Geoff Dyer - The Missing of the Somme

Most comments, though, are generic: ‘RIP’, ‘Remembering’, ‘We Will Remember Them’, ‘Lest We Forget’, ‘Very Moving’. Sometimes there is a jaunty salute: ‘All the best, lads’, ‘Sleep well, boys’. As well as commenting on the cemetery itself — ‘Peaceful’, ‘Beautiful’ — many people offer larger impressions of the war: ‘Such a waste’, ‘No more war’, ‘Never again’. All comments are heartfelt, even those like ‘They died for freedom’ or ‘For Civilization’, which, testifying to the enduring power of ignorance, end up meaning the opposite of what is intended: ‘They died for nothing.’ At the Connaught Cemetery for the massacred Ulster Division several visitors from Northern Ireland have written ‘No surrender’. One entry, from Andy Keery, reads: ‘No surrender. Proud to come from Ulster.’ Beneath it his friend has written: ‘No surrender. I came with Andy.’ Occasionally people quote a couple of lines of poetry. I add my own little couplet:

A lot of people have written ‘no surrender’.

That’s how bigots remember.

Sometimes people’s comments are so idiosyncratic as scarcely to make sense: ‘The bloke on the tractor spoiled it for me by his reckless driving. Signed anon’ — the unknown visitor. On 10 October 1992 at Tyne Cot Greg Dawson wrote, ‘We really showed those fascists a thing or two!’ Another person had drawn a Star of David and written, ‘What about the 6 million Jews?’ Beneath it someone else had written, ‘Wrong war, mate.’ This quickly becomes something of a catchphrase between the three of us: irrespective of its relevance, any remark elicits the droll rejoinder, ‘Wrong war, mate.’

At the Sheffield Memorial a diligent student wrote a short essay pointing out, in closely reasoned detail, that blame for the Somme rested, ultimately, on Churchill’s shoulders. He even added a footnote citing A. J. P. Taylor, complete with page reference, place and date of publication. Reluctant to get drawn into the minutiae of scholarly debate, another visitor had simply scrawled in the margin: ‘Rubbish!’

Sometimes a dialogue does evolve, most obviously at one of the Redan Ridge cemeteries. The theme of the discussion here is exactly that announced by the anti-Taylorite at the Sheffield Memorial: rubbish.

There are three tiny, beautifully located cemeteries at Redan Ridge. Next to one of them is a stinking mound of farm rubbish. An entry from 10 July 1986 expresses the characteristic sentiments of most visitors: ‘It’s such a shame they must rest with a rubbish pit beside them.’ 17Several pages on, after numerous endorsements of these remarks, the first dissenting voice appears: ‘If visitors fail to recognize the true pathos behind their visits here only to latch on to the presence of a rubbish dump, then their presence here disgusts me.’

This attempt to scotch the debate only inflames it. The characteristic tone becomes aggressively indignant: ‘The rubbish is a thinly disguised insult to the memory of Pte. Tommy Atkins.’ Adding injury to insult the next person to join in notes: ‘It’s quite apt: human waste next to more of it.’ Comments like this mean that from now on the ire of those offended by the rubbish is directed not only against the farmer who dumped it but against those who implicitly condone him — and who, in turn, become steadily more aggressive in their responses: ‘Sod the rubbishtip — these men lived and died in it. Isn’t rubbish a part of life?’

That’s a moot point, but for quite a few months now the rubbish has been playing a more important part in the visitors’ book than the cemetery. Gradually the debate itself becomes the main subject of debate. The cemetery was ousted by the rubbishtip; now both are only incidental to the real focus of attention: the visitors’ book itself. You can imagine it being integrated into battlefield tours, becoming the main reason for people’s visit. Conscious of this, someone has written: ‘Quite frankly the wastage of human life is worthy of more comment than a ridiculous rubbish-tip saga.’

Every attempt to have the last word, however, demands a response and so the rubbish debate and the debate about the rubbish debate perpetuate themselves. It comes as something of a disappointment to read, on 9 September 1991: ‘Glad the rubbish has finally gone.’

I note all this down on 9 November 1992. It is the second time I have been here and there is a strange pleasure in standing in exactly the same spot again. I find the proof of my last visit, in my own handwriting, in the visitors’ book. It was a different season then; now the sky sags like mud over the brown earth. The air is cold as iron. Rain is blowing horizontal. The smell of rotting farmyard waste pervades the scene. I write:

Returned here after my previous visit 5.9.91.

PS: The rubbish has returned too.

The pages of these visitors’ books are clipped in a green ringhooped binder. When there are no pages left, new ones are clipped in. What happens to the old ones? Burned? Filed away in archives? If the latter, then perhaps an academic will one day salvage all these pages and use this hoard of raw data as the basis of a comprehensive survey of attitudes to the war, the ways in which it is remembered and misremembered. There is certainly enough material to fill a book: people who come here are moved and want to record their feelings, explain themselves.

And this book, really, is just an extended entry, jotted on pages ripped from the visitors’ book of a cemetery on the Somme.

What with the weather and the escalating cost of the trip, we decide to abandon our plan to be at Thiepval for Armistice Day. I am all for continuing with the big push to Ors, where Owen is buried, but by now serious questions are being raised about my leadership. Paul and Mark are refusing to budge.

‘You’ll damn well go where I order you,’ I say at last.

‘What are you going to do? Court-martial us?’ says Mark.

‘Yeah. Fuck off, Hitler,’ says Paul.

‘Wrong war, mate,’ chant Mark and I.

We decide to head back to Vimy Ridge (missed on the way down due to a navigational error) before beating a retreat to Boulogne.

Since Armistice Day has been incorporated into Remembrance Day, there is little point remaining here until the eleventh, but, as we drive towards Vimy, I ponder the significance of dates — 4 August 1914, 1 July 1916, 11 November 1918 — and the extent to which the ebbing and flowing of the memory of the Great War are determined by the gravitational pull of the calendar.

In his study of Holocaust memorials, James Young points out how

when events are commemoratively linked to a day on the calendar, a day whose figure inevitably recurs, both memory of events and the meanings engendered in memory seem ordained by nothing less than time itself.

The actual date of the event to be commemorated often falls as arbitrarily as a person’s birthday. In the case of the Great War, which ended punctually at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the temporal significance of the moment and day on which hostilities ceased was consciously pre-determined. If the intention was to bring the future memory of the war into the sharpest possible focus, it could hardly have been better arranged: the various ceremonies of Remembrace could not have worked so powerfully without this precise temporal anchoring. Since the Second World War, this anchoring has been lost. Remembrance Day can now drift three days clear of the eleventh of November. Hence the sense noted earlier that at the Cenotaph it is the act of remembering together that is being remembered. Past and present are only imperfectly aligned.

In other ways they are being pulled into closer proximity. This was felt especially strongly in 1993, the centenary of Owen’s birth and the seventy-fifth anniversary of his death: another example of the way in which the war has become memorialized in the poet’s image. The same year also saw the seventy-fifth anniversary of the armistice. 4 August 1994 marked the eightieth anniversary of the outbreak of war. All of these dates are signposts pointing to one of the ways in which the memory of the Great War exerts itself more powerfully as it recedes in time. This has less to do with recent events in Sarajevo than the simple sense that we are drawing gradually closer to the time when the war took place exactly a hundred years ago. In terms of remembrance the years 2014–2018 will represent the temporal equivalent of a total eclipse. By then no one who fought in the war will be alive to remember it.