Geoff Dyer - The Missing of the Somme

We drive into Passchendaele. The power of this name has not diminished with the years. As words, ‘Auschwitz’ and ‘Dachau’ have become over-burdened by their rhetorical power as synonyms for evil. If not in print then certainly in conversation Belsen has become a common metaphor for extreme skinniness. Passchendaele, despite the carnage associated with it, is rarely heard except to designate the Battle of Third Ypres. Instead of passing into common linguistic currency, then, these place-names have acquired an almost sacred ring. They have perhaps become over-loaded with holiness, especially Passchendaele. For those who were there, Passchendaele was so awful, so horrific, that it became almost a joke. Paul reads aloud the accounts of two survivors quoted by Lyn Macdonald: ‘Tuesday, 2 October. Back in the battery again, but what have we come back to? Passchendaele!’ Another recalls that

the names were so sinister — Zonnebeke — Hill 60 — Zillebeke — the names terrified you before you got there, they had such a sinister ring about them. Then to end up making for Passchendaele was the last straw.

This tone of disaffected endurance is not confined to place-names.

Paul Fussell sees the war, via Hardy, as a huge ‘satire of circumstance’ in which irony emerges as the only adequate mode of expression. Hence, he notes satirically, ‘ The Oxford Book of War Poetry might just as well be titled The Oxford Book of Satire .’ The war for Fussell is a text which he has read more perceptively and persuasively than anyone else. The participants are consequently judged in literary terms: Haig is reproved for a ‘want of imagination and innocence of artistic culture’; the ‘hopeless absence of cleverness’ about one of his plans is ‘entirely characteristic of its author ’. In such company ‘it is refreshing to turn to a wittier tradition’, to Sir Herbert Plumer, for example, ‘a sort of intellectual’s hero of the British Great War’. Not surprisingly the war demanded from its generals ‘the military equivalent of wit and invention’ — exactly the qualities so abundantly displayed by a ‘sophisticated observer’ like Fussell himself. For Fussell, in short, irony is synonymous with sophistication — which makes it especially ironic that the war’s most deeply ironic mode is probably the ‘mustn’t grumble’ proletarian grumble. (Sassoon did not simply try to depict the war in realist terms; he tried to find a poetic diction of moaning .)

Of the prose writers it is Frederic Manning who — despite a tendency to lop off every aspirate in sight — has best conveyed this pervasive idiom:

‘What ’appened to Shem?’ [Bourne] asked.

‘Went back. Wounded in the foot.’

‘’e were wounded early on, when Jerry dropped the barrage on us,’ explained Minton, stolidly precise as to facts.

‘That bugger gets off everything with ’is feet,’ said Sergeant Tozer.

‘’e were gettin’ off with ’is ’ands an’ knees when I seed ’im,’ said Minton, phlegmatically.

Trench songs like ‘The Old Battalion’, used to famous effect in Oh What a Lovely War , are musical elaborations of exactly this brand of deadpan resignation. First performed by Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in 1963, Oh What a Lovely War reached a wider audience in 1969 when it was filmed by Richard Attenborough. I half saw the film a couple of times, but, disliking music hall and the theatre in equal measure, it never made any impression on me. It wasn’t until I read it as a text — in wilful defiance, as Sassoon might have put it, of a prefatory note which warns that ‘this is a play script and should be read as such’ — that I found a version I could respond to. The satirical attacks on Haig and the generals still seem to rely on crude caricature, but the trench scenes contain some of the best writing about the war. Writers may have resorted to irony, but the soldiers here rely on its more humane equivalent: the piss-take.

On Christmas Eve the Germans sing ‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht’; the British respond with a carol of their own:

It was Christmas day in the cookhouse,

The happiest day of the year,

Men’s hearts were full of gladness

And their bellies full of beer,

When up spoke Private Shorthouse,

His face as bold as brass,

Saying, ‘We don’t want your Christmas pudding

You can stick it up your. .’

Tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy. .

In the course of the play almost all of the themes touched on in this book are dealt with in similar style. In place of a meditation on Gassed we have:

They’re warning us, they’re warning us,

One respirator for the four of us.

Thank your lucky stars that three of us can run,

So one of us can use it all alone.

Listening to ‘those poor wounded bleeders moaning in noman’s-land’, a soldier notes that it ‘sounds like a cattle market’. The literary endeavours of the writer-soldiers — and the birth of the war’s written mythology — receive similarly short shrift:

SECOND SOLDIER: What’s he doing?

THIRD SOLDIER: Writing to his lady love.

SECOND SOLDIER: Oh blimey! Not again.

THIRD SOLDIER: Third volume. My dearest, I waited for you for two hours last night at Hellfire Corner, but you didn’t turn up. Can it be that you no longer love me?

Signed — Harry Hotlips.

SECOND SOLDIER: What’s she like?

FOURTH SOLDIER: Lovely.

SECOND SOLDIER: Is she?

THIRD SOLDIER: Bet she’s got a nose like a five-inch shell.

FOURTH SOLDIER: Shut up will you? I’m trying to concentrate.

FIFTH SOLDIER: You writing for that paper again?

FOURTH SOLDIER: Yes, they don’t seem to realize they’re in at the birth of the Wipers Gazette . Here, do you want to hear what I’ve written?

SECOND SOLDIER: No.

Appropriately and perfectly, the play ends with a song which, like that defining passage in Barbusse, looks ahead to the impossibility of conveying what happened in the trenches:

And when they ask us, and they’re certainly going to ask us,

The reason why we didn’t win the Croix de Guerre,

Oh, we’ll never tell them, oh, we’ll never tell them

There was a front, but damned if we knew where.

Oh What a Lovely War was not ‘written’ in the conventional sense; it grew out of a close collaboration by all the members of the Theatre Workshop. In a characteristic aside Fussell, by contrast, notes that ‘it is really hard to shake off the conviction that this war has been written by someone’. The great value of Lyn Macdonald’s books is that they are not texts so much as carefully arranged accumulations of raw material which have not been ‘worked up’ as they have in Oh What a Lovely War . Preserved in 1914 or Somme are the voices of men — like my grandfather — who never sought to record their experiences on paper. The tropes identified by Fussell are reproduced in a different, ‘lower’ or non-literary register which simultaneously qualifies and verifies many of his claims.

Sassoon’s observation, in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer , that ‘the symbolism of the sunset was wasted on the rank and file’ suggests that Fussell’s elaborate analysis of sunsets has only literary significance — but sunsets bathe the accounts of even the least literary men in a lyric glow. Likewise, Fussell’s lengthy examination of the way the war was ironically underwritten by the sporting spirit is both supported by and wrenched away from its Newboltian public school context by an incident recorded by Macdonald. Lieutenant Patrick King, in the midst of shelling, calls across to see if his men are all right. The reply comes: ‘Aye, all’s reet here, Paddy. We’re still battin’.’