I remember John Berger in a lecture suggesting that ours has been the century of departure, of migration, of exodus — of disappearance. ‘The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.’ If this is so, then the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing casts a shadow into the future, a shadow which extends beyond the dead of the Holocaust, to the Gulag, to the ‘disappeared’ of South America and of Tiananmen.
There had been military disasters before the Battle of the Somme, but these — the Charge of the Light Brigade, for example — served only as indictments of individual strategy, not of the larger purpose of which they were a part. For the first time in history the Great War resulted in a sense of the utter waste and futility of war. If the twentieth century has drifted slowly towards an acute sense of waste as a moral and political issue, then the origins of the ecology of compassion (represented by the peace movement, most obviously) are to be found in the once-devastated landscape of the Somme.
That is why so much of the meaning of our century is concentrated here. Thiepval is not simply a site of commemoration but of prophecy, of birth as well as of death: a memorial to the future, to what the century had in store for those who were left, whom age would weary.
At the far side of the memorial there is a small cemetery. On the Cross of Sacrifice at the edge of the cemetery I read:
THAT THE WORLD MAY REMEMBER THE COMMON SACRIFICE
OF TWO AND A HALF MILLION DEAD HERE
HAVE BEEN LAID SIDE BY SIDE SOLDIERS OF FRANCE
AND OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE IN ETERNAL COMRADESHIP.
The cemetery is divided in two halves: French crosses on one side, English headstones on the other. A place where time and silence have stood their ground. In the distance, wheat fields and low hedges, trees. I walk along rows of crosses on each of which is written the single word: inconnu. Row after row. On the English side there are the pale headstones:
A SOLDIER
OF THE GREAT WAR
KNOWN UNTO GOD
In front of each grave there are flowers: flame-bursts of yellow, pink, red, orange. Apart from roses I recognize none of the flowers; the rest remain unknown, unnamed.
The only sound is of humming bees, of light passing through trees, striking the grass. Gradually I become aware that the air is alive with butterflies. The flowers are thick with the white blur of wings, the rust and black camouflage of Red Admirals, silent as ghosts. I remember the names of only a few butterflies but I know that the Greek word psyche means both ‘soul’ and ‘butterfly’. And as I sit and watch, I know also that what I am seeing are the souls of the nameless dead who lie here, fluttering through the perfect air.
It is early evening by the time I make my way to Beaumont-Hamel. I walk along a footpath to a small cemetery on the top of a low hill. From the cemetery gate I can see the crosses of four other small cemeteries.
The headstones are arranged in three lines, facing east. It is a perfect spot, without even the drone of cars to disturb it. The light is softening, stretching out over the fields. Soft and sharp, gentle and bright. I take out the register of graves. Cemetery Redan Ridge Number One: 154 soldiers lie here, 73 unidentified. As I look through the book, the sun makes the pages glow the same colour as the Great War Stone.
Few people come here: the first entry in the visitors’ book was made in 1986, the last ten days ago. On 18 August 1988 a girl from the Netherlands had written: ‘It is because of the lonelyness.’
Light, field, the crosses of the other cemeteries. The faint breeze makes the pages stir beneath my fingers. It is the opposite of lonely, this cemetery: friends are buried here together — so what truth do these strange words express? The harder I try to decipher them, the more puzzling they become until, recognizing how ingrained is my mistake, trying to break a code that is not even there, I let them stand for themselves, their mystery and power undisturbed, these words that explain everything and nothing.
Scarves of purple cloud are beginning to stretch out over the horizon, light welling up behind them. The sun is going down on one of the most beautiful places on earth.
I have never felt so peaceful. I would be happy never to leave.
So strong are these feelings that I wonder if there is not some compensatory quality in nature, some equilibrium — of which the poppy is a manifestation and symbol — which means that where terrible violence has taken place the earth will sometimes generate an equal and opposite sense of peace. In this place where men were slaughtered they came also to love each other, to realize Camus’s great truth: that ‘there are more things to admire in men than to despise’.
Standing here, I know that some part of me will always be calmed by the memory of this place, by the vast capacity for forgiveness revealed by these cemeteries, by this landscape.
At this moment I am the only person on earth experiencing these sensations, in this place. At the same time, overwhelming and compounding this feeling, is the certainty that my presence here changes nothing; everything would be exactly the same without me.
Perhaps that is what is meant by ‘lonelyness’ — knowing that even at your moments of most exalted emotion, you do not matter (perhaps this is precisely the moment of most exalted emotion) because these things will always be here: the dark trees full of summer leaf, the fading light that has not changed in seventy-five years, the peace that lies perpetually in wait.
The sky is streaked crimson by the time I leave the cemetery of Redan Ridge Number One. I make my way back towards the road through dark fields. Tomorrow, a year from now, it will be exactly the same: birds lunging and darting towards the horizon; three crosses silhouetted against the blood-red sky; a man walking along the curving road; lights coming on in distant farmhouses — and each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
NOTES
Place of publication is London unless otherwise indicated. Full sources are given in the Notes only when the source is not obvious from the text or the Bibliography. Multi-part quotes may extend across more than one page, but the Notes reference is for the first part only.
p. 3 ‘On every mantelpiece. .’: Yvan Goll, ‘Requiem for the Dead of Europe’, in Jon Silkin (ed.), The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, p. 244.
p. 3 ‘Memory has a. .’: John Updike, Memories of the Ford Administration (Hamish Hamilton, 1993) p. 9.
p. 4 ‘in his ghastly. .’: Wilfred Owen, ‘Disabled’, Collected Poems, p. 67.
p. 7 ‘the turning-point in. .’: Men without Art, extract reprinted in Julian Symons (ed.), The Essential Wyndham Lewis, p. 211.
p. 8 For an extended discussion of pre-1914 as a period of latent war see Daniel Pick, War Machine (1993), pp. 192–5.
p. 8 ‘breaking down even. .’: A. J. P. Taylor, Europe: Grandeur and Decline (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1991), p. 185.
p. 8 ‘maintain towards his. .’: ‘The Idea of History’, in Fritz Stern (ed.), The Varieties of History, 2nd edn (Macmillan, 1970), p. 292.
p. 11 ‘prepared his exit. .’ and ‘We are setting. .’: Scott and Amundsen: The Race to the South Pole, revised edn (Pan, 1983), p. 508.
p. 11 ‘has shown that. .’: ibid., p. 523.
p. 11 ‘We are showing. .’: ibid., p. 508.
p. 11 ‘Of their suffering. .’: Thomas Williamson, quoted by Huntford, ibid., pp. 520–21.