I remember, as a child, hearing stories about my grandfather’s and my great-uncle’s war experiences as I weighed in my hand the piece of shrapnel that finally got my grandfather out of the trenches. He was lucky, incredibly lucky, hindsight tells us, just as his brother Sandy was lucky — the only physical reminder of their respective ordeals was patches of fading scar tissue — though no one can really evaluate what the psychological wear and tear would have been; memories and images that would undoubtedly prove a more enduring legacy of their experience of battle. And perhaps my generation is the last one to feel any real closeness to those world-shattering events of 1914-18. It was oddly destabilizing, as I tried to track down an early photograph of my grandfather the other day, to hear one of my uncles referring to him casually as “Dad.” Indeed, had William Boyd senior lived a few years longer (he was only sixty-two when he died) I might have had my own memories of that stout, mustachioed figure I have seen in family photographs. Not merely my grandfather, after all, but a man who managed to survive two years in the trenches.
I think it is that closeness, that familial proximity, that provoked my own abiding interest in the Great War. For me, fundamentally, it is the un-knowingness, the unimaginability of that conflict that triggers the imagination. We have the newsreel images and the photographs, we have the memoirs, the regimental histories, the poetry and so on, but despite all this evidence the questions always remained only partially answered: what was it really like?
I can’t speak for other novelists who have taken the Great War as their subject but sometimes the best way to arrive at the truth is to lie — to invent, to fictionalize. The curious alchemy of art — rather than the diligent assembling of documentary fact — can be a swifter and more potent route to understanding and empathy than the most detailed photographs or the most compendious documentation. You have to do your homework, sure — authenticity has to be striven for — but in the end it is the fecundity and idiosyncrasy of the novelist’s imagination that will make the thing work — or not.
I first wrote about the First World War in my 1982 novel An Ice-Cream War. This was a forgotten corner of the Great War, an interminable struggle between the British and German colonies in East Africa (mirroring the larger one in Europe) — a surreal but bloody little affair that resembled the counterinsurgency conflicts of the sixties and seventies more than the traditional image of huge, immobile armies facing each other across 600 miles of trenches.
I turned to the Western Front proper in my novel The New Confessions, which was published in 1987. Here I tackled the battle where my grandfather had been wounded, the third Battle of Ypres, or Passchen-daele, as it is more popularly known. In the course of my research I spent weeks in the Imperial War Museum in London, watching contemporary newsreel pictures.
For obvious reasons, most of the sequences were filmed well behind the lines — endless shots of Tommies marching through French villages, artillery blasting away at distant targets and so on. There was very little that was what you might call authentic front-line footage. It was dangerous in those trenches, after all, and the photographers wisely kept their distance. Yet many of the images that are routinely screened on our televisions around Armistice Day are patent fakes—“action” staged in training camps with soldiers playing dead. The real stuff, when you can find it, is unmistakable, but it is rare — and of course it is mute.
One day, by chance, I ordered up a sequence about a burial party, just a few minutes long, of young soldiers lugging in dead bodies after a battle and dumping them by temporary graves. The misery and nauseated dread on the faces of the living is highly distressing and, just for a moment, because the cameraman was there, I was vouchsafed a tiny glimpse of the reality of what these young men, these boys, were going through.
It was during those weeks of watching miles and miles of newsreel that the idea of making The Trench was born. We forget that the First World War took place in glorious Technicolor, so familiar are we with its monochrome version. We forget also that those smiling faces, chatting, brewing up, puffing on their Woodbines, also spoke. The silence — and the sepia — distance the event from us profoundly, and it seemed to me one of the great values of making a film about the trench experience of the First World War at the end of the twentieth century would be that, at the very least, we would see it and hear it approximately as it must have been.
And perhaps, more importantly, it would be of some significance, as we leave the century behind, to attempt once again to come to terms with one of its defining events. It can be argued, with some conviction, that the twentieth century actually began in 1914, not 1900. Or, even more pertinently, that it began on 1 July 1916 at 7.30 in the morning as the barrage lifted and the first waves of Kitchener’s Army left their trenches and walked across the dense untended meadows of the Somme valley, the misty morning sun beating down upon them, to their sudden, messy deaths.
Philip Larkin’s great poem “MCMXIV” contains the mordantly resonant line, “Never such innocence again”—but the innocence that the hundreds of thousands of eager volunteers possessed in 1914 remained intact until the hideous debacle of the Somme in 1916. Sixty thousand were killed and wounded that first day — the bloodiest day of slaughter in the history of the British Army; perhaps even the bloodiest day of slaughter in any battle between armies, ever.
In the event, whether the world would have changed anyway, the battle usefully marks the great watershed. Without the disaster of the Somme the allies might well have brokered a peace with the Germans in 1916. But the terrible carnage of the Somme (400,000 British casualties, 175,000 French, 600,000 German) meant that the war had to be fought on, and fought on to be won. The cost of the war continuing for another two years — in every dimension (lives, damage, money) — exceeded everything that the first two years had balefully notched up. And as for the war itself, after 1918, nothing in the Western world could ever be the same again — socially, economically, sexually, politically, geo-politically, culturally — the twentieth century was full-throatedly under way.
This may explain why in the past two decades British novelists, at least, may have felt like re-exploring those turbulent four years. But I have a feeling that what may be whizzing about in the zeitgeist doesn’t necessarily produce good art: good journalism, yes, good non-fiction, undoubtedly, but most novelists are drawn to a subject by the small scale, rather than the large. (How can you write a novel about the deaths of 9,000,000 people over a period of fifty-two months?)
The writer — the film-maker, the playwright — is drawn to a subject, I believe, by character and story, by their potential and by the imaginative possibilities of elaborating on them. One needs only to glance at any portrait or snapshot of the soldiers of the Great War to sense in yourself that burgeoning curiosity, to set those same questions running — who are you? Who did you leave behind? How frightened were you? Did you think you would die? How would I have coped if it had been me instead of them? And so on — the answers to which provide the foundations upon which the fiction will rise.
The Trench is my attempt to provide the answers to those questions. It is not a film about conflict — the Battle of the Somme only begins at the end — but about waiting to go into battle and the pressures of that wait — two days, with the clock clicking remorselessly down — on very young men.
For the novelist, writing a film, let alone directing one, represents a great social opportunity: suddenly from being in a state of creative solitude you are a member of an exclusive club that numbers 100 or so members. And, as a corollary, the novelist discovers that the one great advantage of making a film, rather than sitting alone in your room, is that your overwhelming desire to “get it right”—to make it as authentic and true-to-life as is feasibly possible — is one that you share with all these fellow workers.