Missing of the Somme , livre ebook

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128 pages

English

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The Missing of the Somme has become a classic meditation upon war and remembrance. It weaves a network of myth and memory, photos and films, poetry and sculptures, graveyards and ceremonies that illuminate our understanding of, and relationship to, the Great War.

Sujets

Histoire

World War I

History of Europe

France

Informations

Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	08 novembre 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780857863379
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0440€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Also by Geoff Dyer
Zona
Working the Room: Essays and Reviews 1999–2010
Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi
The Ongoing Moment
Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It
Anglo-English Attitudes: Essays, Reviews and
Misadventures 1984–99
Out of Sheer Rage
The Search
Paris Trance
But Beautiful
The Colour of Memory
Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger

This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2012 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
www.canongate.tv
This digital edition first published in 2012 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Geoff Dyer, 1994
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published in Great Britain in 1994 by Hamish Hamilton
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
978 0 85786 272 3 eISBN 978 0 85786 337 9
Typeset in Goudy by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire
For my mother and father
CONTENTS
Foreword
List of Illustrations
Note

The Missing of the Somme
Notes
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index
FOREWORD
The Missing of the Somme is a haunting meditation, an elegy of remembrance that ranks with Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory as among the very best books ever written about the ultimate impact of the war. It reminds us that everything we know of our lives, every sense we have of being modern, was born of the mud and blood of Flanders. Jazz, Joyce, Dali, Cocteau, Hitler, Mao and Stalin were all offspring of the carnage. Darwin, Freud and Einstein were men of the nineteenth century, but their deeply unorthodox ideas – that species are mutable, that you do not control the sanctity of your own thoughts, that an apple does not fall from the tree as simply as Newton described – came to fruition and achieved general acceptance in the wake of the conflict, as if sown in soil fertilised by the dead. The Great War was the fulcrum of modernity.
For a century, Europe had been largely at peace even as industry and technology generated wealth and military power beyond anything that had ever been known. European powers consumed the world until the boundaries of colonial ambitions met and slowly tightened around the neck of civilisation. Then a single bullet fired into the neck of a prince in Sarajevo in the summer of 1914 shattered a universe, a realm of certainty, optimism, hope and faith, and in doing so sparked the greatest cataclysm in the history of humanity.
At the outbreak of the conflict, in August 1914, a man had to stand five feet eight inches to enter the British Army. Within two months, boys of five feet three were eagerly recruited. In eight weeks, the British Expeditionary Force, four divisions that represented the entire home army of the British Empire, had been virtually annihilated. In the first month of the war, the French lost 70,000 men, 40,000 alone over two terrible days in August. Every month, the British Army required 10,000 junior officers to replace the litany of dead. Public schools graduated their senior classes not to Oxford or Cambridge but directly to the trenches. The chance of any British boy aged thirteen to twenty-four surviving the war in 1914 was one in three.
For the men in the trenches, the world became a place of mud and sky, with only the zenith sun to remind the living that they had not already been buried and left for dead. The regular army of the British Empire required 2,500 shovels a year. In the mud of Flanders, ten million would be required. Twenty-five thousand British coal miners spent the war underground, ferreting beneath the German lines to lay charges that detonated with such explosive force as to be heard on Hampstead Heath in London.
The sepia images that inform memories of the war, the tens of thousands of photographs taken in what was the first industrial conflict to be thoroughly documented on film, remain haunting and powerfully evocative. But the visual medium fails to capture two of the most dominant features of life at the front: the sound and the smell, the soul-crushing noise of prolonged bombardments and the constant stench in the trenches, an unholy combination of sweat, fear, blood, cordite, excrement, vomit and putrescence. Staged images of men advancing, rifles and bayonets at the ready, belie the horror of helplessness that men actually experienced in an attack. Bayonets accounted for but a third of one per cent of casualties. Rifle fire and machine guns brought down thirty-five per cent of the dead and wounded. Most who died did so clinging in terror to the mud wall of a trench as a rain of steel and fire fell from the sky.
The concentration of suffering was unprecedented, in part because the zone of military operations was so small. For much of the war, the British front was a mere eighty-five miles in length, and at no time did it exceed 125 miles. Indeed, the entire British sector, in which millions of men lived, trained and died, extended only fifty by sixty miles, roughly the size of the English county of Lincolnshire. To supply and defend around a hundred miles of war front, the British would dig more than 6,000 miles of trenches and lay down 6,000 miles of railroad. The Ypres Salient in Belgium – a section of the battlefield surrounded on three sides by German forces – measured four miles by twelve; in that cauldron of death, 1.7 million boys and men would fall.
The Somme in the summer of 1916 was the final death of innocence. After all the debacles of 1915, the failed effort to break through at Neuve Chapelle in March, the disappointment of the Dardanelles, the suicidal resistance of the Canadians at Ypres in April, the collapse at Aubers Ridge and the disaster at Loos in September, every British hope lay upon one great offensive that would finally break the German line and open the coastal plain to a war of movement, thus relieving the French and freeing commander and soldier alike from the degradation and agony of the trenches. This was the promise that ran like a wave through the men of the Fourth Army, half a million strong, poised for the assault.
For seven days the sky by night and day rained steel upon the enemy trenches. The British troops stumbled as the ground shook through their boots. The bombardment grew to a sustained crescendo, a hurricane of piercing screams that hovered over the entire length of the front. Nothing like this had been seen in the history of war. Napoleon at Waterloo fired 20,000 shells. The British at the Somme had in place 1,537 batteries, each capable of firing 1,000 rounds a day.
The thunder of the shells filled the British with a promise that would be cruelly betrayed. General Haig had chosen the Somme for the attack in part because it allowed his troops to escape the sodden fields of Flanders. But the very conditions of Picardy that drew his attention also allowed the Germans to dig, which they did, establishing dugouts and shelters in the chalk forty and sixty feet below the torn surface of the earth, impervious even to the shells of the relatively few heavy howitzers the British brought to bear. Unbeknownst to the British, the German soldiers, stunned and afraid, often bleeding from the ears and nose due to the concussive pressure of the shells, quelled in fear of death but quite unprepared to die, hovered deep beneath the ground, awaiting the onslaught.
In the final hour before the attack over a quarter of a million shells fell on the German line. Then came silence, of a sort and only for an instant. A hollow stunned moment as if the ground itself had been given a reprieve. Time stood suspended. The British troops crowded at the base of the scaling ladders could hear the plaintive moaning of the wounded in what remained of the enemy trench, the buzzing of great swarms of flies, the high-pitched screaming of rats, even the sublime singing of birds, larks and morning doves on this misty day that the poet warrior Siegfried Sassoon would later describe as ‘of the kind commonly called heavenly.’ Ashen faces, watches synchronised, a tot of navy rum, a last letter to a loved one pegged to the trench with a knife, a muted prayer and glance at a mate, a half smile certain to be one’s last. The smell in the trench was of fear, and of sweat, blood, vomit, excrement, cordite and the putrescence of cadavers. At precisely 7.30 a.m. shrill piercing whistles signaled the attack. Eleven British divisions, 110,000 men jammed as a single throng in trenches along a thirteen-mile front, struggled to climb out onto the field of battle. At the same moment, from the depths of dugouts of a scale and complexity unknown and unimaginable to the British, the survivors of six German front line divisions raced to the sunlight. In the minute that it took them to reach the parapet, the battle was decided.
Siegfried Sassoon was a witness to the advance, as the men went over the top, formed up and then shoulder to shoulder, burdened by in some cases a hundred pounds of gear, with bayonets fixed, leaned forward to walk into a storm of lead. At 7.45 he saw in a reserve trench men cheering their mates onward as if watching a football match. Two hours later, he wrote, ‘the birds seem bewildered; a lark begins to go up and then flies feebly along, thinking better of it. Others flutter above the trench with querulous cries, weak on the wing.’ At 10.05, he wrote, ‘I am staring at a sunlit picture of Hell, and still the breeze shakes the yellow weeds, and the poppies glow under Crawley Ridge where some shells fell a few minutes ago.’ At 2.30 that afternoon: ‘I could see one man moving his arms up and down as he lay on his side; his face was a crimson patch.’
Of the sixty battalions in the first wave, twenty were utterly destroyed in No Man’s Land. Within the first hour, perhaps the first minutes, there were more than 30,000 dead and wounded. By the end of the day there was not a British