Geoff Dyer - The Missing of the Somme

Few people come here: the first entry in the visitors’ book was made in 1986, the last ten days ago. On 18 August 1988 a girl from the Netherlands had written: ‘It is because of the lonelyness.’

Light, field, the crosses of the other cemeteries. The faint breeze makes the pages stir beneath my fingers. It is the opposite of lonely, this cemetery: friends are buried here together — so what truth do these strange words express? The harder I try to decipher them, the more puzzling they become until, recognizing how ingrained is my mistake, trying to break a code that is not even there, I let them stand for themselves, their mystery and power undisturbed, these words that explain everything and nothing.

Scarves of purple cloud are beginning to stretch out over the horizon, light welling up behind them. The sun is going down on one of the most beautiful places on earth.

I have never felt so peaceful. I would be happy never to leave.

So strong are these feelings that I wonder if there is not some compensatory quality in nature, some equilibrium — of which the poppy is a manifestation and symbol — which means that where terrible violence has taken place the earth will sometimes generate an equal and opposite sense of peace. In this place where men were slaughtered they came also to love each other, to realize Camus’s great truth: that ‘there are more things to admire in men than to despise’.

Standing here, I know that some part of me will always be calmed by the memory of this place, by the vast capacity for forgiveness revealed by these cemeteries, by this landscape.

At this moment I am the only person on earth experiencing these sensations, in this place. At the same time, overwhelming and compounding this feeling, is the certainty that my presence here changes nothing; everything would be exactly the same without me.

Perhaps that is what is meant by ‘lonelyness’ — knowing that even at your moments of most exalted emotion, you do not matter (perhaps this is precisely the moment of most exalted emotion) because these things will always be here: the dark trees full of summer leaf, the fading light that has not changed in seventy-five years, the peace that lies perpetually in wait.

The sky is streaked crimson by the time I leave the cemetery of Redan Ridge Number One. I make my way back towards the road through dark fields. Tomorrow, a year from now, it will be exactly the same: birds lunging and darting towards the horizon; three crosses silhouetted against the blood-red sky; a man walking along the curving road; lights coming on in distant farmhouses — and each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Place of publication is London unless otherwise indicated. Full sources are given in the Notes only when the source is not obvious from the text or the Bibliography. Multi-part quotes may extend across more than one page, but the Notes reference is for the first part only.

p. 3 ‘On every mantelpiece. .’: Yvan Goll, ‘Requiem for the Dead of Europe’, in Jon Silkin (ed.), The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry , p. 244.

p. 3 ‘Memory has a. .’: John Updike, Memories of the Ford Administration (Hamish Hamilton, 1993) p. 9.

p. 4 ‘in his ghastly. .’: Wilfred Owen, ‘Disabled’, Collected Poems , p. 67.

p. 7 ‘the turning-point in. .’: Men without Art , extract reprinted in Julian Symons (ed.), The Essential Wyndham Lewis , p. 211.

p. 8 For an extended discussion of pre-1914 as a period of latent war see Daniel Pick, War Machine (1993), pp. 192–5.

p. 8 ‘breaking down even. .’: A. J. P. Taylor, Europe: Grandeur and Decline (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1991), p. 185.

p. 8 ‘maintain towards his. .’: ‘The Idea of History’, in Fritz Stern (ed.), The Varieties of History , 2nd edn (Macmillan, 1970), p. 292.

p. 11 ‘prepared his exit. .’ and ‘We are setting. .’: Scott and Amundsen: The Race to the South Pole , revised edn (Pan, 1983), p. 508.

p. 11 ‘has shown that. .’: ibid., p. 523.

p. 11 ‘We are showing. .’: ibid., p. 508.

p. 11 ‘Of their suffering. .’: Thomas Williamson, quoted by Huntford, ibid., pp. 520–21.

p. 12 ‘if Scott fails. .’: ibid., p. 394.

p. 12 ‘the grotesque futility. .’: ibid., p. 527.

p. 12 ‘heroism for heroism’s sake. .’ and ‘for one of. .’: ibid., p. 523.

p. 12 ‘the glory of. .’ and ‘to make a. .’: ibid., p. 524.

p. 13 ‘countrymen an example. .’: Agnes Egerton-Castle, ‘The Precursor’, The Treasure , January 1916, pp. 71–2, quoted by Huntford, ibid., p. 528.

p. 13n ‘a special effort. .’ and ‘An Exhibition of. .’: Annual Report of the Church Crafts League, quoted by Catherine Moriarty, ‘Christian Iconography and First World War Memorials’, in the Imperial War Museum Review , no. 6, p. 67.

p. 13n ‘to secure combined. .’: Quoted by Bob Bushaway, ‘Name upon Name: The Great War and Remembrance’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Myths of the English , p. 144.

p. 14 ‘simplicity of statement. .’: A. C. Benson, quoted by Bushaway, ibid., p. 146.

p. 15 ‘The graveyards, haphazard. .’: Clayre Percy and Jane Ridley (eds.), The Letters of Edwin Lutyens to his Wife Emily (Collins, 1985), p. 350.

p. 16 For a history of the War Graves Commission see Philip Longworth, The Unending Vigil , Constable, 1967.

p. 17 ‘the image of. .’: Fallen Soldiers , p. 39. For a fuller account of changing attitudes to death and cemetery design etc., see ibid., pp. 39–45.

p. 18 Statistics for burials in the Somme are from Martin and Mary Middlebrook, The Somme Battlefields , pp. 9–10.

p. 20 p. 20 ‘“The future!”. .’: Under Fire , pp. 256–7.

p. 20n ‘What kind of. .’: quoted by Alistair Horne in The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 , p. 341.

p. 21 ‘“It’ll be. .’ and ‘sorrowfully, like a. .’: pp. 327–8.

p. 21 ‘What passing-bells for. .’: ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, Collected Poems , p. 44.

p. 21 ‘“We shall forget. .’: Under Fire , p. 328.

p. 22 ‘Remembering, we forget’: ‘To One Who was With Me in the War’, Collected Poems 1908–1956 , p. 187.

p. 22 ‘We’re forgetting-machines. .’: Under Fire , p. 328.

p. 22 ‘How the future. .’: The Owen manuscript is reproduced by Dominic Hibberd in Wilfred Owen: The Last Year , p. 123.

p. 23 ‘no dividends from. .’: Collected Poems 1908–1956 , p. 71.

p. 23 ‘Have you forgotten. .’, ‘Look down, and. .’ and ‘Do you remember. .’: ibid., pp. 118–19.

p. 24 ‘Make them forget’: ibid., p. 201.

p. 24 ‘gather[ed] to itself. .’: The Challenge of the Dead , p. 173.

p. 24 ‘some tribute to. .’: quoted by David Cannadine, ‘Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain’, in Joachim Whalley (ed.) Mirrors of Mortality , p. 220. I have also drawn on Cannadine’s essay more generally in this section.

p. 24 ‘by the human. .’: quoted by Cannadine, ibid., p. 221.

p. 25 ‘the great awful. .’: The Times , 12 November 1919, p. 15.

p. 26n ‘In the tarpaper. .’: USA (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1966), pp. 722–3. I am grateful to Nick Humphrey for putting me on to this passage.

p. 27 ‘the man who. .’: Ronald Blythe, The Age of Illusion , new edn (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1983), p. 9. Blythe’s first chapter contains a detailed and evocative account of how the idea of burying an unknown soldier came about.

p. 27 ‘In silence, broken. .’, et al.: Armistice Day Supplement, The Times , 12 November 1920, pp. i — iii.