All around Nicole at the clinic, meanwhile, are those maimed mentally or vicariously by the war: ‘shell-shocks who merely heard an air raid from a distance’ or ‘merely read newspapers’. The accessories of fashion — a beret, for example — seek to cover ‘a skull recently operated on. Beneath it human eyes peered.’ Despite Nicole’s immense wealth, even the idyllic period of their courtship is surrounded ominously by the sound of war:
Suddenly there was a booming from the wine slopes across the lake; cannons were shooting at hail-bearing clouds in order to break them. . the hotel crouched amid tumult, chaos, and darkness.
Years later, by which time his marriage to Nicole is showing signs of strain and he is falling for another, younger woman, Dick and his friends make their tour of the Newfoundland trenches.
We arrive there on a November morning. The sky is armistice-white. The trenches are still preserved but without the barbed wire — removed, finally, because sheep kept getting tangled up in it — the grass-covered shell-holes make the place look like a particularly difficult golf course.
Fitzgerald, by contrast, deliberately begins the section of the novel which describes Dick’s visit, ‘Casualties’, so as to make it seem, for a moment, either as if the scene is taking place in the middle of the actual war or — and it amounts to the same thing — as if the war is still being waged in 1925:
Dick turned the corner of the traverse and continued along the trench walking on the duckboard. He came to a periscope, looked through it a moment, then he got up on the step and peered over the parapet. In front of him beneath a dingy sky was Beaumont-Hamel; to his left the tragic hill of Thiepval.
A few minutes later, by which time it has become clear that the friends are simply visitors rather than combatants — though they are, of course, ‘casualties’ — Fitzgerald vouchsafes to Dick one of the most famous, beautiful and telling of all passages about the war.
See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No European will ever do that again in this generation. .
This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation between the classes.
Despite the cold there were a handful of other visitors at the Memorial Park. The smaller cemeteries are deserted. Sometimes there are intervals of three or four weeks in the visitors’ books. Often people come to visit one particular grave: a great uncle, a grandfather. They are always touching, these personal inscriptions in the book, especially when the pilgrimage is the fulfilment of a lifetime’s ambition.
Most comments, though, are generic: ‘RIP’, ‘Remembering’, ‘We Will Remember Them’, ‘Lest We Forget’, ‘Very Moving’. Sometimes there is a jaunty salute: ‘All the best, lads’, ‘Sleep well, boys’. As well as commenting on the cemetery itself — ‘Peaceful’, ‘Beautiful’ — many people offer larger impressions of the war: ‘Such a waste’, ‘No more war’, ‘Never again’. All comments are heartfelt, even those like ‘They died for freedom’ or ‘For Civilization’, which, testifying to the enduring power of ignorance, end up meaning the opposite of what is intended: ‘They died for nothing.’ At the Connaught Cemetery for the massacred Ulster Division several visitors from Northern Ireland have written ‘No surrender’. One entry, from Andy Keery, reads: ‘No surrender. Proud to come from Ulster.’ Beneath it his friend has written: ‘No surrender. I came with Andy.’ Occasionally people quote a couple of lines of poetry. I add my own little couplet:
A lot of people have written ‘no surrender’.
That’s how bigots remember.
Sometimes people’s comments are so idiosyncratic as scarcely to make sense: ‘The bloke on the tractor spoiled it for me by his reckless driving. Signed anon’ — the unknown visitor. On 10 October 1992 at Tyne Cot Greg Dawson wrote, ‘We really showed those fascists a thing or two!’ Another person had drawn a Star of David and written, ‘What about the 6 million Jews?’ Beneath it someone else had written, ‘Wrong war, mate.’ This quickly becomes something of a catchphrase between the three of us: irrespective of its relevance, any remark elicits the droll rejoinder, ‘Wrong war, mate.’
At the Sheffield Memorial a diligent student wrote a short essay pointing out, in closely reasoned detail, that blame for the Somme rested, ultimately, on Churchill’s shoulders. He even added a footnote citing A. J. P. Taylor, complete with page reference, place and date of publication. Reluctant to get drawn into the minutiae of scholarly debate, another visitor had simply scrawled in the margin: ‘Rubbish!’
Sometimes a dialogue does evolve, most obviously at one of the Redan Ridge cemeteries. The theme of the discussion here is exactly that announced by the anti-Taylorite at the Sheffield Memoriaclass="underline" rubbish.
There are three tiny, beautifully located cemeteries at Redan Ridge. Next to one of them is a stinking mound of farm rubbish. An entry from 10 July 1986 expresses the characteristic sentiments of most visitors: ‘It’s such a shame they must rest with a rubbish pit beside them.’17 Several pages on, after numerous endorsements of these remarks, the first dissenting voice appears: ‘If visitors fail to recognize the true pathos behind their visits here only to latch on to the presence of a rubbish dump, then their presence here disgusts me.’
This attempt to scotch the debate only inflames it. The characteristic tone becomes aggressively indignant: ‘The rubbish is a thinly disguised insult to the memory of Pte. Tommy Atkins.’ Adding injury to insult the next person to join in notes: ‘It’s quite apt: human waste next to more of it.’ Comments like this mean that from now on the ire of those offended by the rubbish is directed not only against the farmer who dumped it but against those who implicitly condone him — and who, in turn, become steadily more aggressive in their responses: ‘Sod the rubbishtip — these men lived and died in it. Isn’t rubbish a part of life?’
That’s a moot point, but for quite a few months now the rubbish has been playing a more important part in the visitors’ book than the cemetery. Gradually the debate itself becomes the main subject of debate. The cemetery was ousted by the rubbishtip; now both are only incidental to the real focus of attention: the visitors’ book itself. You can imagine it being integrated into battlefield tours, becoming the main reason for people’s visit. Conscious of this, someone has written: ‘Quite frankly the wastage of human life is worthy of more comment than a ridiculous rubbish-tip saga.’
Every attempt to have the last word, however, demands a response and so the rubbish debate and the debate about the rubbish debate perpetuate themselves. It comes as something of a disappointment to read, on 9 September 1991: ‘Glad the rubbish has finally gone.’
I note all this down on 9 November 1992. It is the second time I have been here and there is a strange pleasure in standing in exactly the same spot again. I find the proof of my last visit, in my own handwriting, in the visitors’ book. It was a different season then; now the sky sags like mud over the brown earth. The air is cold as iron. Rain is blowing horizontal. The smell of rotting farmyard waste pervades the scene. I write: