The Great War ruined the idea of ruins. Instead of the slow patient work of ruination observed in Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’, artillery brought about instant obliteration. Things survived only by accident or chance — like the calvary at Ypres — or mistake. Destruction was the standard and the norm. Cottages and villages did not crumble and decay — they were swept away.
In France, researching his book on the Battle of the Somme in March 1917, John Masefield described the area around Serre as
skinned, gouged, flayed and slaughtered, and the villages smashed to powder, so that no man could ever say there had been a village there within the memory of man.
In Barbusse’s Under Fire the squad are making their way to the village of Souchez when the narrator realizes they are already there:
In point of fact we have not left the plain, the vast plain, seared and barren — but we are in Souchez!
The village has disappeared. . There is not even an end of wall, fence, or porch that remains standing.
Revisiting the scenes of battle near Passchendaele in 1920, Stephen Graham finds himself — or loses himself, more accurately — in what Barbusse calls a ‘plain of lost landmarks’:
The old church of Zandwoorde cannot now be identified by any ruins — one has to ask where it was. Even the bricks and the stones seem to have been swept away.
Considering the same area of land half a century later, Leon Wolff puts the scale of destruction in its historical context: ‘In a later war, atomic bombs wrecked two Japanese cities; but Passchendaele was effaced from the earth.’
Shunning such emotive turns of phrase, Denis Winter emphasizes that the Somme presented a scene of devastation even more thorough than that observed in Belgium: ‘Aerial photos of Passchendaele in its final stages show grass and even trees. By autumn 1916, on the other hand, there was no vestige of grass on the Somme.’
Passchendaele, Albert and other villages in the Somme were rebuilt, but to some of the villages around Verdun the inhabitants never returned. Fleury, Douaumont and Cumières vanished from the map for ever.
Ruins rise from the ashes of the Great War with the Nazis and Albert Speer’s ‘Theory of Ruin Value’. Instead of being remnants of the past, Speer’s ruins are projected into a distant future — a future stretching even beyond the thousand-year Reich. With Hitler’s enthusiastic approval Speer set about designing structures and using materials to ensure that, even after generations of decay, the ivy-grown columns and crumbling walls of the Reich would have the ruined splendour of the great models of antiquity.
In the occupied countries the all-obliterating destruction of the Great War could be raised by the Nazis to the level of strategic principle. The fate of the Czech village of Lidice has been described by Albert Camus. The houses were burned to the ground, the men were shot, the women and children deported. After that
special teams spent months at work levelling the terrain with dynamite, destroying the very stones, filling in the village pond and, finally, diverting the course of the river. . To make assurance doubly sure, the cemetery was emptied of its dead who might have been a perpetual reminder that once something existed in this place.
The passion for Remembrance — for building memorials, for recording the names of the dead — can be better understood in the wake of such destruction. Solace and comfort can be found in the capacity of ruins to survive the human tragedies they result from and record. But the destruction first witnessed in the Great War was so thorough that it seemed capable of obliterating all trace of itself. Men were blown to pieces or disappeared into mud, villages were lost without trace. All that would remain, it seemed, would be ‘a sponge, an infernal swamp for souls in pain’.
Soldiers returned from this zone of obliteration to an England virtually untouched by war. The Second World War left London and other major cities cratered and ravaged by the Blitz. After the Great War the architecture and landscape of England were unchanged except, here and there, for relatively slight damage from air raids. Apart from the injured, there was no sign of a war having taken place. Written in October 1918, Cynthia Asquith’s words were prescient:
I am beginning to rub my eyes at the prospect of peace. I think it will require more courage than anything that has gone before. . one will at last fully recognize that the dead are not only dead for the duration of the war.
It was as if a terrible plague had swept invisibly through the male population of the country — except there were no bodies, no signs of burial, no cemeteries even. Ten per cent of the males under forty-five had simply disappeared.
Life went on. ‘We didn’t really miss the men who didn’t come back,’ a native of Akenfield remarks. ‘The village stayed the same.’ An accurate analysis, it turns out, of the demographic consequences of the war; in the 1921 national census the age distribution curve compared with 1901 and 1966 ‘reveals hardly the slightest difference’. In the cold light of population statistics, in other words, the losses of the terrible battles were soon made good.
The problem, then, was to find a way of making manifest the memory of those who were missing — who did not figure in statistics like these. How to make visible this invisible loss? How to do the work of ruins? How to inscribe the story of what had happened on a death-haunted landscape which was, apparently, unmarked by the greatest tragedy to have affected the nation? Again we come back to Owen’s ‘Anthem’, which, by cataloguing the ways in which the dead will not be remembered — ‘no prayers nor bells’ — etches their memory in the dusk of the shires.
In a fragment omitted from the published version of Minima Moralia Adorno observed that ‘what the Nazis did to the Jews was unspeakable: language had no word for it’. And yet, ‘a term needed to be found if the victims. . were to be spared the curse of having no thoughts turned unto them. So in English the concept of genocide was coined.’ As a result, Adorno continues, ‘the unspeakable was made, for the sake of protest, commensurable’.
What happened in the Great War remained incommensurable. ‘Horror’ and ‘slaughter’ have become popular terms of shorthand response; at a higher level of emotional and verbal refinement there is Owen’s ‘pity’. Successive waves of rhetorical elaboration could never contain the experience in which they originated — this, paradoxically, is what gives the poetry its appeal: the cry of the poems is unanswerable. This is what was heard in the two minutes’ silence of Armistice Day and is heard still in the perpetual silence of the cemeteries. Remembrance is the means by which the incommensurability of the Great War is acknowledged and expressed.
Parts of the Western Front, like the area of the Somme, had been so completely devastated that the French government contemplated making them into national forests. Soon after the armistice, however, peasants began drifting back to their old farms where they were granted three years’ rent-free tenancy. Battlefields were levelled and cleared of war debris and dead; houses were rebuilt. Stephen Graham’s The Challenge of the Dead offers an eyewitness account of the early stages of the Western Front’s transition from war to peace. Again and again in the course of his travels he comes across parties of soldiers exhuming bodies from the earth. Amidst this harvest of death the first signs of returning life serve only to transform a featureless quagmire to a blighted wilderness, a landscape at once pre- and post-historic: