Thank your lucky stars that three of us can run,
So one of us can use it all alone.
Listening to ‘those poor wounded bleeders moaning in noman’s-land’, a soldier notes that it ‘sounds like a cattle market’. The literary endeavours of the writer-soldiers — and the birth of the war’s written mythology — receive similarly short shrift:
SECOND SOLDIER: What’s he doing?
THIRD SOLDIER: Writing to his lady love.
SECOND SOLDIER: Oh blimey! Not again.
THIRD SOLDIER: Third volume. My dearest, I waited for you for two hours last night at Hellfire Corner, but you didn’t turn up. Can it be that you no longer love me?
Signed — Harry Hotlips.
SECOND SOLDIER: What’s she like?
FOURTH SOLDIER: Lovely.
SECOND SOLDIER: Is she?
THIRD SOLDIER: Bet she’s got a nose like a five-inch shell.
FOURTH SOLDIER: Shut up will you? I’m trying to concentrate.
FIFTH SOLDIER: You writing for that paper again?
FOURTH SOLDIER: Yes, they don’t seem to realize they’re in at the birth of the Wipers Gazette. Here, do you want to hear what I’ve written?
SECOND SOLDIER: No.
Appropriately and perfectly, the play ends with a song which, like that defining passage in Barbusse, looks ahead to the impossibility of conveying what happened in the trenches:
And when they ask us, and they’re certainly going to ask us,
The reason why we didn’t win the Croix de Guerre,
Oh, we’ll never tell them, oh, we’ll never tell them
There was a front, but damned if we knew where.
Oh What a Lovely War was not ‘written’ in the conventional sense; it grew out of a close collaboration by all the members of the Theatre Workshop. In a characteristic aside Fussell, by contrast, notes that ‘it is really hard to shake off the conviction that this war has been written by someone’. The great value of Lyn Macdonald’s books is that they are not texts so much as carefully arranged accumulations of raw material which have not been ‘worked up’ as they have in Oh What a Lovely War. Preserved in 1914 or Somme are the voices of men — like my grandfather — who never sought to record their experiences on paper. The tropes identified by Fussell are reproduced in a different, ‘lower’ or non-literary register which simultaneously qualifies and verifies many of his claims.
Sassoon’s observation, in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, that ‘the symbolism of the sunset was wasted on the rank and file’ suggests that Fussell’s elaborate analysis of sunsets has only literary significance — but sunsets bathe the accounts of even the least literary men in a lyric glow. Likewise, Fussell’s lengthy examination of the way the war was ironically underwritten by the sporting spirit is both supported by and wrenched away from its Newboltian public school context by an incident recorded by Macdonald. Lieutenant Patrick King, in the midst of shelling, calls across to see if his men are all right. The reply comes: ‘Aye, all’s reet here, Paddy. We’re still battin’.’
This tone of deadpan resignation is surprisingly versatile. It embraces a range of the rhetorical devices catalogued in The Great War and Modern Memory. Fussell notes the way that The Pilgrim’s Progress provided a symbolic map of the war (Passchendaele is the Slough of Despond); one of Macdonald’s interviewees begins with the graphically exact understatement, ‘The salient was a dead loss,’ and moves in ten lines beyond Bunyan to describe it as ‘just a complete abomination of desolation’.
This pretty much sums up our feelings about Passchendaele. We buy bread, fruit and pink-coloured meat at a supermarket and then go for coffee. At eleven-thirty in the morning the café is already full of men, beer and smoke.
‘To our dismay, on counting our money, we found that it was nearly gone,’ noted Williamson in 1927. ‘Whither had it gone?’
‘We must have spent more on beer than we thought,’ suggests Paul before going through the figures in the back of his notebook again. However we look at it, money is pouring through our fingers. After further anguished calculations we put it down to the exchange rate. A few weeks ago the pound plunged to a new record low, and as a consequence we are sitting here in Passchendaele, the poor men of Europe, licking our financial wounds.
We leave the café and head for Tyne Cot Cemetery, a vast, sprawling city of the dead. Like any metropolis it has preserved the haphazard, unregulated heart of the old city: the 300 or so graves that were found here after the armistice. Since then it has spread out in a series of radial fans and neat purpose-built suburban blocks, accommodating over eleven thousand of the dead of the rural battlefields. Even rough-hewn German bunkers were absorbed by the city’s irenic expansion.
Rain has cratered and pocked the earth around the headstones, smeared them with mud. The grass has been worn bare in places. The sky is grey with cold. Flowers have been pruned back to their stems. It is easy to imagine that the shedding of leaves is only the first stage in nature’s cutting back for winter. In time branches will shrink back into trunks and trunks into earth until only frost-ravaged headstones remain above the ground.
It is so cold that we stay only a short time before Paul says,
‘Let’s get back in the car.’
‘Tank, Paul, tank.’
‘Sorry. “Tank.”’
‘And say “sir” when you say “tank”.’
‘Tank, sir. Yes, sir.’
Our next stop is the Hill 60 Museum, which for the rest of the trip we refer to as the Little Shop of Horrors. If Hill 60 seemed out of place in that list of sinister names — a stray from Vietnam — this place soon persuades you of its right to be included among them. Out front is a ‘theme’ café decorated with wartime bric-à-brac. One of those creepy old war songs is playing on a scratchy gramophone: ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary. .’ The canned past.
The first room of the museum proper is given over mainly to stereoscopic viewers. Bright sepia in 3-D: lines of blasted trees receding into history; an exaggerated perspective on the past. Everything is covered in dust, ‘the flesh of time’ Brodsky calls it, ‘time’s very flesh and blood’. The walls are lined with photographs, photographs of the muddy dead. Another trench song, ‘The Old Battalion’, scratches and crackles through the speakers:
If you want to find the old battalion,
I know where they are:
They’re hanging on the old barbed wire.
I’ve seen ’em, I’ve seen ’em,
Hanging on the old barbed wire.
The next room is given over to hideous uniforms and a random assortment of broken bayonets, revolvers and shell casings. There are a couple of petrified boots, the remains of a rifle so rusty it looks like it has been salvaged from a coral reef. A dusty damp smell — damp rot, rotting dust — pervades the place. It is as if Steptoe and Son have opened up their own branch of the Imperial War Museum.
Through a glass door we step out into the rain-clogged trenches and ditches. Everything here is rusty. Not just the strips of corrugated iron which, let’s face it, were designed to rust, but the earth and leaves. The year is turning to rust. Mud is old rust with dirt mixed in. Water is liquid rust.
By now the tank is a slum. It is littered with pâté rind, bread crumbs, greaseproof paper, orange peel and banana skins. Tins of beer rattle across the floor every time we turn a corner. From the outside hardly a square inch of the original paintwork can be seen. Even the interior is caked with mud from our boots.
Paul is driving. We are waiting at a junction. He begins pulling out on to the main road.