Episodes like these are scattered throughout memoirs and oral testimonies from the war. Civilians bayed for blood and victory; combatants, meanwhile, had become passive instruments of their nations’ will. In the words of Arthur Bryant:
German civilians sang specially composed hymns of hate against England and, in the most civilized country in the world, quiet inoffensive English gentlemen and ladies who had never seen a blow struck in anger scouted the very mention of peace and spoke of the whole German race as they would of a pack of wild beasts. Only in the battleline itself was there no hatred: only suffering and endurance: death and infinite waste.
In Under Fire the shattered survivors of French and German units sleep side by side in the mud. This moment of exhausted solidarity is then worked up into the climactic vision of fraternity in which war will have no place. The experience of the trenches gives rise to Barbusse’s socialist-pacifist vision of a possible future. In this light the mutinies that rocked the French army in the spring of 1917 were like grumbling premonitions of revolution. The mutinies were suppressed, discipline was restored, conditions — food, leave — were improved. A similar configuration of experience, however, could lead to a more violently protracted form of discontent as there emerged from the conflict ‘men whom the war had ruined. . who incorporated the renovating ideals of the socialist tradition, the cult of the earth, the taste of violence that had grown in the mud of the trenches.’
‘That was a laugh,’ remarked a German soldier on being told the war was over. ‘We ourselves are the war.’
In London the Armistice Day ceremonies of 1921 had been disrupted by a demonstration by the unemployed, whose placards read: ‘The Dead are remembered but we are forgotten.’ In one of his Last Poems, published posthumously in 1932 (the year after Blunden’s edition of Owen), D. H. Lawrence presents a prophetic vision of the deepening depression and political unrest of the thirties as an expression of the ‘disembodied rage’ of the dead who died in vain, who ‘moan and throng in anger’. Never explicitly identified with the war, these ‘unhappy dead’ are yet impossible to disassociate from it. Set on a ‘day of the dead’ in November, the poem makes it seem as if the army of the surrogate dead that marched past the Cenotaph has now joined the massed ranks of the disillusioned, the unemployed, the dispossessed. The war that was to end all wars will lead inexorably to another, a world made safe for democracy seethes with this betrayal of the discontented dead:
Oh, but beware, beware the angry dead.
Who knows, who knows how much our modern woe is due to the angry, unappeased dead
that were thrust out of life, and now come back at us malignant, malignant, for we will not succour them.
In the face of unemployment, inflation and the other indignities and privations of peacetime, the shared suffering of the trenches offered an almost mythic embodiment of total belonging: the immersion of the individual within a rigidly hierarchical community of equals. For the movement that articulated this ideal in Germany, peace was a continuation of the war by means which, ultimately, led to its full-scale resumption after a simmering twenty-year interlude.
Sassoon had noted how soldiers became almost happy in the knowledge that they were abandoning their own volition to the directives of the army; Nazism subsumed the individual will to the will of the Reich, the Führer. An ideological imperative was built from the martial ideal of obedience which the army had instilled in its soldiers.
‘The Third Reich comes from the trenches,’ said Rudolf Hess. But so too does the end of the idea of obedience as unequivocally heroic. A British survivor of the Somme remembers how
the war changed me — it changed us all. . Everybody ought to have this military training. It would do them good and make them obedient. Some of the young men now, they need obedience. They don’t know what it is. Our lives were all obedience.
The passage contains its own implicit contradiction, yielding where it seeks to uphold, tacitly acknowledging that it was precisely the experience of the Great War that brought obedience and servitude into tainted proximity. Henceforth obedience would have some of the qualities of submission and complicity — culminating, for victims and perpetrators alike, in the Holocaust — and all heroism would have about it some of the quality of refusal, rebellion and — a key term in the next war — resistance. D. H. Lawrence had noticed this submissive quality of courage among recruits in Cornwalclass="underline" ‘They are all so brave, to suffer,’ he wrote in July 1916, ‘but none of them brave enough, to reject suffering.’
Perhaps the real heroes of 1914–18, then, are those who refused to obey and to fight, who actively rejected the passivity forced upon them by the war, who reasserted their right not to suffer, not to have things done to them.
Which is why, despite a series of diversions, wrong turnings and U-turns, I made such an effort to find the village of Bailleulmont.
In the communal cemetery there, tucked away from the tangle of civilian graves, is a group of military headstones. Unusually, they are made of brown stone, on one of which is inscribed:
10495 PRIVATE
A. INGHAM
MANCHESTER REGIMENT
1ST DECEMBER 1916
SHOT AT DAWN
ONE OF THE FIRST TO ENLIST
A WORTHY SON
OF HIS FATHER
Like over 300 others, four of the soldiers buried here in Bailleulmont were shot for desertion or cowardice. Two of them — Ingham and Alfred Longshaw — were friends who served together — at the Somme — deserted together, were executed together and now lie together. For years Ingham’s family believed he had simply ‘died of wounds’ — as the inscriptions on the headstones of other executed men maintain — but when his father was informed of the truth he insisted on this inscription being added to the headstone.
A campaign was recently mounted to have executed deserters pardoned. A letter printed in the Independent provides a vivid illustration of the extent to which our idea of heroism has changed:
My father was highly decorated in the First World War — DSM, MM and three times mentioned in dispatches. But his greatest pride was in the time when, escorting a deserter to death at dawn, he let him escape. This was not a latterday judgement, but that of one who had been involved in all the perils of the front line, and lost a limb in the process.
The deserter’s grave has become a hero’s grave; pride has come to reside not in the carrying out of duty but in its humane dereliction.13
‘I’ve seen ’em, I’ve seen ’em. .’
The war goes on, silently, visibly. The same faces, the same ground. Men march up to the front, waving steel helmets. Artillery barrages. Lots of carrying: ammunition, shells, supplies. Larking around in the trenches. Lunch. More marching. More artillery. The attack. The first few prisoners brought in. The odd casualty. The landscape taking a pounding (with special emphasis on mine craters). A rubbled village. Walking wounded returning. Troops coming back with prisoners, miserable shaven-headed Hun. .
I am in the Imperial War Museum, watching a compilation of documentary films from the war. Each film seems identical to all the others. Their form is as fixed as the gridlock of trenches in which they are set.
The camera stops everything. Soldiers can’t keep their eyes off it. During a pre-battle service no one listens to the padre: everyone is too busy watching the camera. Watching and grinning. The war is a grinning contest which the allies are winning (Jerry can only muster a weary smile). Only the most badly wounded — whom we never actually see — can resist grinning at the camera. Being so camera-conscious gives rise, inevitably, to some strikingly bad acting. Never more so than in the famous faked sequence of troops apparently going over the top in The Battle of the Somme (first shown, to a public horrified by its realism, on 21 August 1916) which was actually filmed at a training ground. A soldier falls, dies, looks back to the camera and then folds his arms neatly across his chest.