it would be easy to imagine someone who had no insoluble ties killing himself here, drawn by the lodestone of death. There is a pull from the other world, a drag on the heart and spirit.
Especially in our dismal hotel room. We lie on our beds, half pissed. Mark is reading Death’s Men; Paul, They Called It Passchendaele; I read The Challenge of the Dead. Eventually the other two drop off to sleep. I go on reading. I ‘lie listless, sleepless, with Ypres on the heart, and then suddenly a grand tumult of explosion, a sound as of the tumbling of heavy masonry’.
Paul snoring.
We drive along the flat roads of Flanders through the dregs of autumn. Every crossroads is smeared with tractor mud. It has stopped raining and started to drizzle. ‘Intermittent’ is the nearest we get to turning off the wipers — the Ypres, as we prefer to call them. The landscape is a sponge, soaking up rain. Turnips or beets — root vegetables of some kind, in any case — are piled up at entrances to fields.
Because the car is rented, we drive at top speed through every puddle and slick of mud, rally-cross style. Soon it is plastered with muck. From now on we refer to it as the tank: ‘Let’s park the tank’, ‘The tank needs petrol. .’ Mainly, because it is so cold, we say, ‘Let’s get back in the tank.’
Near St Julien we come to Frederick Chapman Clemesha’s Canadian Memoriaclass="underline" the bust of a soldier mounted on and merging into a pillar of square stones. Head tipped forward, facing not towards the enemy lines of old but back towards Ypres. Rain smoking around him, dripping from the brim of his tin helmet. Thin trees in the distance. Sky grey as the rainstreaked stone of the monument.
We are in no hurry to leave. The memorial makes no appeal and no demands. It commands its solemn patch of land. Withstanding rain and time, we stand with it, this imperturbable monument.
Mourning for all mankind?
Beyond that it is difficult to say what feelings the memorial evokes. Not pity, not pride, not sadness even. Henry Williamson acknowledged this uncertainty while remaining ostensibly untroubled by it. For him it is a ‘memorial to all soldiers in the war’. Having found a way of articulating the statue’s refusal to yield to an easily identifiable response, he generalizes still further: it ‘mourns for all mankind’ — at which point the actual statue all but disappears in a fog of generalized emotion. It is a grand gesture and a self-defeatingly banal one: if all mankind is to be mourned, there would be no need to single out for special lamentation this particular
BATTLEFIELD WHERE 18,000
CANADIANS ON THE BRITISH
LEFT WITHSTOOD THE FIRST
GERMAN GAS ATTACKS THE
22–24 APRIL 1915 2,000
FELL AND LIE BURIED NEARBY
In Fields of Glory Jean Rouaud describes a gas attack in terms that recall the rolling fog of Bleak House or the slinking catlike fog of Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’:
Now the chlorinated fog infiltrates the network of communication trenches, seeps into dugouts (mere sections of trench covered with planks), nestles in potholes, creeps through the rudimentary partitions of casements, plunges into underground chambers hitherto preserved from shells, pollutes food and water supplies, occupies space so methodically that frantic pain-racked men search vainly for a breath of air.
The leisurely sentence unfolds infinitely slowly, gradually revealing the harm that this apparently harmless stain on the air can do until, finding yourself running out of breath with several clauses still to go, you are suddenly struggling for the full stop. The initial lyrical lilt of the scene is soon rent apart by ‘the violent cough that tears the lungs and the pleura and brings bloody froth to the lips, the acrid vomiting that doubles up the body’.
John Singer Sargent’s painting Gassed shows a line of ten men making their way through the mass of other gas victims sprawling on the ground on either side of them. Their eyes are bandaged and, as in Brueghel’s Parable of the Blind, each man has his hand on the shoulder of the one in front. In the middle of the group a soldier turns away to vomit. Another, near the front, raises his leg high, expecting a step. An orderly guides and steadies the two men at the head of the line. Further off, to the right of the low sun, another group are making their way uncertainly forward.
The only sound. .
The soldiers in the foreground lie sleeping or resting, propped on one another. One drinks from a canteen. In the sky there are planes where birds should be, flying haphazardly.
Henry Tonks, another war artist who was with Sargent when he saw the gassed soldiers, recalls the scene:
They sat or lay down on the grass, there must have been several hundred, evidently suffering a great deal, chiefly I fancy from their eyes which were covered up by pieces of lint.
In Gassed there is little suffering. Or rather, what suffering there is is outweighed by the painting’s compassion. In spite of the vomiting figure the scene has almost nothing in common with Owen’s vision of the gas victim whose blood comes ‘gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs’. What Sargent has depicted, instead, is the solace of the blind: the comfort of putting your trust in someone, of being safely led. At the same time the light itself seems enough to restore their sight, light so soft that it will soothe even their gas-ravaged eyes. Pain is noisy, clamorous. In Sargent’s painting coughing and retching are absorbed by the tranquillity of the evening. The lyricism at the opening of Rouaud’s description is beginning to make itself felt again as air and men convalesce, reasserting their capacity for tenderness.
The scene is already touched, in other words, by the beauty of the world as it will be revealed when their vision is restored.
The only sound, that is. . But no, I am getting ahead of myself.
In the first months of the war football was used as an incentive to enlistment; the war, it was claimed, offered the chance to play ‘the greatest game of all’. By the end of 1914 an estimated 500,000 men had enlisted at football matches. By the following spring, professional football had been banned: matches, it was feared, were so popular that (a reversal of the initial strategy) they deterred men from enlisting.
At the front the enthusiasm for the game continued unabated. Whether a match actually took place in No Man’s Land between German and English troops on Christmas Day 1914 is doubtful; even if it did not, it is entirely appropriate that the day’s events should have generated the myth of a football match as the embodiment of fraternization.
The most famous footballing episode was Captain Nevill’s kicking a ball into No Man’s Land on the first day of the Somme. A prize was offered to the first man to dribble the ball into the German trenches; Nevill himself scrambled out of the trench in pursuit of his goal and was cut down immediately. (Perhaps the Somme was not only an indictment of military strategy but also of the British propensity for the long-ball game.) Lawrence’s admonition — that tragedy ought to be a great big kick at misery — could not have been fulfilled more literally.