The Missing of the Somme

ENDNOTES

1. As early as 1915 the Church Crafts League was making ‘a special effort to direct the pious intentions of bereaved relatives into the proper channels’. On 8 January 1916 the Civic Arts Association held a conference on how best to ensure that the dead were suitably remembered. Six months later the same association organized ‘An Exhibition of Designs for War Memorials’. In the same year the Royal Academy set up a committee of influential architects and sculptors to offer guidance on the aesthetics of remembrance. The following June various public bodies met at the Royal Academy ‘to secure combined instead of isolated efforts in erecting memorials and to protect churches and public buildings from unsuitable treatment in setting up monuments of the war’.

2. Until 1917 the Imperial War Graves Commission was known as the Graves Registration Commission; in 1960 it became the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

3. Bertrand’s words are echoed by those of an actual French soldier, Sergeant Marc Boassoan, who wrote to his wife in a letter of July 1916: ‘What kind of a nation will they make of us tomorrow, these exhausted creatures, emptied of blood, emptied of thought, crushed by superhuman fatigue?’

4. The anaesthetized solemnity of this process of selection is savagely undermined by John Dos Passos in Nineteen Nineteen, the second volume of his USA trilogy:

In the tarpaper morgue at Châlons-sur-Marne in the reek of chloride of lime and the dead, they picked out the pine box that held all that was left of

enie menie minie moe plenty other pine boxes stacked up there containing what they’d scraped up of Richard Roe

and other person or persons unknown. Only one can go. How did they pick John Doe?

Make sure he ain’t a dinge, boys.

make sure he ain’t a guinea or a kike,

how can you tell a guy’s a hundredpercent when all you’ve got’s a gunnysack full of bones, bronze buttons stamped with the screaming eagle and a pair of roll puttees?

. . and the gagging chloride and the puky dirtstench of the yearold dead. .

5. Bertrand Tavernier’s Life and Nothing But ends with Major Dellaplane’s (Philippe Noiret) calculation that it would take the French dead eleven days and nights to march up the Champs-Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe.

6. This scrupulous recording of the dead was due both to the unprecedented scale of loss and to the fact that those who died, whether volunteers or conscripts, were, for the most part, citizen-soldiers. The principle of honouring the war dead individually can be traced back to the French Revolution and the dawn of the citizen-army — but it was not until the Great War that the dead were comprehensively commemorated. Although there were exceptions, the common soldier before 1914 was, in George Mosse’s words, ‘treated as part of an anonymous collectivity’. The Great War was the first to give equal honour to all the dead, officers and men alike.

7. inter alia: 1926: Herbert Read, In Retreat; 1928: Edmund Bunden, Undertones of War; Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man; E. E. Cummings, The Enormous Room; Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front; Richard Aldington, Death of a Hero; Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That; Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms; Ernst Junger, Storm of Steel; 1930: Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer; Frederic Manning, Her Privates We.

8. In the course of writing the review of Stallworthy’s biography from which both these quotations are taken, Larkin took the opportunity, in a letter, to offer a succinct opinion of the much more detailed picture of Owen we now have: ‘W. O. seems rather a prick, really, yet the poems stay good. A brave prick, of course. You wouldn’t catch me waving a revolver at 30 Germans and getting the M C thereby. But not the sort of poetic Angel of Mons (Somme rather) of legend.’

9. This contrasts sharply with the American Civil War; T. H. O’Sullivan’s 1863 photograph, ‘A Harvest of Death’, for example, showed the fields of Gettysburg strewn with dead.

10. In an early visit to the Imperial War Museum photographic department I began to suspect that this ‘cover-up’ was continuing into the present day. Photos from the Great War are catalogued by subject and, despite extensive filings under ‘Destruction’, there was no classification for ‘Dead’ or ‘Injured’ or any other heading I could think of. By chance I came across a photo of a dead soldier. Beneath it was typed, ‘Transferred to Casualty Album’. In red handwriting another note read: ‘Not for sale or reproduction’. Having established the correct generic term I moved back to the subject catalogues, but — as I thought — there was no Casualty Album. Feeling certain that I had stumbled upon a classic example of the missing-file conspiracy I explained to one of the assistants, in tones of baffled innocence, that I couldn’t seem to find the so-called Casualty Album.

‘Ah, the Casualty Album,’ he said. ‘It’s next door. I’ll get it for you right away, Mr Dyer.’ The injunction in red, it turns out, dated from the twenties so that relatives of the dead would not come across photographs of mutilated loved ones in the morning paper. It had long since been waived; stored separately as a gesture of decorum the file itself was on my desk within minutes of asking for it.

11. The contrary view is put forward in Cormac McCarthy’s novel All the Pretty Horses: ‘He spoke of his campaigns in the deserts of Mexico and he told them of horses killed under him and he said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war. Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.’

12. The last equestrian statue to be erected in London was of Earl Haig, in 1934.

13. On 15 May 1994 a memorial inscribed ‘To all those who have established and are maintaining the right to refuse to kill’ was unveiled in Tavistock Square, London. The inscription continues: ‘Their foresight and courage give us hope.’

14. In another evocative phrase a few pages later Jones writes of ‘fog-walkers’.

15. Eventually, perhaps, the experience of the war did find expression in the most representative work of a sculptor whose distinguishing characteristic was, precisely, the elision of the figurative and the abstract. Henry Moore joined the army in 1916, when he was eighteen. He served as a machine-gunner and was gassed at Cambrai in November 1917. After being hospitalized for two months, he became an instructor in bayonet drill. Anthony Barnett has hinted at the significance of this experience for the ‘sculptor who discovered the hole’. More generally, Barnett suggests that it is Moore’s experience of the war that ‘vividly explains, and is expressed by, the terrible stare and the crippled posture shared by his reclining figures’. If Moore’s reclining men were scattered over a landscape, we would be ‘at the site of a massacre’. Barnett’s argument is subtle and provocative rather than trenchant or definitive. He is at pains to point out that while Moore’s characteristic work ‘must be seen as in some way incorporating [his war] experience’ it cannot be ‘reduced to a response to the war’. Moore’s work should be contrasted with memorials which, typically, view the war as ‘a tragic eruption into an otherwise pleasant society’. As noted, war, for working-class soldiers, was a continuation of labour by other means, an amplification and intensification of the misery inflicted by mine and factory. Moore was a miner’s son and he responded to the war not with protest but as ‘a witness to a way of life that at one moment found expression in masswarfare’. The condition of his figures is one of resignation to forces that overwhelm but can never crush them.

16. Many of these books only attracted the attention they did in the wake of the renewed interest in the war generated by the phenomenal success of All Quiet. In May 1929 Richard Aldington sent a telegram to his American agent: ‘Referring great success Journey’s End and German war novels urge earliest fall publication Death of a Hero to take advantage of public mood. Large scale English war novel might go big now.’

17. The rubbish-tip controversy has obvious echoes with the fuss in 1981 over the then Labour leader Michael Foot turning up for the Remembrance Day Service at the Cenotaph wearing a donkey jacket. According to the Daily Telegraph, Foot laid his wreath ‘with all the reverent dignity of a tramp bending down to inspect a cigarette end’.

18. A monument to ‘the untellable’, it is also, strangely and appropriately, unphotographable. No photograph can convey its scale, its balance, its overwhelming effect on the senses.