‘Watch out!’
A truck, overtaking a car on the main road, thunders past, missing us by inches. We’re all stunned. We talk about nothing else for the next hour.
‘Think of the publicity that would have got for your book,’ says Mark. ‘Getting killed before you even wrote it.’
‘This is not a book about Paul’s driving,’ I say. ‘English poetry is not yet fit to speak of it.’
‘Dulce et decorum est in tankus mori,’ says Paul.
Messines Ridge Cemetery is set back from the road, in the middle of a quiet wood. The graves are strewn with leaves: yellow, flecked with black, brown-green. At the back of the cemetery is an arcade of classical pillars. Even the slightest breeze is enough to tug leaves from the trees. The rustle of a pheasant breaking free of the silence. Rain dripping through trees. Damp bird calls.
The headstones are turning green with moss. The words ‘Their Glory Shall Not Be Blotted Out’ are blotted out by mud splashed up by rain.
As each year passes, it grows more difficult to keep time at bay. A quarter of a century’s moss forms in one year. Time is trying to make up for lost time. Left untended this cemetery, with its classical pillars, would look like an ancient ruin in a couple of years. If the machine-gun’s unprecedented destructive power made it ‘concentrated essence of infantry’, then here we have concentrated essence of the past. This is the look the past tends towards.
We come to the vast German cemetery at Langemark. A pile of horse dung lies, accidentally, I suppose, in the entrance. Nearly 25,000 men are buried here in a mass grave. At the edge of the Kameradengrab stand four mourning figures, silhouetted against the zinc sky. Up close these are poorly sculpted figures, but from a distance they impart a sense of utter desolation to the place. It is as if the minute’s silence for which they have bowed their heads has been extended for the duration of eternity. Names are printed on low grey pillars. To the right there are individual graves marked by flat slabs of stone.
There is no colour here, no flowers, nothing transcendent. The dead as individuals hardly matter; only as elements of the nation. There are no individual inscriptions, no rhetoric. Only the unadorned facts of mortality — and even these are reduced to a bare, bleak minimum. This is the meaning and consequence of defeat.
The French cemetery at Notre Dame de Lorette covers twenty-six acres. There are 20,000 named graves here; in the ossuary lie the remains of another 20,000 unknown dead. It is icy cold. Wind streams across the grey hill. Wind is not something that passes through the sky. The sky is wind and nothing else. Crosses stretch away in lines so long they seem to follow the curvature of the earth. Names are written on both the front and back of each cross. The scale of the cemetery exceeds all imagining. Even the names on the crosses count for nothing. Only the numbers count, the scale of loss. But this is so huge that it is consumed by itself. It shocks, stuns, numbs. Sassoon’s nameless names here become the numberless numbers. You stand aghast while the wind hurtles through your clothes, searing your ears until you find yourself almost vanishing: in the face of this wind, in this expanse of lifelessness, you cannot hold your own: you do not count. There is no room here for the living. The wind, the cold, force you away.
We head south, following the Western Front down towards the Somme. We entertain ourselves by singing ‘The Old Battalion’ or conversing in a pseudo Great War lingo. Paul and I address Mark as Private Hayhurst and prefix everything with an officerly ‘I say’ or ‘Look here’. For his part Mark, while adopting the tones of the loyal batman, is actually a scrimshanker who does nothing except sit in the back reading Death’s Men. Our hotel is a ‘billet’. The forthcoming night in the boozer is referred to as ‘the show’ or ‘stunt’. None of us is quite sure whether we’re on a gloomy holiday or a rowdy pilgrimage.
We are not the first to be uncertain on this score. During the twenties the British Legion and the St Barnabas Society organized subsidized trips to enable relatives of the dead who could not afford the journey to make a pilgrimage to the cemeteries where their loved ones lay.
Helen Turrell makes such a pilgrimage in Kipling’s haunting, lovely story ‘The Gardener’. Helen has brought up her nephew Michael ever since his father — her brother — died in India. Michael is killed in the war and buried in Hagenzeele Third Military Cemetery. It is a huge cemetery and only a few hundred of the twenty thousand graves are yet marked by white headstones; the rest are marked by ‘a merciless sea of black crosses’. Overwhelmed by the wilderness of graves, Helen approaches a man who is kneeling behind a row of headstones. ‘Evidently a gardener’, the man asks who she is looking for and Helen gives her nephew’s name.
The man lifted his eyes and looked at her with infinite compassion before he turned from the fresh-sown grass towards the naked black crosses.
‘Come with me,’ he said, ‘and I will show you where your son lies.’
The story all but ends there, with the words of this Christlike figure. A three-line epilogue records that when Helen left the cemetery she looked back and saw the man bending over his plants once again, ‘supposing him to be the gardener’.
Like Helen, most of the pilgrims were bereaved women, but their numbers soon came to include veterans wanting to revisit the battlefields. Comforts were few on such trips, but there were also large numbers of visitors who wanted — and were willing to pay for — a less arduous and sombre trip around the trenches and cemeteries of France and Flanders: tourists, in short. In another instance of historical projection these battlefield tours had already been bitterly satirized by Philip Johnstone in his poem ‘High Wood’, first published in February 1918:
Madame, please,
You are requested kindly not to touch
Or take away the Company’s property
As souvenirs; you’ll find we have on sale
A large variety, all guaranteed.
As I was saying, all is as it was,
This is an unknown British officer,
The tunic having lately rotted off.
Please follow me — this way. .
the path, sir, please. .
Lyn Macdonald is perhaps exaggerating when she describes Ypres in 1920 as ‘the booming mecca of the first mass-explosion of tourism in history’, but in 1930 a hundred thousand people signed the visitors’ book at the Menin Gate in just three months. Many came in the spirit of Johnstone’s visitors or Abe North, who, in the Newfoundland Memorial Park, showers Dick Diver and Rosemary in a mock grenade attack of ‘earth gobs and pebbles’; many more departed in the spirit of Dick himself who ‘picked up a retaliatory handful of stones and then put them down.
‘“I couldn’t kid here,” he said rather apologetically.’
Understandably as well as apologetically, for few novels are as saturated with the memory of the Great War as Tender is the Night. Dick himself sums up this central concern of the book with the ‘half-ironic phrase, “Non-Combatant’s shell-shock”’.
On the first page, as Dick makes his way to Zurich in 1917, he passes ‘long trains of blinded or one-legged men, or dying trunks’. The clinic where he first meets Nicole is ‘a refuge for the broken, the incomplete, the menacing’. Nicole’s mental instability may not be related to the war — ‘the war is over’, she says, ‘and I scarcely knew there was a war’ — but is all the time reminding us of it. Her smile ‘was like all the lost youth in the world’. Lost youth may be a perpetual theme of Fitzgerald’s but there is often a larger historical dimension to our most personal concerns. In 1947, seven years after her husband’s death, Zelda wrote in a letter: ‘I do not know that a personality can be divorced from the times which evoke it. . I feel that Scott’s greatest contribution was the dramatization of a heart-broken + despairing era. .’ In 1917 Fitzgerald himself wrote: ‘After all, life hasn’t much to offer except youth and. . Every man I’ve met who’s been to war, that is this war, seems to have lost youth and faith in man.’