. . trees not quite dead but sprouting green from black trunks and then to blasted trees dead to the core. After a mile or so farmhouses and cultivation cease and one enters the terrible battle area of Passchendaele, all pits, all tangled with corroded wire — but now as if it were in tumultuous conflict with Nature. . The stagnancy has not dried up, but festers still in black rot below the rushes. Double shell-holes, treble shell-holes, charred ground, great pits, bashed-in dug-outs, all overgrown with the highest of wild flowers. .
In 1917 Masefield wrote letter after letter to his wife, cataloguing the devastation he was witnessing in the area of the Somme. Even while surrounded by destruction on an unimaginable scale, he predicted that ‘when the trenches are filled in, when the plough has gone over them, the ground will not long keep the look of war’. By the late twenties he was being proved right. When R. H. Mottram went back twenty years after the end of the war, he found ‘all semblance gone, irretrievably gone’. If at first the fear had been that the area was beyond renovation, now veterans became worried that insufficient traces would remain of what had taken place. In 1930 Vera Brittain wrote:
Nature herself conspires with time to cheat our recollections; grass has grown over the shell-holes at Ypres, and the cultivated meadows of industrious peasants have replaced the hut-scarred fields of Etaples and Camiers where once I nursed the wounded in their great retreat of 1918.
Carl Sandburg’s poem ‘Grass’ transforms this vast capacity for rejuvenation from a source of anxiety to one of comfort.
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.
Fields stretch away yellow and green under a perfect sky. I walk along a footpath to a small cemetery on the top of a low hill. At the edge of the path is a small pile of shells. Dense with rust, they look like relics of the Bronze or Iron Age, from a time before there were cities or books.
Even the grass cannot work hard enough to keep these traces of the past buried for good. ‘A farmer on the Western Front cannot prune a tree without ruining his saw,’ claims a character in Ondaatje’s The English Patient, ‘because of the amount of shrapnel shot into it during the [Great] War.’ Each year’s ploughing brings new bodies to the surface. Each year, writes David Constantine,
the ground breaks out in an eczema of iron,
Lead and the bones of men and the poor horses. .
The Missing of the Somme
Three p.m. The sun is blazing. The last mist melted hours ago. Trees gather the sky’s blueness around themselves. The fields on either side of the road are blurred red by poppies. I take off my shirt and soon my rucksack is clammy with sweat. By this time on 1 July 1916, under a sky as clear and hot as this, 20,000 British soldiers had been killed; another 40,000 were wounded or missing.
As I make my way towards it, the memorial at Thiepval seems almost ugly, its hulking immensity dominating the landscape for miles around.
At the car park on the edge of the site a sign states that this memorial stands on sacred ground. Visitors are asked not to bring dogs here, not to picnic, to try to preserve the beauty and tranquillity of the place.
There is no one else here. A wind moves through the jade-green trees. Green and black seem shades of each other. The grass is clipped razor-short, blazing bright green as though its colour is intensified by being so confined: potential inches of colour crammed into a centimetre. I can imagine nowhere more beautiful.
On 28 April 1917, Masefield wrote a letter describing the scene he witnessed here:
Corpses, rats, old tins, old weapons, rifles, bombs, legs, boots, skulls, cartridges, bits of wood & tin & iron & stone, parts of rotting bodies & festering heads lie scattered about. A more filthy evil hole you cannot imagine.
At the edge of the grass there is a long curving stone seat, where I sit and watch the British and French flags breezing perfectly from the summit of the huge monument. For once even the Union Jack does not look ugly.
The sun burns on the letters high up on the memoriaclass="underline" THE MISSING OF THE SOMME.
By contrast to the missing it commemorates, the Thiepval Memorial is palpably here, unmissable.18 Designed by Lutyens in High Empire style (if there is such a thing), there is no humility about it, no backing down, no regret.
Permanent, built to last, the monument has none of the vulnerability of the human body, none of its terrible propensity for harm. Its predominant relation is to the earth — not, as is the case with a cathedral, to the sky. A cathedral reaches up, defies gravity effortlessly, its effect is entirely vertiginous. And unlike a cathedral which is so graceful (full of grace) that, after a point, it disappears, becomes ethereal, the Thiepval Memorial, after a point, simply refuses to go any higher. It is stubborn, stoical. Like the deadlocked armies of the war, it stands its ground.
The contrast with a cathedral is telling in another, broader sense. In keeping with Lutyens’ general preference, the Memorial is stripped of Christian symbolism; there was, he felt, no need for it. For many men who survived, the Battle of the Somme (which, in memory, represents the core experience and expression of the Great War) put an end to the consoling power of religion. ‘From that moment,’ a soldier has said of the first day’s fighting, ‘all my religion died. All my teaching and beliefs in God had left me, never to return.’ In some ways, then, the Thiepval Memorial is a memorial if not to the death, then certainly to the superfluousness of God. Commemorated here is the faith of the ‘empty heaven’ evoked in a moving passage by Manning:
These apparently rude and brutal natures comforted, encouraged, and reconciled each other to fate, with a tenderness and tact which was more moving than anything in life. They had nothing; not even their own bodies which had become mere implements of warfare. They turned from the wreckage and misery of life to an empty heaven, and from an empty heaven to the silence of their own hearts. They had been brought to the last extremity of hope, and yet they put their hands on each other’s shoulders and said with a passionate conviction that it would be all right, though they had faith in nothing, but in themselves and in each other.
I cross the grass and walk up the shadow-mounted steps of the Memorial itself. A few wreaths have been left by the Great War Stone, their red petals glowing brightly against the pale stone. From here I can see that the monument is built on sixteen huge legs which come together in interlocking arches; also that it is made of brick. Concrete can be poured in a mass but bricks have to be placed individually just as, on each of the four sides of the sixteen legs, the names of the missing had to be carved on bands of white stone facing. (The design of the sixteen legs presumably originated in the need to create enough surface area to accommodate all the names in such a way — no more than five or six feet above head height — that they are easily readable.) Most names are here, arranged by regiments. Game W 27446, Game W 27448. There are several Dyers. High up, two plaques — French on one side, English on the other — explain that the names are recorded here of 73,077 men who lost their lives in the Battle of the Somme and to whom the fortunes of war denied the honour of proper burial.