The Missing of the Somme Read Online Free
Author: Geoff Dyer
gas, and the counter-attacks. At those moments
you’re full of the excitement of reality, and you’ve some satisfaction. But all that wears off and goes away, you don’t know how and you don’t know where, and
there’s only the names left . . .’
Sassoon’s later claim – ‘Remembering, we forget’ – is inverted: a memorial is constructed from the litany of what will be forgotten. At the end of it all, as with a
memorial, there are ‘only the names left’.
‘We’re forgetting-machines,’ exclaims another of Barbusse’s soldiers. Accompanying the draft preface Owen wrote for a proposed collection of his poems was a list of
possible contents; next to the first poem, ‘Miners’, is scribbled ‘How the future will forget’. Constantly reiterated, the claim that we are in danger of forgetting is one
of the ways in which the war ensured it would be remembered. Every generation since the armistice has believed that it will be the last for whom the Great War has any meaning. Now, whenthe last survivors are within a few years of their deaths, I too wonder if the memory of the war will perish with the generation after mine. This sense of imminent amnesia is, has been
and – presumably – always will be immanent in the war’s enduring memory.
The issue, in short, is not simply the way the war generates memory but the way memory has determined – and continues to determine – the meaning of the war.
Taken from his earlier poem ‘Recessional’, Kipling’s words ‘Lest we Forget’ admonish us from memorials all over the country. Forget what? And what will befall us if
we
do
forget? It takes a perverse effort of will to ask such questions – for, translated into words, the dates 1914–18 have come to mean ‘that which is incapable of being
forgotten’.
Sassoon expended a good deal of satirical bile on the hypocrisy of official modes of Remembrance but no one was more troubled by the reciprocity of remembering and forgetting. He may claim, in
‘Dreamers’, that soldiers draw ‘no dividends from time’s tomorrows’, but he is determined that they will have a place in all our yesterdays.
As early as March 1919, the poem ‘Aftermath’ opens with the aghast question, ‘
Have you forgotten yet?
. . .’ Sassoon’s tone is no less admonitory than
Kipling’s – ‘
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget
’ – but in place of august memorials he wants to cram our nostrils
with the smell of the trenches:
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench –
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
* * *
The Glorious Dead
Beating his familiar drum, Sassoon, in his 1933 sequence ‘The Road to Ruin’, imagined ‘the Prince of Darkness’ standing in front of the Cenotaph,
intoning:
Make them forget, O Lord, what this Memorial
Means . . .
Over the years, passing by in a bus or on a bike, I have seen the Cenotaph so often that I scarcely notice it. It has become part of the unheeded architecture of the everyday.
The empty tomb has become the invisible tomb.
In the years following the armistice, however, especially in 1919 and 1920, the Cenotaph, in Stephen Graham’s words, ‘gather[ed] to itself all the experience and all that was sacred
in the war’.
A victory parade had been planned for 19 July 1919, but the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, opposed any proposals for national rejoicing which did not include ‘some tribute to the
dead’. Lutyens was duly asked to devise a temporary, non-denominational ‘catafalque’. In a matter of hours he sketched the design for what became the Cenotaph.
The wood and plaster pylon was unveiled on schedule, but such was the emotion aroused by its stern, ascetic majesty that it was decided – ‘by the human sentiment of millions’,
as Lutyens himself wrote – to replace it with an identical permanent version made of
you’re full of the excitement of reality, and you’ve some satisfaction. But all that wears off and goes away, you don’t know how and you don’t know where, and
there’s only the names left . . .’
Sassoon’s later claim – ‘Remembering, we forget’ – is inverted: a memorial is constructed from the litany of what will be forgotten. At the end of it all, as with a
memorial, there are ‘only the names left’.
‘We’re forgetting-machines,’ exclaims another of Barbusse’s soldiers. Accompanying the draft preface Owen wrote for a proposed collection of his poems was a list of
possible contents; next to the first poem, ‘Miners’, is scribbled ‘How the future will forget’. Constantly reiterated, the claim that we are in danger of forgetting is one
of the ways in which the war ensured it would be remembered. Every generation since the armistice has believed that it will be the last for whom the Great War has any meaning. Now, whenthe last survivors are within a few years of their deaths, I too wonder if the memory of the war will perish with the generation after mine. This sense of imminent amnesia is, has been
and – presumably – always will be immanent in the war’s enduring memory.
The issue, in short, is not simply the way the war generates memory but the way memory has determined – and continues to determine – the meaning of the war.
Taken from his earlier poem ‘Recessional’, Kipling’s words ‘Lest we Forget’ admonish us from memorials all over the country. Forget what? And what will befall us if
we
do
forget? It takes a perverse effort of will to ask such questions – for, translated into words, the dates 1914–18 have come to mean ‘that which is incapable of being
forgotten’.
Sassoon expended a good deal of satirical bile on the hypocrisy of official modes of Remembrance but no one was more troubled by the reciprocity of remembering and forgetting. He may claim, in
‘Dreamers’, that soldiers draw ‘no dividends from time’s tomorrows’, but he is determined that they will have a place in all our yesterdays.
As early as March 1919, the poem ‘Aftermath’ opens with the aghast question, ‘
Have you forgotten yet?
. . .’ Sassoon’s tone is no less admonitory than
Kipling’s – ‘
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget
’ – but in place of august memorials he wants to cram our nostrils
with the smell of the trenches:
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench –
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
* * *
The Glorious Dead
Beating his familiar drum, Sassoon, in his 1933 sequence ‘The Road to Ruin’, imagined ‘the Prince of Darkness’ standing in front of the Cenotaph,
intoning:
Make them forget, O Lord, what this Memorial
Means . . .
Over the years, passing by in a bus or on a bike, I have seen the Cenotaph so often that I scarcely notice it. It has become part of the unheeded architecture of the everyday.
The empty tomb has become the invisible tomb.
In the years following the armistice, however, especially in 1919 and 1920, the Cenotaph, in Stephen Graham’s words, ‘gather[ed] to itself all the experience and all that was sacred
in the war’.
A victory parade had been planned for 19 July 1919, but the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, opposed any proposals for national rejoicing which did not include ‘some tribute to the
dead’. Lutyens was duly asked to devise a temporary, non-denominational ‘catafalque’. In a matter of hours he sketched the design for what became the Cenotaph.
The wood and plaster pylon was unveiled on schedule, but such was the emotion aroused by its stern, ascetic majesty that it was decided – ‘by the human sentiment of millions’,
as Lutyens himself wrote – to replace it with an identical permanent version made of