The Missing of the Somme Read Online Free Page B

hundred men who had won the Victoria Cross, fifty on each side of the nave.
The highest-ranking commanders from the war were among the pallbearers: Haig, French and Trenchard. The king scattered earth from the soil of France on to the coffin. ‘All this,’
commented one observer, ‘was to stir such memories and emotions as might have made the very stones cry out.’

    A similarly ironic palaver surrounds the choosing of the French Unknown Soldier in Bertrand Tavernier’s 1989 film
La Vie et rien d’autre
(
Life and Nothing
But
).
    A photograph of the temporary Cenotaph of 1919: soldiers marching past, huge crowds looking on. There is nothing triumphant about the parade. The role of the army is not to
celebrate victory but to represent the dead. This is an inevitable side-effect of the language of Remembrance being permeated so thoroughly by the idea of sacrifice. In honouring the dead,
survivors testified to their exclusion from the war’s ultimate meaning – sacrifice – except vicariously as witnesses. The role of the living is to offer tribute, not to receive
it. The soldiers marching past the Cenotaph, in other words, comprise an army of the surrogate dead.
    In an effort to give some sense of the scale of the loss, Fabian Ware, head of the Imperial War Graves Commission, pointed out that if the Empire’s dead marched four abreast down
Whitehall, it would take them three and a half days to pass the Cenotaph. 5 Over a million of the living passed by between its unveiling on 11 November and the
sealing of the Unknown Warrior’s tomb a week later. The correspondence between Ware’s image and what actually took place in1920 is such that to anyone looking at
this photo the soldiers seem like the dead themselves, marching back to receive the tribute of the living. Ware’s hypothetical idea was made flesh. ‘The dead lived again,’ wrote a
reporter in
The Times
.
    The surrogate dead
    ‘A crowd flowed over Westminster Bridge. So many, / I had not thought death had undone so many,’ wrote T. S. Eliot in
The Waste Land
.
    The line of soldiers marching past the Cenotaph stretches out of sight, out of time. If we followed the line, it would take us back to another photograph, of men marching away to war. These two
images are really simply two segments of a single picture of the long march through the war. There is a single column of men, so long that by the time those at the back are marching off from the
recruiting stations, heading to trains, those at the front – the dead – are marching past the Cenotaph.
    An early draft of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Apologia Pro Poemate Meo’ is entitled ‘The Unsaid’. In an accidental echo of Owen, John Berger has written that the two
minutes’ silence
    was a silence before the untellable. The sculptured war memorials are like no other public monuments ever constructed. They are numb: monuments to an inexpressible
     calamity.
    The Cenotaph is the starkest embodiment of Berger’s claim. It is a representation in three dimensions of the silence that surrounded it for two minutes on Armistice Day. The public wanted
a permanent version of the Cenotaph to record – to hold – the silence that was gathered within it and which, thereafter, would emanate from it. During the silence it had seemed,according to
The Times
, as if ‘the very pulse of Time stood still’. In recording that silence, the Cenotaph would also be an emblem of timelessness. A temporary
version of the Cenotaph was an impossible contradiction: it had to be permanent.
    For two minutes in each of the years that followed, the silence of the monument was recharged. Since the Second World War and the diminished power of the Sunday Silence, that silence has drained
from the Cenotaph. The clamour of London encroaches on it annually; its silence is becoming inaudible, fading.
    In the 1920s neither the permanent Cenotaph nor the Unknown Warrior could satisfy the passion for remembrance. In many ways the