The Missing of the Somme. Geoff Dyer by Dyer Geoff

Author:Dyer, Geoff [Dyer, Geoff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, War, Travel
ISBN: 9780857863379
Amazon: 0857863371
Goodreads: 22211483
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 1994-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

By 1927 when Sassoon scrawled these words – metaphorically speaking – on the recently inaugurated Menin Gate, his tone of maimed derision had become a matter of reflex. If ‘this pomp’ of ‘peace-complacent stone’ is a misrepresentation and denial, then so, equally, is Sassoon’s response to it. Refusing to accommodate the possibility of atonement for ‘the unheroic Dead’ on whose behalf he is lobbying, Sassoon yet conveys – and thereby yields to – the memorial’s own version of itself when he writes of the ‘intolerably nameless names’.

In his novel Fields of Glory Jean Rouaud describes life in the kind of ‘sullen swamp’ that, for Sassoon, is the enduring truth of the Ypres battlefield:

Little by little, abandoned corpses sank into the clay, slid to the bottom of a hollow and were soon buried under a wall of earth. During an attack you stumbled over a half-exposed arm or leg. Falling face to face on a corpse, you swore between your teeth – yours or the corpse’s. Nasty the way these sly corpses would trip you up. But you took the opportunity to tear their identification tags off their necks, so as to save those anonymous lumps of flesh from a future without memory, to restore them to official existence, as though the tragedy of the unknown soldier were to have lost not so much his life as his name.

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