The Missing of the Somme. Geoff Dyer
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down until Cabinet papers and War Office records became available to researchers in the sixties. Only in the last couple of years, however, have we learnt how Haig, for example, in another telling instance of the way the war seems to have been fought retrospectively, systematically rewrote his diary to make his intentions accord with – and minimize his responsibility for – what actually resulted from his command. Denis Winter, whose controversial endeavours have cast damaging light on the way the state colluded in perpetuating Haig’s preferred version of events, concludes that ‘the official record of the war – political as well as military – [was] systematically distorted both during the war as propaganda and after it, in the official history’. The amount of material he has unearthed in Canadian and Australian archives also emphasizes how effectively documents passed on to the Public Record Office in Britain had been ‘vetted so as to remove those which contradicted the official line’. Even when the blinds are raised, the sudden rush of light reveals how much is – and will remain – concealed, missing.
Winter’s obsessive scrutiny of the Haig records and their incriminating gaps has destroyed the last shreds of Haig’s reputation; with Owen a similar process has been under way in the opposite direction. His manuscripts have been scrutinized by Jon Stallworthy so that almost every variant of every line is now available. The work of no British poet of this century has been more thoroughly posthumously edited and preserved or, despite Yeats famously excluding him from the Oxford Book of Modern Verse (on the grounds that ‘passive suffering is not a theme for poetry’), more widely anthologized. In the twenties Haig’s reputation was embalmed in an official vacuum of secrecy; likewise, nothing was known of Owen’s life or his development as a poet. In his 1920 edition of Owen’s poems Sassoon declared that aside from the poems any ‘records of [Owen’s] conversation, behaviour or appearance, would be irrelevant and unseemly’. Until Blunden’s edition – which included a memoir and what have since become well-known extracts from the letters – he seemed, in Philip Larkin’s phrase, ‘almost a spirit called into being by the Great War’s unprecedented beastliness to assert compassion and humanity’. His poems ‘existed for some ten years in a vacuum, as if they were utterances of The Spirit of the Pities in some updated The Dynasts’.8
In the early twenties everything about the war – except the scale of loss – was suspended in a vacuum which all the memorials and rites of Remembrance were in the process of trying, in different ways, to fill. Husbands, sons, fathers were missing. Facts were missing. Everywhere the overwhelming sense was of lack, of absence. Overwhelmingly present was ‘the pall of death which hung so sorrowful, stagnant and static over Britain’.
To a nation stunned by grief the prophetic lag of posthumous publication made it seem that Owen was speaking from the other side of the grave. Memorials were one sign of the shadow cast by the dead over England in the twenties; another was a surge of interest in spiritualism. Owen was the medium through whom the missing spoke.
They are going to have died: this is the tense not only of the poems of Owen (who carried photos of the dead and mutilated in his wallet) but also of photographs from the war. Although he was thinking only of photographs, both are, in Roland Barthes’ phrase, ‘prophecies in reverse’. With this in mind, like Brodsky contemplating photographs of Auden, ‘I began to wonder whether one form of art was capable of depicting another, whether the visual could apprehend the semantic.’
It is difficult, now, to imagine the Great War in colour. Even contemporary poems like Gurney’s ‘Pain’ depict the war in monochrome:
Grey monotony lending
Weight to the grey skies, grey mud where goes
An army of grey bedrenched scarecrows in rows . . .
‘I again work more in black and white than in colour,’ Paul Klee noted on 26 October 1917. ‘Colour seems to be a little exhausted just now.’ Many photographs – like those from the first day of the Somme – were taken under skies of Kodak blue, but, even had it been available, colour film would – it seems to us – have rendered the scenes in sepia. Coagulated by time, even fresh blood seems greyish brown.
Photos like this are not simply true to the past; they are photos of the past. The soldiers marching through them seem to be tramping through ‘the great sunk silences’ of the past. The photos are colour-resistant. They refuse to come out of the past – and the past is sepia-tinted. Peter Porter in his poem ‘Somme and Flanders’ notes how ‘Those Harmsworth books have sepia’d’; Vernon Scannell in ‘The Great War’ refers to the ‘sepia November’ of armistice.
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