Geoff Dyer - The Missing of the Somme

Oh, but beware, beware the angry dead.

Who knows, who knows how much our modern woe is due to the angry, unappeased dead

that were thrust out of life, and now come back at us malignant, malignant, for we will not succour them.

In the face of unemployment, inflation and the other indignities and privations of peacetime, the shared suffering of the trenches offered an almost mythic embodiment of total belonging: the immersion of the individual within a rigidly hierarchical community of equals. For the movement that articulated this ideal in Germany, peace was a continuation of the war by means which, ultimately, led to its full-scale resumption after a simmering twenty-year interlude.

Sassoon had noted how soldiers became almost happy in the knowledge that they were abandoning their own volition to the directives of the army; Nazism subsumed the individual will to the will of the Reich, the Führer. An ideological imperative was built from the martial ideal of obedience which the army had instilled in its soldiers.

‘The Third Reich comes from the trenches,’ said Rudolf Hess. But so too does the end of the idea of obedience as unequivocally heroic. A British survivor of the Somme remembers how

the war changed me — it changed us all. . Everybody ought to have this military training. It would do them good and make them obedient. Some of the young men now, they need obedience. They don’t know what it is. Our lives were all obedience.

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:

10495 PRIVATE

A. INGHAM

MANCHESTER REGIMENT

1ST DECEMBER 1916

SHOT AT DAWN

ONE OF THE FIRST TO ENLIST

A WORTHY SON

OF HIS FATHER

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:

My father was highly decorated in the First World War — DSM, MM and three times mentioned in dispatches. But his greatest pride was in the time when, escorting a deserter to death at dawn, he let him escape. This was not a latterday judgement, but that of one who had been involved in all the perils of the front line, and lost a limb in the process.

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,