Homage to Sebastian

I am reading, I suspect 10 years later than everyone else, Sebastian Faulks' 'Birdsong', his novel circling around and focusing on the First World War and, in particular, the Battle of the Somme. For a while, maybe for the first two hundred or more pages, I found it hard to comprehend the structure of the book with sections from different eras, linked as it were by emotion and circumstance rather than - as I thought - by a more coherent thread.

I am now beginning to understand that this is, as Faulks himself says in his introduction, an 'operatic novel' dealing with issues of love and loss, of death and survival and the fact that none of these leaves any of the players unchanged.

Faulks' description of that dreadful day, 1st July 1916, is as good as I can or could imagine. Unlike his character, Elizabeth, I have been to the monument at Thiepval on more than one occasion and I know something of the scale of the loss. But Faulks adds to this with vignette and with the broad brush strokes of a much bigger picture.

For example, I did not know that the slaughter was so great that some German machine gunners refused to keep firing, unable to accept the massacre they were inflicting. I did not know that two generals committed suicide when it became clear what carnage the day had reaped. But consider this passage on the bigger scale, and coming, in Faulks' narrative, at the end of that bloody day.

"It was dark at last. The night poured down in waves from the ridge above them and the guns at last fell silent.

"The earth began to move. To their right a man who had lain still since the first attack, eased himself upright, then fell again when his damaged leg could not take his weight. Other single men moved, and began to come up like worms from their shellholes, limping, crawling, dragging themselves out. Within minutes the hillside was seething with the movement of the wounded as they attempted to get themselves back to their line.

"'Christ,' said Weir, 'I had no idea there were so many men out here.'
"It was like a resurrection in a cemetery 12 miles long. Bent, agonised shapes loomed in multitudes on the churned earth, limping and dragging back to reclaim their life. It was as though the land were disgorging a generation of crippled sleepers, each one distinct but related to its twisted brothers as they teemed up from the reluctant earth.

"Weir was shaking.

"'It's all right,' said Stephen. 'The guns have stopped.'

"It's not that,' said Weir. 'It's the noise. Can't you hear it?'

Stephen had noticed nothing but the silence that followed the guns. Now, as he listened, he could hear what Weir had meant: it was a low, continuous moaning. He could not make out any individual pain, but the sound ran down to the river on their left and up over the hill for half a mile or more. As his ear became used to the absence of guns, Stephen could hear it more clearly: it sounded to him as though the earth itself was groaning.

"'Oh God, oh God.' Weit began to cry. 'What have we done, what have we done? Listen to it. We've done something terrible, we'll never get back to how it was before.'

LES ARRETS DE LA GRANDE ARMEE

A couple of weeks ago a small group of us went to see some of the battlefields, cemetaries and memorials of the Great War or World War I. I think I've touched on this subject before but I am always concerned, when I visit such sites, about a conflict of emotions.

Take the Canadian memorial at Vimy Ridge, for example [pictured]. Here we have one of the most elegant of monuments, erected in the 1930s and recent having undergone an extensive renovation programme requiring a long-disused quarry in Croatia to be re-opened.

The result? Something achingly artistic, filled with light, beauty and with sorrow. The central image is of Canada crying for her lost sons.

But what are we to feel about this? Is it a celebration of heroism or of waste? A sort of Arch de Triomphe or Picasso's Guernica [picture]? History is of little help here because by the standards of that bloody 1914-18 conflict, the attack on Vimy Ridge was - after long months of planning and preparation - efficient with fewer than 4,000 Canadian soldiers killed. A horrendous number but when you compare it to the 20,000 the British lost on the first day of The Somme in July 1916 ...

Of course such comparisons are at once odious and meaningless but it is interesting to speculate on the meaning viewers will attach the the statuary and, within the graveyards, the symmetry of northern France and Flanders. Will a sense of this war fade or will these many symbols transcend one conflict to be symbols of the futility of all wars? One hopes so.

In the post a couple of days ago, I received a compilation of copies of The Wipers Times (and equivalent titles) published through much of the second half of the war, wherever the editor and sub-editor (both of whom survived) were posted. To them the last word (which has little to do with anything except the humour of those impossible times):

"The following is a true extract from a return of reserve rations from a certain garrison:-
Locality - Foxhall Kemp
Map Ref - P 67 X 19-32
Commodity - Bully Beef
Quantity - 1 Tin
Remarks - Not Full"

War Games

My sense that the English used to take nothing seriously and, moreover, considered war to be a game, has just been reinforced. And poignantly so on the eve of Remembrance Sunday. I was reading part of the demob letter received by a soldier in the Royal Engineers who fought at both the Somme and Ypres and some of whose effects are being sold on eBay.

"Now that the time has come for you to leave the Army and go back to civil life, I wish, both personally and officially, to thank you for the service which you have given.

"You take away with you the priceless knowledge that you have played a man's part in this great War for freedom and fair play. You will take away with you also the remembrances of your comrades, your pride in your Regiment, and your love for your country.

"You have played the game, go on playing it, and all will be well with the great Empire which you have helped to save.

"I wish you every prosperity and happiness."