Geoff Dyer - The Missing of the Somme

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’.

when

Will kindness have such power again?

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,

would be a useless violation of the unwritten laws that govern the relations of combatants permanently within a hundred yards of distance from each other, who have found out that to provide discomfort for the other is but a roundabout way of providing it for themselves.

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

a Saxon boy crushed under a shattered tank, moaning ‘Mutter, Mutter, Mutter,’ out of ghastly grey lips. A British soldier, wounded in the leg, and sitting nearby, hearing the words, and dragging himself to the dying boy, takes his cold hand and says: ‘All right, son, it’s all right. Mother’s here with you.’

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:

German civilians sang specially composed hymns of hate against England and, in the most civilized country in the world, quiet inoffensive English gentlemen and ladies who had never seen a blow struck in anger scouted the very mention of peace and spoke of the whole German race as they would of a pack of wild beasts. Only in the battleline itself was there no hatred: only suffering and endurance: death and infinite waste.

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: