Within an hour, exactly as forecast, the mist starts to thin. Level slopes of fields appear. The dusty blaze of rape. Dipping flatness. I walk towards a large cemetery, the most distant rows of headstones barely visible.
The cemetery is separated from the surrounding field by a low wall, dissolved in places by the linger of mist. Close to this wall a large cross appears as a mossy blur, like the trunk of a tree. The noise of the gate being unlatched sends birds flocking from branches and back. The gravel is loud beneath my feet. Near the gate, on a large stone — pale, horizontal, altar-like — is written:
THEIR NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE
Between this stone and the cross are rows of white headstones, bordered by perfect grass. Flowers: purple, dull red, flame-yellow.
Most of the headstones give simply the regiment, name, rank and, where it is known, the date of the soldier’s death, sometimes his age. Occasionally quotations have been added, but the elaborate biblical sentiments are superfluous; they neither add to nor detract from the uniform pathos of the headstones, some of which do not even bear a name:
A SOLDIER
OF THE GREAT WAR
KNOWN UNTO GOD
The cross has a bronze sword running down the centre, pointing to the ground. Gradually the mist thins enough for the cross to cast a promise of shadow, a darker haze, so faint it is barely there. Pale sunlight.
The high left-hand wall of the cemetery is a memorial to the New Zealand dead with no known graves ‘who fell in the Battles of the Somme September and October 1916’. Inscribed along its length are 1,205 names.
Near the gate is a visitors’ book and register of graves. The name of the cemetery is Caterpillar Valley. There are 5,539 men buried here.
‘We will remember them’
The Great War ruptured the historical continuum, destroying the legacy of the past. Wyndham Lewis sounds the characteristic note when he calls it ‘the turning-point in the history of the earth’, but there is a sense in which, for the British at least, the war helped to preserve the past even as it destroyed it. Life in the decade and a half preceding 1914 has come to be viewed inevitably and unavoidably through the optic of the war that followed it. The past as past was preserved by the war that shattered it. By ushering in a future characterized by instability and uncertainty, it embalmed for ever a past characterized by stability and certainty.
Things were, of course, less settled than the habitual view of pre-August 1914 tempts us to believe. For many contemporary observers the war tainted the past, revealing and making explicit a violence that had been latent in the preceding peace. Eighty years on, this sense of crouched and gathering violence has been all but totally filtered out of our perception of the pre-war period. Militant suffragettes, class unrest, strikes, Ireland teetering on the brink of civil war — all are shaded and softened by the long, elegiac shadows cast by the war.
European civilization may have been ‘breaking down even before war destroyed it’, but our abiding sense of the quietness of the Edwardian frame of mind is, overwhelmingly, derived from and enhanced by the holocaust that followed it. The glorious summer of 1914 seems, even, to have been generated by the cataclysm that succeeded it.
In a persuasive passage, Johan Huizinga admonished the historian to
maintain towards his subject an indeterminist point of view. He must constantly put himself at a point in the past at which the known factors still seem to permit different outcomes.
But history does not lie uniformly over events. Here and there it forms drifts — and these drifts are at their deepest between the years 1914 and 1918. Watching footage of the Normandy landings, we can experience D-Day as it happened. History hangs in the balance, waiting to be made. The Battle of the Somme, by contrast, is deeply buried in its own aftermath. The euphoric intoxication of the early days of the French Revolution — ‘Bliss was it in that dawn’ — remains undiminished by the terror lying in wait a few chapters on. The young men queuing up to enlist in 1914 have the look of ghosts. They are queuing up to be slaughtered: they are already dead. By Huizinga’s terms, the Great War urges us to write the opposite of history: the story of effects generating their cause.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
These incantatory rhythms and mantra-like repetitions are intoned every year on Remembrance Day. They are words we hear but rarely see in print. We know them — more or less — by heart. They seem not to have been written but to have pulsed into life in the nation’s collective memory, to have been generated, down the long passage of years, by the hypnotic spell of Remembrance they are used to induce.
But they were written, of course, by Laurence Binyon, in September 1914: before the fallen actually fell. ‘For the Fallen’, in other words, is a work not of remembrance but of anticipation, or more accurately, the anticipation of remembrance: a foreseeing that is also a determining.
On 22 August 1917 at Pilkem Ridge near Ypres, Ernest Brooks took one of the iconographic photographs of the Great War. Head bowed, rifle on his back, a soldier is silhouetted against the going down of the sun, looking at the grave of a dead comrade, remembering him. A photograph from the war — the Battle of Third Ypres (or Passchendaele as it is better known) was still raging, the armistice was fifteen months distant — it is also a photograph of the way the war will come to be remembered. It is a photograph of the future, of the future’s view of the past. It is a photograph of Binyon’s poem, of a sentiment. We will remember them.
If several of the terms by which we remember the war were established in advance of its conclusion, many crucial elements were embodied in a single dramatic event two years before it started.
Between November 1911 and January 1912 two teams of men — one British, headed by a naval officer, Robert Falcon Scott, the other Norwegian, headed by Roald Amundsen — were engaged in the last stage of a protracted race to the South Pole. Using dogs and adapting themselves skilfully to the hostile environment, the Norwegian team reached the Pole on 15 December and returned safely. Scott, leader of an ill-prepared expedition which relied on strength-sapping man-hauling, reached the Pole on 17 January. Defeated, the five-man team faced a gruelling 800-mile trudge back to safety. By 21 March, eleven miles from the nearest depot of food and fuel, the three exhausted surviving members of the expedition — Scott, Dr Edward Wilson and Henry Bowers — pitched their tent and sat out a blizzard. At some point Scott seems to have made the decision that it was better to stay put and preserve the record of their struggle rather than die in their tracks. They survived for at least nine days while Scott, in Roland Huntford’s phrase, ‘prepared his exit from the stage’ and addressed letters to posterity: ‘We are setting a good example to our countrymen, if not by getting into a tight place, by facing it like men when we get there.’ Despite its failure, the expedition, wrote Scott, ‘has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past’. The tradition of heroic death which aggrandizes his own example is also invigorated by it: ‘We are showing that Englishmen can still die with a bold spirit, fighting it out to the end. . I think this makes an example for Englishmen of the future.’