I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. . Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, hallow were obscene.
In a later letter Barton observes, parenthetically, that if British soldiers are attending to the wounded, the Germans ‘often hold their fire. . as we do’. Again, it is the verifiability of the observation that renders its dramatic authenticity suspect. Barton’s remark is the product, we feel, not of the contingency of his own experience but the judiciousness of Hill’s research.
The imaginative fabric of Sebastian Faulks’ impressive war novel Birdsong absorbs the research so thoroughly that only a few of these leaks appear. Faulks’ own observation, that one of his characters ‘seemed unable to say things without suggesting they were quotations from someone else’ nevertheless has ironic relevance to some passages in the book. Just back from leave, an officer gives vent to his loathing of the civilians living comfortably back in England: ‘Those fat pigs have got no idea what lives are led for them,’ he exclaims. ‘I wish a great bombardment would smash down Piccadilly into Whitehall and kill the whole lot of them.’ An entirely authentic sentiment, but one too obviously derived from a famous letter of Owen’s (see p. 29 above) to ring individually true.
Given the near impossibility of remaining beyond the reach of Sassoon and Owen, one solution is to include them in the fictive world of a novel. Pat Barker has done exactly this in two fine novels, Regeneration and The Eye in the Door. Set in Craiglockhart, the former opens with a transcription of Sassoon’s famous declaration and dramatizes many of the crucial moments in his relationships with Dr W. H. R. Rivers and Owen (including his detailed amendments to early versions of ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’).
Unlike Hill, Faulks and Barker, Eric Hiscock actually served in the war and saw action near Ypres in the spring of 1918. Born in 1900, he did not publish his memoir The Bells of Hell Go Ting-a-ling-a-ling until 1976, six years after the first edition of Strange Meeting. The fact that he has no gifts as a writer makes his case more revealing. On one occasion he notes that the
ever-present dreamlike quality of the days and nights (nights when I heard men gasping for breath as death enveloped them in evil-smelling mud-filled shell-holes as they slipped from the duckboards as they struggled towards the front line) filled me with an intense loathing of manmade war.
Reality recedes with each ‘as’ until the final heartfelt declaration can barely sustain the weight of its own conviction. Even moments of extreme personal danger are rendered secure and comfortable by the familiar conventions by which they are expressed. ‘Terrified, I clawed the stinking mud as the bullet whistled round my head and shoulders and I waited for death.’ The whole war is compressed into a single cliché.
In The Bloody Game (another Sassoon-derived title) Fussell mentions that some have considered Hiscock’s memoir ‘not as factually accurate as it pretends to be’. Whether it is a true account is not the issue here. What is important is that, for Hiscock, the linguistic and thematic conventions of the genre are more powerful than the original experience; indeed the original experience can only be revealed by the accretion of clichés it is buried beneath. The homely crudity of Hiscock’s language makes him more — not less — susceptible to mediated expression. A lack of linguistic self-consciousness exacerbates the tendency to express the experience of war through the words of others. Hiscock unwittingly acknowledges this when, as a way of adding resonance to an incident, he concludes by observing ‘if that wasn’t a theme for Siegfried Sassoon, I don’t know what was’. In terms of the writing that results from his experiences Hiscock may as well not have participated personally in the events of his own story.
The problems built in to Hill’s naturalist novel and Hiscock’s memoir disappear in a book like Timothy Findley’s The Wars, which heightens the linguistic and narrative strategies on which it depends. The problem of mediation is resolved by accentuating it. The novel’s superb setpieces — in which the protagonist Lieutenant Ross shoots an injured horse in the hold of the troopship, becomes lost in Flanders fog, or shelters from a gas attack — seem wholly authentic because Findley avails himself of the full range of narrative gambits which have become available in the years since the war. Hill’s characteristic register is a vaguely twenties literary English; Findley’s jagged self-enhancing fragments anticipate the technique of Michael Ondaatje’s Second World War novel, The English Patient. Ross’s sensations are recorded with a linguistic resourcefulness that is nowhere achieved in the memoirs. After a deafening barrage, to pick the tiniest of examples, Ross’s ‘ears popped and the silence poured in’.
The structure of the book incorporates and depends on the research that has gone into its writing: transcripts of interviews, letters, old photographs. . ‘What you people who weren’t yet born can never know,’ reads one such transcription,
is what it meant to sleep under silent falls of snow when all night long the only sounds you heard were dogs that barked at trains that passed so far away they took a short cut through your dreams and no one even awoke. It was the War that changed all that. It was. After the Great War for Civilization — sleep was different everywhere. .
Findley moves, often within the space of a couple of paragraphs, from the contingencies of a moment-by-moment present tense to the vast historical overview. Instead of an imaginative leap into the trenches, in other words, he enters the time of photographs. Sometimes, when there is no ‘good picture available except the one you can make in your mind’, present and past, description and speculation resolve into each other. The staple tropes of the front are reinvented:
The mud. There are no good similes. Mud must be a Flemish word. Mud was invented here. Mudland might have been its name. The ground is the colour of steel. Over most of the plain there isn’t a trace of topsoiclass="underline" only sand and clay. The Belgians call them ‘clyttes’, these fields, and the further you go towards the sea, the worse the clyttes become. In them, the water is reached by the plough at an average depth of eighteen inches. When it rains (which is almost constantly from early September through to March, except when it snows) the water rises at you out of the ground. It rises from your footprints — and an army marching over a field can cause a flood. In 1916, it was said that you ‘waded to the front’. Men and horses sank from sight. They drowned in mud. Their graves, it seemed, just dug themselves and pulled them down.
No eyewitness account is more evocative than this, precisely because Findley acknowledges that the most vivid feature of the Great War is that it took place in the past.
It therefore takes an effort of considerable historical will to remember that before the war Thiepval, Auchonvillers and Beaumont-Hamel were just places like any others, that the Somme was a pleasant river in the département of the same name. But in 1910, in Faulks’ Birdsong, when Stephen Wraysford arrives at Amiens, that is all it is, a place — where he falls for the wife of the local factory-owner with whom he is lodging. They are consumed by passion, but brooding over the doomed love affair is the greater doom that will soon consume the earth beneath their feet.