Geoff Dyer - The Missing of the Somme

We head south, following the Western Front down towards the Somme. We entertain ourselves by singing ‘The Old Battalion’ or conversing in a pseudo Great War lingo. Paul and I address Mark as Private Hayhurst and prefix everything with an officerly ‘I say’ or ‘Look here’. For his part Mark, while adopting the tones of the loyal batman, is actually a scrimshanker who does nothing except sit in the back reading Death’s Men . Our hotel is a ‘billet’. The forthcoming night in the boozer is referred to as ‘the show’ or ‘stunt’. None of us is quite sure whether we’re on a gloomy holiday or a rowdy pilgrimage.

We are not the first to be uncertain on this score. During the twenties the British Legion and the St Barnabas Society organized subsidized trips to enable relatives of the dead who could not afford the journey to make a pilgrimage to the cemeteries where their loved ones lay.

Helen Turrell makes such a pilgrimage in Kipling’s haunting, lovely story ‘The Gardener’. Helen has brought up her nephew Michael ever since his father — her brother — died in India. Michael is killed in the war and buried in Hagenzeele Third Military Cemetery. It is a huge cemetery and only a few hundred of the twenty thousand graves are yet marked by white headstones; the rest are marked by ‘a merciless sea of black crosses’. Overwhelmed by the wilderness of graves, Helen approaches a man who is kneeling behind a row of headstones. ‘Evidently a gardener’, the man asks who she is looking for and Helen gives her nephew’s name.

The man lifted his eyes and looked at her with infinite compassion before he turned from the fresh-sown grass towards the naked black crosses.

‘Come with me,’ he said, ‘and I will show you where your son lies.’

The story all but ends there, with the words of this Christlike figure. A three-line epilogue records that when Helen left the cemetery she looked back and saw the man bending over his plants once again, ‘supposing him to be the gardener’.

Like Helen, most of the pilgrims were bereaved women, but their numbers soon came to include veterans wanting to revisit the battlefields. Comforts were few on such trips, but there were also large numbers of visitors who wanted — and were willing to pay for — a less arduous and sombre trip around the trenches and cemeteries of France and Flanders: tourists, in short. In another instance of historical projection these battlefield tours had already been bitterly satirized by Philip Johnstone in his poem ‘High Wood’, first published in February 1918:

Madame, please,

You are requested kindly not to touch

Or take away the Company’s property

As souvenirs; you’ll find we have on sale

A large variety, all guaranteed.

As I was saying, all is as it was,

This is an unknown British officer,

The tunic having lately rotted off.

Please follow me — this way. .

the path , sir, please . .

Lyn Macdonald is perhaps exaggerating when she describes Ypres in 1920 as ‘the booming mecca of the first mass-explosion of tourism in history’, but in 1930 a hundred thousand people signed the visitors’ book at the Menin Gate in just three months. Many came in the spirit of Johnstone’s visitors or Abe North, who, in the Newfoundland Memorial Park, showers Dick Diver and Rosemary in a mock grenade attack of ‘earth gobs and pebbles’; many more departed in the spirit of Dick himself who ‘picked up a retaliatory handful of stones and then put them down.

‘“I couldn’t kid here,” he said rather apologetically.’

Understandably as well as apologetically, for few novels are as saturated with the memory of the Great War as Tender is the Night . Dick himself sums up this central concern of the book with the ‘half-ironic phrase, “Non-Combatant’s shell-shock”’.

On the first page, as Dick makes his way to Zurich in 1917, he passes ‘long trains of blinded or one-legged men, or dying trunks’. The clinic where he first meets Nicole is ‘a refuge for the broken, the incomplete, the menacing’. Nicole’s mental instability may not be related to the war — ‘the war is over’, she says, ‘and I scarcely knew there was a war’ — but is all the time reminding us of it. Her smile ‘was like all the lost youth in the world’. Lost youth may be a perpetual theme of Fitzgerald’s but there is often a larger historical dimension to our most personal concerns. In 1947, seven years after her husband’s death, Zelda wrote in a letter: ‘I do not know that a personality can be divorced from the times which evoke it. . I feel that Scott’s greatest contribution was the dramatization of a heart-broken + despairing era. .’ In 1917 Fitzgerald himself wrote: ‘After all, life hasn’t much to offer except youth and. . Every man I’ve met who’s been to war, that is this war, seems to have lost youth and faith in man.’

All around Nicole at the clinic, meanwhile, are those maimed mentally or vicariously by the war: ‘shell-shocks who merely heard an air raid from a distance’ or ‘merely read newspapers’. The accessories of fashion — a beret, for example — seek to cover ‘a skull recently operated on. Beneath it human eyes peered.’ Despite Nicole’s immense wealth, even the idyllic period of their courtship is surrounded ominously by the sound of war:

Suddenly there was a booming from the wine slopes across the lake; cannons were shooting at hail-bearing clouds in order to break them. . the hotel crouched amid tumult, chaos, and darkness.

Years later, by which time his marriage to Nicole is showing signs of strain and he is falling for another, younger woman, Dick and his friends make their tour of the Newfoundland trenches.

We arrive there on a November morning. The sky is armistice-white. The trenches are still preserved but without the barbed wire — removed, finally, because sheep kept getting tangled up in it — the grass-covered shell-holes make the place look like a particularly difficult golf course.

Fitzgerald, by contrast, deliberately begins the section of the novel which describes Dick’s visit, ‘Casualties’, so as to make it seem, for a moment, either as if the scene is taking place in the middle of the actual war or — and it amounts to the same thing — as if the war is still being waged in 1925:

Dick turned the corner of the traverse and continued along the trench walking on the duckboard. He came to a periscope, looked through it a moment, then he got up on the step and peered over the parapet. In front of him beneath a dingy sky was Beaumont-Hamel; to his left the tragic hill of Thiepval.

A few minutes later, by which time it has become clear that the friends are simply visitors rather than combatants — though they are, of course, ‘casualties’ — Fitzgerald vouchsafes to Dick one of the most famous, beautiful and telling of all passages about the war.

See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No European will ever do that again in this generation. .

This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation between the classes.

Despite the cold there were a handful of other visitors at the Memorial Park. The smaller cemeteries are deserted. Sometimes there are intervals of three or four weeks in the visitors’ books. Often people come to visit one particular grave: a great uncle, a grandfather. They are always touching, these personal inscriptions in the book, especially when the pilgrimage is the fulfilment of a lifetime’s ambition.