The Missing of the Somme. Geoff Dyer

– Scott, Dr Edward Wilson and Henry Bowers – pitched their tent and sat out a blizzard. At some point Scott seems to have made the decision that it was better to stay put and preserve the record of their struggle rather than die in their tracks. They survived for at least nine days while Scott, in Roland Huntford’s phrase, ‘prepared his exit from the stage’ and addressed letters to posterity: ‘We are setting a good example to our countrymen, if not by getting into a tight place, by facing it like men when we get there.’ Despite its failure, the expedition, wrote Scott, ‘has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past’. The tradition of heroic death which aggrandizes his own example is also invigorated by it: ‘We are showing that Englishmen can still die with a bold spirit, fighting it out to the end . . . I think this makes an example for Englishmen of the future.’

       The anticipation of memory

      On 12 November, in the collapsed tent, the bodies and their documents were found by a rescue party and the legend of Scott of the Antarctic began to take immediate effect. ‘Of their suffering, hardship and devotion to one another,’ wrote a member of the rescue team, ‘the world will soon know the deeds that were done were equally as great as any committed on Battlefield and won the respect and honour of every true Britisher.’

      Scott’s headstrong incompetence had actually meant that, from an early stage, the expedition had been riddled by tension. Captain Oates – the ‘very gallant Englishman’ of legend – had earlier written that ‘if Scott fails to get to the Pole he jolly well deserves it’. Although clad in the guise of scientific discovery, Scott’s expedition contributed nothing to the knowledge of polar travel unless it was to emphasize ‘the grotesque futility of man-hauling’. But with Scott, futility (the title of one of only a handful of poems published by Wilfred Owen in his lifetime) becomes an important component of the heroic. That Scott had turned the expedition into an affair of ‘heroism for heroism’s sake’ only enhanced the posthumous glory that greeted news of his death when it reached England on 11 February the following year.

      A memorial service ‘for one of the most inefficient of polar expeditions, and one of the worst of polar explorers’ was held at St Paul’s, and Scott’s failure took its place alongside Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar as a triumphant expression of the British spirit. Scott’s distorting, highly rhetorical version of events was taken up enthusiastically and unquestioningly by the nation as a whole. At the naval dockyard chapel in Devonport, the sermon emphasized ‘the glory of self-sacrifice, the blessing of failure’. By now the glorious failure personified by Scott had become a British ideal: a vivid example of how ‘to make a virtue of calamity and dress up incompetence as heroism’.

      That the story of Scott anticipates the larger heroic calamity of the Great War hardly needs emphasizing. As a now-forgotten writer put it, he had given his

      countrymen an example of endurance . . . We have so many heroes among us now, so many Scotts . . . holding sacrifice above gain [and] we begin to understand what a splendour arises from the bloody fields . . . of Flanders.

      In Huntingdon, on Armistice Day 1923, a war memorial was unveiled. The statue is of a soldier resting, one foot propped on the wall behind him. The protruding knee supports his left arm which in turn supports his chin in a quizzical echo of Rodin’s Thinker. His other hand steadies the rifle and bayonet propped beside him. The figure was sculpted by Kathleen Scott, widow of Scott of the Antarctic.

      Discussion about the form memorials like this should take was widespread and well advanced before the war ended. By 1917 associations and clubs across the country were meeting to establish appropriate means of remembrance.¹ By the early twenties the nation’s grief had been sculpted into a broadly agreed form. Although permitting of many variations, this was the form sketched in September 1916 when the Cornhill Magazine argued against allegory in favour of ‘simplicity of statement . . . so that the gazer can see at once that the matter recorded is great and significant, and desires to know more’.

      At the end of the war a counter-case was still being made for memorials which would have practical rather than simply poetic value: hospitals, homes, universities. Such proposals were more in keeping with the mood of 1945 than 1918 when the need was for a memorial idiom and architecture unencumbered by questions of utility. In 1945 that architecture and idiom were in place: all that was needed was to add new names and dates. The real task was to rebuild an economy and infrastructure shattered by war.

      Whatever the human cost, the Second World War had an obvious practical purpose and goal – one that became especially clear retrospectively after footage of Hitler’s death camps became public. After the Great War people had little clear idea of why it had been fought or what had been accomplished except for the loss of millions of lives. This actually made the task of memorializing the war relatively easy.

      Memorials to the Second World War and the Holocaust are still being constructed all over the world; the form they should take is still being debated. Controversy – over the ‘Bomber’ Harris statue in London, for example – punctuates each phase of the Second World War as it is replayed along the length of its fiftieth anniversary. The form of memorials to the Great War, by contrast, was agreed on and fixed definitively and relatively quickly. By the mid-thirties the public construction of memory was complete. Since then only a few memorials have been built: addenda to the text of memory. All that needed to be added was time: time for the past to seep into future memory and take root there.

      The exact number of people who died in the Great War will never be known. France and Germany each lost more than a million and a half men; Russia, two million. Three-quarters of a million of the dead were British – a figure which rises to almost a million when the losses of the Empire as a whole are considered.

      During the war the dead were buried haphazardly, often in mass graves. By the time of the great battles of attrition of 1916–17 mass graves were dug in advance of major offensives. Singing columns of soldiers fell grimly silent as they marched by these gaping pits en route to the front-line trenches. Those who died in the midst of fiercely protracted fighting could lie and rot for months or years before being buried. Others would be buried in isolated individual graves or small, improvised cemeteries. Sir Edwin Lutyens, one of the architects responsible for the cemeteries we see today, visited France in 1917 and was moved by the hurriedly constructed wartime graves. On 12 July he jotted down his impressions in a letter to his wife:

      The graveyards, haphazard from the needs of much to do and little time for thought. And then a ribbon of isolated graves like a milky way across miles of country where men were tucked in where they fell. Ribbons of little crosses each touching each across a cemetery, set in a wilderness of annuals and where one sort of flower is grown the effect is charming, easy and oh so pathetic. One thinks for the moment no other monument is needed.

      Such feelings, as Lutyens himself realized, were transitory; for the future more enduring monuments were needed. Accordingly, after the armistice, under the auspices of the Imperial War Graves Commission, work began on establishing the cemeteries as permanent memorials to the dead.²

      Despite protests, culminating in a debate at the House of Commons on 4 May 1920 in which the proposals were condemned as ‘hideous and unchristian’, it was decided that there would be no repatriation or private memorials. All British and Empire soldiers would be buried – or would remain buried – where they fell. Undifferentiated by rank, uniform headstones – cheaper to produce and easier to preserve than crosses, compatible with a range of religious (dis)belief – would achieve an ‘equality in death’; the name of every soldier who died would be recorded, either in a cemetery or – where no body was found – on one of a number of memorials. At the base of each headstone there would be space for the next of kin to add inscriptions of their own.