Move close to Sargent’s painting, closer than its size compels. Through the legs of the gassed soldiers — and especially in the gap opened in the line by the vomiting man — you can glimpse a game of football being played in the background. One team in red, the other in blue, the ball in mid-air, suspended in the lovely evening light.
The only sounds not absorbed by the light are the shouts of the game, just audible to the line of blinded men.
* * *
Road signs direct us through history as well as geography: Poelcapelle, Zonnebeke, Passchendaele. ‘There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity,’ wrote Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. A generation later Philip Toynbee remembers, as a boy, ‘murmuring the name Passchendaele in an ecstasy of excitement and regret’. Vernon Scannell too was mesmerized by the ‘litany of proper names’ which crop up, in various permutations, again and again in his poems: ‘Passchendaele, Bapaume, and Loos, and Mons’; ‘Cambrai, Bethune, Arras, Kemmel Hill’; ‘Passchendaele, Verdun, The Menin Road. .’
I cannot remember when in my childhood I first heard of places like these. But I know I heard them — the Somme especially — at home, before I came across them in history books or at school. It was at the Somme that history engaged my family, that my family entered history. Like Shurdington, Cranham, Birdlip, Leckhampton and Churchdown, the name was part of the soil in which the history of my family was rooted. This intertwining of the villages and landmarks of Gloucestershire with those of Flanders and Picardy is also the defining characteristic of the poetry of Ivor Gurney.
Appropriately, his first volume of poetry, published in 1917, was entitled Severn and Somme; in the letters and poems he wrote from the trenches, and afterwards in the long years of mental illness, he exclaims again and again how — a source of comfort and torment — the landscape of northern France resembles his beloved Gloucestershire. At Crucifix Corner ‘all things said Severn’; in another poem the same spot reminds him of Crickley. Near Vermand, ‘the copse was like a Cranham copse with scythed curve’, like ‘Cotswold her spinnies if ever. .’ Hearing a cuckoo in ‘a shattered wood. . what could [he] think of but Framilode, Minsterworth, Cranham, and the old haunts of home’. Recalling the time he was gassed at ‘bad St Julien’ (long after that first attack, in September 1917), the poem ‘Farewell’ sets the dual landscapes of ‘Ypres’, ‘Somme and Aubers’ and ‘Gloucester’, ‘Cheltenham’, ‘Stroud’ swirling around each other.
Gurney was born in 1890 and served in the Gloucesters, the same regiment as my father’s father. The last fifteen years of his life were spent at the City of London Mental Home, but when he died, in 1937, he was buried just outside Gloucester. Running past the bottom of our garden, Hatherley Brook passes within half a mile of the church at Twigworth where he is buried.
We drive into Passchendaele. The power of this name has not diminished with the years. As words, ‘Auschwitz’ and ‘Dachau’ have become over-burdened by their rhetorical power as synonyms for evil. If not in print then certainly in conversation Belsen has become a common metaphor for extreme skinniness. Passchendaele, despite the carnage associated with it, is rarely heard except to designate the Battle of Third Ypres. Instead of passing into common linguistic currency, then, these place-names have acquired an almost sacred ring. They have perhaps become over-loaded with holiness, especially Passchendaele. For those who were there, Passchendaele was so awful, so horrific, that it became almost a joke. Paul reads aloud the accounts of two survivors quoted by Lyn Macdonald: ‘Tuesday, 2 October. Back in the battery again, but what have we come back to? Passchendaele!’ Another recalls that
the names were so sinister — Zonnebeke — Hill 60 — Zillebeke — the names terrified you before you got there, they had such a sinister ring about them. Then to end up making for Passchendaele was the last straw.
This tone of disaffected endurance is not confined to place-names.
Paul Fussell sees the war, via Hardy, as a huge ‘satire of circumstance’ in which irony emerges as the only adequate mode of expression. Hence, he notes satirically, ‘The Oxford Book of War Poetry might just as well be titled The Oxford Book of Satire.’ The war for Fussell is a text which he has read more perceptively and persuasively than anyone else. The participants are consequently judged in literary terms: Haig is reproved for a ‘want of imagination and innocence of artistic culture’; the ‘hopeless absence of cleverness’ about one of his plans is ‘entirely characteristic of its author’. In such company ‘it is refreshing to turn to a wittier tradition’, to Sir Herbert Plumer, for example, ‘a sort of intellectual’s hero of the British Great War’. Not surprisingly the war demanded from its generals ‘the military equivalent of wit and invention’ — exactly the qualities so abundantly displayed by a ‘sophisticated observer’ like Fussell himself. For Fussell, in short, irony is synonymous with sophistication — which makes it especially ironic that the war’s most deeply ironic mode is probably the ‘mustn’t grumble’ proletarian grumble. (Sassoon did not simply try to depict the war in realist terms; he tried to find a poetic diction of moaning.)
Of the prose writers it is Frederic Manning who — despite a tendency to lop off every aspirate in sight — has best conveyed this pervasive idiom:
‘What ’appened to Shem?’ [Bourne] asked.
‘Went back. Wounded in the foot.’
‘’e were wounded early on, when Jerry dropped the barrage on us,’ explained Minton, stolidly precise as to facts.
‘That bugger gets off everything with ’is feet,’ said Sergeant Tozer.
‘’e were gettin’ off with ’is ’ands an’ knees when I seed ’im,’ said Minton, phlegmatically.
Trench songs like ‘The Old Battalion’, used to famous effect in Oh What a Lovely War, are musical elaborations of exactly this brand of deadpan resignation. First performed by Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in 1963, Oh What a Lovely War reached a wider audience in 1969 when it was filmed by Richard Attenborough. I half saw the film a couple of times, but, disliking music hall and the theatre in equal measure, it never made any impression on me. It wasn’t until I read it as a text — in wilful defiance, as Sassoon might have put it, of a prefatory note which warns that ‘this is a play script and should be read as such’ — that I found a version I could respond to. The satirical attacks on Haig and the generals still seem to rely on crude caricature, but the trench scenes contain some of the best writing about the war. Writers may have resorted to irony, but the soldiers here rely on its more humane equivalent: the piss-take.
On Christmas Eve the Germans sing ‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht’; the British respond with a carol of their own:
It was Christmas day in the cookhouse,
The happiest day of the year,
Men’s hearts were full of gladness
And their bellies full of beer,
When up spoke Private Shorthouse,
His face as bold as brass,
Saying, ‘We don’t want your Christmas pudding
You can stick it up your. .’
Tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy. .
In the course of the play almost all of the themes touched on in this book are dealt with in similar style. In place of a meditation on Gassed we have:
They’re warning us, they’re warning us,
One respirator for the four of us.