Geoff Dyer - The Missing of the Somme

The most horrific aspect of the Great War was the waste of lives as men were sent to the front in battles of meaningless attrition. Is their cause served appropriately, one wonders, by a verbal strategy which relies, for its meaning, on constantly reinforcing attrition?

Strings of shuddering adjectives dull the reaction they are intended to induce. The calm, measured tread of Elaine Scarry’s formulation, by contrast, is terrible in its simplicity: ‘The main purpose and outcome of war is injuring.’

‘Before the Great War there was no war poetry as we now conceive the term,’ writes Peter Parker in The Old Lie ; ‘instead there was martial verse.’ So pervasive were the conventions of feeling produced by this tradition that in 1914 the eleven-year-old Eric Blair could write a heartfelt poem — ‘Awake, young men of England’ — relying entirely on received sentiment. In exactly the same way, an eleven-year-old writing fifty years on could, in similar circumstances, come up with a heartfelt poem expressing the horror of war — while also relying solely on received sentiment.

In some ways, then, we talk of the horror of war as instinctively and enthusiastically as Rupert Brooke and his contemporaries jumped at the chance of war ‘like swimmers into cleanness leaping’.

This is not just a linguistic quibble. Off-the-peg formulae free you from thinking for yourself about what is being said. Whenever words are bandied about automatically and easily, their meaning is in the process of leaking away or evaporating. The ease with which Rupert Brooke coined his ‘think only this of me’ heroics by embracing a ready-made formula of feeling should alert us to — and make us sceptical of — the ease with which these sentiments have been overruled by another. Isaac Rosenberg acutely condemned Rupert Brooke’s ‘begloried sonnets’ for their reliance on ‘second-hand phrases’. But there is a similarly second- or third-hand whiff to critic Keith Sagar’s indignant characterization of Armistice Day as

part of the process whereby the nation promises to remember for one day a year in order to be able to forget with a clear conscience for the other three hundred and sixty-four; the process whereby the nation accepts with pride the slaughter of a whole generation of its youth. The rhetoric of the Cenotaph ceremony is a continuance in solemn guise of the lying jingoism which prompted Owen to write three months before his death: ‘I wish the Boche would have the pluck to come right in and make a clean sweep of the pleasure boats, and the promenaders on the spa, and all the stinking Leeds and Bradford warprofiteers. .’

Owen is regularly invoked to challenge or undermine the official procedures of Remembrance in this way, but our memory of the Great War actually depends on the mutual support of these two ostensibly opposed coordinates: the Unknown Soldier and the poet everyone knows.

Owen was born in Shropshire on 18 March 1893. He was teaching in France when war was declared but volunteered for the Artists’ Rifles in 1915. Under the influence of Sassoon, whom he met at Craiglockhart Hospital in 1917 while suffering from shell-shock, he began writing the war poems on which his reputation rests. He returned to France and was killed in action a week before the armistice, aged twenty-five.

The extreme brevity of his life is brought out by Jon Stallworthy’s Wilfred Owen , the standard biography. Since Stallworthy diligently allots more or less the same amount of space to each phase of Owen’s life, by the time we come to the part we’re most interested in, the period of his major poems, we realize with a shock that there is only a fraction of the book left. It is as if the remaining 700 pages of a standard-sized life have simply been ripped out. Not only that, but in his last weeks we lose sight of Owen as an individual (there are no eyewitness accounts of his death) and have to resort to the wide-angle of regimental history. Dominic Hibberd has fleshed out this period somewhat in Wilfred Owen: The Last Year , but both books stop where Owen’s life really begins — with his death.

In his lifetime Owen published only five poems (‘Song of Songs’, ‘The Next War’, ‘Miners’, ‘Hospital Barge’ and ‘Futility’). Seven appeared in Edith Sitwell’s Wheels anthology of 1919; a slim selection, edited by Sassoon, came out the following year; Edmund Blunden’s more substantial edition was published in 1931. This means that Owen’s poems came to the notice of the public not as gestures of protest but as part of a larger structure of bereavement .

The period from the armistice onwards saw the construction of memorials throughout England and cemeteries throughout Flanders and northern France. Climaxing with a flash flood of war memoirs and novels in the late 1920s, 7this phase of protracted mourning was formally completed with the inauguration of the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval in 1932.

The extent to which the strands of this fabric of loss are intertwined can be glimpsed by the way that in 1931 Blunden borrowed the ‘official’ vocabulary of Remembrance to lament ‘how great a glory had departed’ from the world of poetry with Owen’s death.

In the years following the armistice the anti-war spirit was so strong that, as the mature Eric Blair (George Orwell) noted, ‘even the men who had been slaughtered were held in some way to blame’. But the hope that the anti-war case had been clinched for good, on the other hand — by the war poets particularly and by Owen especially — proved short-lived.

Christopher Isherwood, who was born in 1904, the year after Orwell, recalls that ‘we young writers of the middle twenties were all suffering, more or less consciously, from a feeling of shame that we hadn’t been able to take part in the European War’. The war for Isherwood was a subject of ‘all-consuming morbid interest’, ‘a complex of terrors and longings’. Longing could sometimes outweigh terror as the Orwell-Isherwood generation ‘became conscious of the vastness of the experience they had missed’. Hence the fascination of the Spanish Civil War, Orwell goes on, ‘was that it was so like the Great War’.

Looking back, C. Day Lewis considered that it was Owen’s poetry which ‘came home deepest to my generation, so that we could never again think of war as anything but a vile, if necessary, evil’. But this generation was faced with other, apparently greater evils; hence W. H. Auden’s ‘easy acceptance of guilt in the fact of murder’ in his 1937 poem ‘Spain’. Owen may have exposed, as Stephen Spender claimed in an essay of the same year, ‘the propagandist lie which makes the dead into heroes in order that others may imagine that death is really quite pleasant’, but this revealed truth was not without its own allure. Philip Toynbee, a veteran of the Spanish War, recalls that Owen’s poems ‘produced envy rather than pity for a generation that had experienced so much’. Keats, the most powerful influence on Owen before his encounter with Sassoon, had declared himself to be ‘half in love with easeful death’, but Owen had apparently done little to diminish the fear of violent death. ‘Even in our anti-war campaigns of the early thirties,’ remembers Toynbee, ‘we were half in love with the horrors we cried out against.’

The realities of the war, then, were not simply overlaid by an organized cult of Remembrance (Cenotaph, Unknown Soldier, two minutes’ silence, poppies, etc.). Rather, our idea of the war, with its elaborately entwined, warring ideas of ‘myth’ and ‘reality’, was actively constructed through elaborately entwined, warring versions of memory in the decade and a half following the cessation of actual hostilities.