The Missing of the Somme. Geoff Dyer
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mine. This sense of imminent amnesia is, has been and – presumably – always will be immanent in the war’s enduring memory.
The issue, in short, is not simply the way the war generates memory but the way memory has determined – and continues to determine – the meaning of the war.
Taken from his earlier poem ‘Recessional’, Kipling’s words ‘Lest we Forget’ admonish us from memorials all over the country. Forget what? And what will befall us if we do forget? It takes a perverse effort of will to ask such questions – for, translated into words, the dates 1914–18 have come to mean ‘that which is incapable of being forgotten’.
Sassoon expended a good deal of satirical bile on the hypocrisy of official modes of Remembrance but no one was more troubled by the reciprocity of remembering and forgetting. He may claim, in ‘Dreamers’, that soldiers draw ‘no dividends from time’s tomorrows’, but he is determined that they will have a place in all our yesterdays.
As early as March 1919, the poem ‘Aftermath’ opens with the aghast question, ‘Have you forgotten yet? . . .’ Sassoon’s tone is no less admonitory than Kipling’s – ‘Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget’ – but in place of august memorials he wants to cram our nostrils with the smell of the trenches:
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench –
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
* * *
The Glorious Dead
Beating his familiar drum, Sassoon, in his 1933 sequence ‘The Road to Ruin’, imagined ‘the Prince of Darkness’ standing in front of the Cenotaph, intoning:
Make them forget, O Lord, what this Memorial
Means . . .
Over the years, passing by in a bus or on a bike, I have seen the Cenotaph so often that I scarcely notice it. It has become part of the unheeded architecture of the everyday. The empty tomb has become the invisible tomb.
In the years following the armistice, however, especially in 1919 and 1920, the Cenotaph, in Stephen Graham’s words, ‘gather[ed] to itself all the experience and all that was sacred in the war’.
A victory parade had been planned for 19 July 1919, but the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, opposed any proposals for national rejoicing which did not include ‘some tribute to the dead’. Lutyens was duly asked to devise a temporary, non-denominational ‘catafalque’. In a matter of hours he sketched the design for what became the Cenotaph.
The wood and plaster pylon was unveiled on schedule, but such was the emotion aroused by its stern, ascetic majesty that it was decided – ‘by the human sentiment of millions’, as Lutyens himself wrote – to replace it with an identical permanent version made of Portland stone.
In the meantime the temporary structure remained in place for the first anniversary of Armistice Day when the two minutes’ silence was first introduced.
Since the Second World War, when it was decided to commemorate the memory of the dead of both wars on the Sunday closest to the eleventh of November, the effect of the silence has been muted. On the normally busy weekdays between the wars – especially in 1919 and 1920 – the effect of ‘the great awful silence’ was overwhelming, shattering.
In 1919, at eleven a.m., not only in Britain but throughout the Empire, all activity ceased. Traffic came to a standstill. In workshops and factories and at the Stock Exchange no one moved. In London not a single telephone call was made. Trains scheduled to leave at eleven delayed their departures by two minutes; those already in motion stopped. In Nottingham Assize Court a demobbed soldier was being tried for murder. At eleven o’clock the whole court, including the prisoner, stood silently for two minutes. Later in the day the soldier was sentenced to death.
On 12 November 1919 the Manchester Guardian reported the previous day’s silence:
The first stroke of eleven produced a magical effect. The tram cars glided into stillness, motors ceased to cough and fume and stopped dead, and the mighty-limbed dray-horses hunched back upon their loads and stopped also, seeming to do it of their own volition . . . Someone took off his hat, and with a nervous hesitancy the rest of the men bowed their heads also. Here and there an old soldier could be detected slipping unconsciously into the posture of ‘attention’. An elderly woman, not far away, wiped her eyes and the man beside her looked white and stern. Everyone stood very still . . . The hush deepened. It had spread over the whole city and become so pronounced as to impress one with a sense of audibility. It was . . . a silence which was almost pain . . . And the spirit of memory brooded over it all.
The following year the silence and the unveiling of the permanent Cenotaph were complemented by another even more emotive component of the ceremony of Remembrance: the burial of the Unknown Warrior.
Eight unmarked graves were exhumed from the most important battlefields of the war. Blindfolded, a senior officer selected one coffin at random.4 In an elaborate series of symbol-packed rituals ‘the man who had been nothing and who was now to be everything’ was carried through France with full battle honours and transported across the Channel in the destroyer Verdun (so that this battle and the soldiers of France also found a place in the proceedings). On the morning of the 11th the flag-draped coffin was taken by gun carriage to Whitehall, where, at eleven o’clock, the permanent Cenotaph was unveiled.
The weather played its part. The sun shone through a haze of cloud. There was no wind. Flags, at half mast, hung in folds. No wind disturbed the silence which descended once again. Big Ben struck eleven. The last stroke dissolved over London, spreading a silence through the nation. ‘In silence, broken only by a nearby sob,’ reported The Times, ‘the great multitude bowed its head . . .’ People held their breath lest they should be heard in the stillness. The quiet, which had seemed already to have reached its limit, grew deeper and even deeper. A woman’s shriek ‘rose and fell and rose again’ until the silence ‘bore down once more’.
O God, our help in ages past.
The silence stretched on until, ‘suddenly, acute, shattering, the very voice of pain itself – but pain triumphant – rose the clear notes of the bugles in The Last Post’.
From the Cenotaph the carriage bearing the Unknown Warrior made its way to Westminster Abbey. Inside, the same intensity of emotion was reinforced by numerical arrangement: a thousand bereaved widows and mothers; a hundred nurses wounded or blinded in the war; a guard of honour made up of a hundred men who had won the Victoria Cross, fifty on each side of the nave. The highest-ranking commanders from the war were among the pallbearers: Haig, French and Trenchard. The king scattered earth from the soil of France on to the coffin. ‘All this,’ commented one observer, ‘was to stir such memories and emotions as might have made the very stones cry out.’
A similarly ironic palaver surrounds the choosing of the French Unknown Soldier in Bertrand Tavernier’s 1989 film La Vie et rien d’autre (Life and Nothing But).
A photograph of the temporary Cenotaph of 1919: soldiers marching past, huge crowds looking on. There is nothing triumphant about the parade. The role of the army is not to celebrate victory but to represent the dead. This is an inevitable side-effect of the language of Remembrance being permeated so thoroughly by the idea of sacrifice. In honouring the dead, survivors testified to their exclusion from the war’s ultimate meaning – sacrifice – except vicariously as witnesses. The role of the living is to offer tribute, not to receive it. The soldiers marching past the Cenotaph, in other words, comprise an army of the surrogate dead.
In an effort to give some sense of the scale of the loss, Fabian Ware, head of the Imperial War Graves Commission, pointed out that if the Empire’s dead marched four abreast down Whitehall, it would take them three and a half days to pass the Cenotaph.5