The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer

Author:Geoff Dyer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780857863379
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Mourning for all mankind?

Beyond that it is difficult to say what feelings the memorial evokes. Not pity, not pride, not sadness even. Henry Williamson acknowledged this uncertainty while remaining ostensibly untroubled by it. For him it is a ‘memorial to all soldiers in the war’. Having found a way of articulating the statue’s refusal to yield to an easily identifiable response, he generalizes still further: it ‘mourns for all mankind’ – at which point the actual statue all but disappears in a fog of generalized emotion. It is a grand gesture and a self-defeatingly banal one: if all mankind is to be mourned, there would be no need to single out for special lamentation this particular

BATTLEFIELD WHERE 18,000

CANADIANS ON THE BRITISH

LEFT WITHSTOOD THE FIRST

GERMAN GAS ATTACKS THE

22–24 APRIL 1915 2,000

FELL AND LIE BURIED NEARBY

In Fields of Glory Jean Rouaud describes a gas attack in terms that recall the rolling fog of Bleak House or the slinking catlike fog of Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’:

Now the chlorinated fog infiltrates the network of communication trenches, seeps into dugouts (mere sections of trench covered with planks), nestles in potholes, creeps through the rudimentary partitions of casements, plunges into underground chambers hitherto preserved from shells, pollutes food and water supplies, occupies space so methodically that frantic pain-racked men search vainly for a breath of air.

The leisurely sentence unfolds infinitely slowly, gradually revealing the harm that this apparently harmless stain on the air can do until, finding yourself running out of breath with several clauses still to go, you are suddenly struggling for the full stop. The initial lyrical lilt of the scene is soon rent apart by ‘the violent cough that tears the lungs and the pleura and brings bloody froth to the lips, the acrid vomiting that doubles up the body’.

John Singer Sargent’s painting Gassed shows a line of ten men making their way through the mass of other gas victims sprawling on the ground on either side of them. Their eyes are bandaged and, as in Brueghel’s Parable of the Blind, each man has his hand on the shoulder of the one in front. In the middle of the group a soldier turns away to vomit. Another, near the front, raises his leg high, expecting a step. An orderly guides and steadies the two men at the head of the line. Further off, to the right of the low sun, another group are making their way uncertainly forward.

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