In the course of their outings they see ‘a small train waiting to take the branch line into Albert and Bapaume’. A second train takes them ‘from Albert out along the small country line beside the Ancre, past the villages of Mesnil and Hamel to the station at Beaumont’. Another pushes its way south ‘where the Marne joined the river Meuse, whose course linked Sedan to Verdun’: a network of innocent connections that will soon define the geography of the Western Front. In Amiens Cathedral Stephen has a vision of the ‘terrible piling up of the dead’ of centuries, which is also a premonition of what is to come. On oppressive, sultry afternoons husband, wife and lover go punting in the stagnant backwaters of the Somme. Thiepval is a spot to take afternoon tea. The future presses on the lovers like the dead weight of geological strata. The Great War took place in the past — even when it lay in the future.
To us it always took place in the past.
The issue of mediation has been compounded by Paul Fussell, who I am reading again as preparation for our trip to Flanders. If it was impossible to write about the war except through Owen’s and Sassoon’s eyes, it is now difficult to read about it except through the filter of Fussell’s ground-breaking investigation and collation of its dominant themes. Whenever we read the war poets, we effectively borrow Fussell’s copies to do so and — even when we dissent from his judgements — cannot ignore his annotations and underlinings. Fussell has himself become a part of the process whereby the memory of the war becomes lodged in the present. His commentary has become a part of the testimony it comments on. (Reading him — or anyone else for that matter — I am searching for what is not there, for what is missing, for what remains to be said.) If Hill’s Strange Meeting is an example of primary mediation, then The Great War and Modern Memory raises the possibility of secondary or critical mediation.
Even the ceremonies of Remembrance are subject to mediation. Now that the two world wars are commemorated with a service at the Cenotaph on the Sunday closest to the eleventh of November, it is — as the term Remembrance Day suggests — the act of remembering together that is being remembered. Contemporary works like A Twentieth-Century Memorial by Michael Sandle (born in 1936) — a skeletal Mickey Mouse manning, or mousing, a bronze machine-gun — are memorials to the near extinction of the war memorial as a viable form of public sculpture.
And this book? Like the youthful Christopher Isherwood who wanted to write a novel entitled ‘A War Memorial’, I wanted to write a book that was not about ‘the War itself but the effect of the idea of [the War] on my generation’. Not a novel but an essay in mediation: research notes for a Great War novel I had no intention of writing, the themes of a novel without its substance. .
I see Ypres and the surrounding area through the words of Stephen Graham and Henry Williamson. . We arrive there in the afternoon darkness and book into an expensive cheap hotel. There are FIRE EXIT signs on every door, brown covers on the beds. Towels the size of napkins, burn marks on the dresser. Our room is the sort which demands that even nonsmokers spend the first conscious minutes of the day propped up in bed, exhaling smoke at the hangover ceiling.
In the evening we walk to the Grote Markt, the vast square in the centre of town. After Ypres was flattened during the war, many buildings — like the fourteenth-century Cloth Hall that dominates the Markt — were rebuilt just as they had been. Williamson returned here in 1927 to find Ypres unrecognizably ‘clean and new and hybrid-English’. Sixty years of ageing have given it the look of a pleasant if slightly gloomy somethingth-century town, scrupulously preserved.
After a couple of beers we make our way to the Menin Gate, the memorial to the Missing of the Ypres salient. The names of 54,896 men who died between 1914 and 15 August 1917 are carved here. Designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield, it is a version of a triumphal arch, so extended as to seem almost like a tunnel. Steps in the middle of this tunnel take us up to the outside of the memorial. From here we can see the leafy water of the canal beyond the Gate. Damp air. Stillness waiting on itself.
We walk back down inside the memorial and then beyond it, across the canal. From this distance the buildings stretching away from the Gate seem to crouch beneath it. And yet, at the same time, it belies its own scale and you wonder if it is really as big as it seems. Everything about the memorial suggests that it should work powerfully on you, but its effect is oddly self-cauterizing.
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.
By 1927 when Sassoon scrawled these words — metaphorically speaking — on the recently inaugurated Menin Gate, his tone of maimed derision had become a matter of reflex. If ‘this pomp’ of ‘peace-complacent stone’ is a misrepresentation and denial, then so, equally, is Sassoon’s response to it. Refusing to accommodate the possibility of atonement for ‘the unheroic Dead’ on whose behalf he is lobbying, Sassoon yet conveys — and thereby yields to — the memorial’s own version of itself when he writes of the ‘intolerably nameless names’.
In his novel Fields of Glory Jean Rouaud describes life in the kind of ‘sullen swamp’ that, for Sassoon, is the enduring truth of the Ypres battlefield:
Little by little, abandoned corpses sank into the clay, slid to the bottom of a hollow and were soon buried under a wall of earth. During an attack you stumbled over a half-exposed arm or leg. Falling face to face on a corpse, you swore between your teeth — yours or the corpse’s. Nasty the way these sly corpses would trip you up. But you took the opportunity to tear their identification tags off their necks, so as to save those anonymous lumps of flesh from a future without memory, to restore them to official existence, as though the tragedy of the unknown soldier were to have lost not so much his life as his name.
Rouaud here affirms the underlying longing that links those ‘who struggled in the slime’ and the memorial arch on which they are commemorated. Lord Plumer was not bandying empty rhetoric when, at the inauguration of the Gate, he declared on behalf of the bereaved: ‘He is not missing; he is here.’
Memorials to the Missing are not about people, they are about names: the nameless names.
It is almost eight o’clock. A few people have congregated beneath the arches. The clocks begin to chime damply. Traffic comes to a halt. Two buglers take up position beneath the Gate and play The Last Post.
The two minutes’ silence on the second anniversary of the armistice was broken by The Last Post, ‘acute, shattering, the very voice of pain itself — but pain triumphant,’ according to The Times. In Death of a Hero the burial of George Winterbourne is concluded by the same ‘soul-shattering, heart-rending. . inexorable chains of rapid sobbing notes and drawn-out piercing wails’ that are heard here at the same time every day of the year.
A boy cycles past. One of the buglers gestures quietly for him to stop. The sound of the bugles ricochets from the walls of the memorial. Echoes chase themselves between the arches. The last notes fade away, beckoning into silence. Afterwards silence lies on the dark canal, a silence in which every note is preserved intact.
Traffic resumes. We drift away, eat dinner, drink some more. It is very cold. Perhaps it is just the weather, perhaps it would be different in the summer — though one feels this is the season when the town comes into its own — but Ypres seems, in Stephen Graham’s phrase, ‘a terrible place still’. Graham was writing about the Ypres of 1920, when ‘death and the ruins completely out-weigh[ed] the living’. The ruins have been replaced by replicas of the original buildings, there is nothing wrong with the town — though it is not the kind of place you would come for a honeymoon — but you can see what Graham meant when he wrote that