragment and provocative suggestions, to Jeremy Young for his photographs, to Jane Pugh for the loan of an album of pictures, and to Xandra Hardie, Charles Drazin and Alexandra Pringle.

An award from the Kay Blundell Trust enabled me to complete the manuscript.

My ongoing debt to John Berger is too extensive to be adequately acknowledged here.