The anger in his poems always comes from this: from the fact of having witnessed what civilians at home could never conceive of seeing. This reaches its most intense expression in the transitional passage in ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’:
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face. .
Owen, the best-known poet of the First World War, wrote that he was ‘not concerned with Poetry’. Robert Capa, the best-known photographer of the Second, declared that he was ‘not interested in taking pretty pictures’. During the Spanish Civil War he took the most famous war photograph of all time, which showed — or purported to — the precise moment of a Republican soldier’s death in action. In his photographs of the Second World War we come across the dead almost casually, in houses and streets. A photograph from December 1944 shows a frozen winter scene with bare trees, cattle and huts in the background. A GI advances across the photo towards a body lying in the middle of the field. Some way off, beyond the margins of the frame, in the next photograph, there will be another body. Through Capa’s photos, in other words, we follow a trail of bodies. This trail leads, ultimately, to the photos of mass death at the core of our century: bodies piled up in concentration camps. Capa, personally, had no intention of photographing the concentration camps, because they ‘were swarming with photographers, and every new picture of horror served only to diminish the total effect’.
Theodor Adorno said famously that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz. Instead, he failed to add, there would be photography.
Since the concentration camps we have seen hundreds, thousands of photographs of the dead: from Cambodia, Beirut, Vietnam, Algeria, Salvador, Sarajevo. After the Second World War the work of Capa — an invented name anyway — came less to suggest an individual’s work and, increasingly, to identify the kind of photograph associated with him. The original dissolved into the hundreds of reproductions that came in his wake. Photographs of the dead are now ten a penny. More and more news bulletins come with the warning that some of the images in them might upset some viewers. Not only is ours a time when anyone — from Presidents of the United States to nameless peasants — might die on film; this has been the time when, to a degree, people only die on film. Like many people I have seen hundreds of bodies on film and never one in real life: an exact reversal of the typical experience of the Great War.
The drift of photography since then has been from looking into the eyes of men who have seen death to seeing things through their eyes.
A real photograph of my mother’s father: in profile, astride a horse, about to take water up to the front. In another frame, crammed between the glass and a photo showing him standing easy, are four medals. On one, attached to a rainbow-coloured ribbon, is written: THE GREAT WAR FOR CIVILISATION 1914–1919. Another, with a ribbon of fading orange-yellow stripes and blue edges, shows a figure on horseback cantering over a skull. Looking at these medals, I get the impression they were given away willy-nilly: souvenirs to ensure that no one went away empty-handed and everyone had something to show for their pains.
CERTIFICATE OF EMPLOYMENT DURING THE WAR
(Army form Z. 18)
Regtl. No. 201334 Rank: Pte
Surname: Tudor
Christian name in fulclass="underline" Geoffrey
Regt: KSLI
Regimental Employment — Nature of: Transport [the next word is illegible]. Trade or calling before Enlistment: Farm Labourer
Course of Instruction and Courses in Active Service Army Schools, and certificates, if any: nil
Special Remarks: This is required as a help in finding civil employment: Steady and reliable. A very good groom and drive. Takes great care of his animals.
Signed by: Major [name illegible]
The history of my family is the history of certificates like this.
Steady and Reliable — these are the qualities which have distinguished us through two world wars.
My father was given a similar reference before he was made redundant from the Gloster Aircraft Company after the Second World War. Years later, when he was made redundant again (aged sixty), he was once more commended for the reliability and steadiness he had displayed over twenty years.
‘Takes great care of his animals.’ The Major who filled out this certificate might have been describing an animal. ‘Steady and reliable’ — like a dog. Go and find a job with that. Go out into the world with my blessing.
Certificates played their part in enabling me to dispense with the qualities displayed by my father and grandfather. I left school and headed to Oxford with my A Level certificates and my top-of-the-class references. I graduated without being given a certificate proving I had even been there. I had entered a way of life in which certificates and recommendations were silently and invisibly assumed and so could be dispensed with.
My deepest sense of kinship with my family is activated by this form of my grandfather’s — not just my love: my class feeling, my ambition, my loyalty. That form — army certificate Z. 18 — is why this book has the shape — the form — it does.
* * *
‘Tenderness: something on animals and pity, something on tenderness. .’
In footage and photographs of the war there are horses everywhere. So many of them it is easy to think you are watching an early Western, set in an especially dismal period of the American Civil War. In St Jude’s Church, Hampstead, there is a memorial to the 375,000 horses killed in the war. In All Quiet on the Western Front, after an artillery barrage, the air is full of the screams of wounded horses. The belly of one of them is ripped open. He becomes tangled in his intestines and trips, stumbles to his feet again. ‘I tell you,’ says one of the soldiers, ‘it is the vilest baseness to use horses in the war.’11
The cries that fill the air are worse than those of men who ‘could not cry so terribly’. The soldiers ‘can bear almost anything’; but this, claims the narrator, Paul, in a passage that anticipates Picasso’s Guernica, ‘is unendurable. It is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation, wild with anguish, filled with terror, and groaning.’
The role of horses in memorials has historically been to raise St George above the clutches of the dragon or to hoist the victorious general to a more commanding height above the claims of the everyday. In either case the horse serves as an additional pedestal.12
In Chipilly, on the Somme, the Memorial to the 58th (London) Division by H. Gauquié is of a soldier and his wounded horse. The horse’s legs have collapsed, its eyes are rolling in panic. The soldier has one arm around the horse’s neck; with the other he strokes its jaw, using his forearm to support its thrashing head. It takes all the soldier’s strength to comfort the wounded horse but his lips touch its face as tenderly as a lover’s. Both seem about to sink into the stone mud beneath them.
‘A very good groom and driver. Takes good care of his animals.’
The driver tends the wounded horse he has led into war. Describing himself as ‘a herdsman’ and ‘a shepherd of sheep’, Owen tended his men like ‘a cattle-driver’. In action the soldiers ‘herded from the blast / Of whizz-bangs’ before dying ‘as cattle’. Widespread in writing from the war, the image of the officer as shepherd and Other Ranks as sheep is especially suggestive, notes Paul Fussell, ‘when the Other Ranks are wearing their issue sheepskin coats with the fur outside’. As so often happens in the war, reality runs ahead of metaphor: in 1917 regiments of the French army marched to the front baa-ing like lambs on their way to the slaughter.