The Missing of the Somme Read Online Free PDF Page A

means of remembrance, like the war itself, were
selfgenerating. In 1921 the British Legion instituted the sale of Flanders poppies – eight million of them – which has continued, in manufactured form, to the present day. Two years
after its inauguration in 1927, the British Legion Festival of Remembrance introduced its most distinctive and moving feature whereby a million poppies, each one representing a life, flutter down
on to the servicemen assembled below.
    Monuments, meanwhile, were being unveiled throughout Britain; cemeteries were being built in France and Belgium; the names of the dead appeared on regimental memorials and rolls of honour in
places of work and trade associations, cities and villages, universities and schools. 6
    While this made the human cost of the war more apparent, the scale of the loss, it turned out, could actually be comforting. The pain of mothers, wives and fathers was
subsumed in a list of names whose sheer scale was numbing. In the course of the war the casualties had been played down. Then, realizing that grief could be rendered more manageable if
simultaneously divided and shared by a million, the scale of sacrifice was emphasized. Publicizing the scale of the loss was the best way to make it bearable.
    And was there not, amidst all this grief, a faint shudder or shiver of excitement at the unimaginable vastness of it all? The war had set all kinds of records in terms of scale: the greatest
bombardments ever seen, the biggest guns, shells and mines, the biggest mobilization, the greatest loss of life (‘the million dead’). Was there not a faint glow of pride, an unavoidable
undertow of semantic approval, in terming the war ‘Great’?
    Covered by a patina of sorrow though it may be, something of this quality perhaps endures to this day, perpetuated by writers who, myself included, prefer this appellation with all its elegiac
resonance to that stark numerical designation, ‘The First World War’.
    The construction of memory
    ‘Horrible beastliness of war’
    ‘Great’ or ‘First World’, any book about the war, or commentary on the literature or art it produced, will stress its
horror
. The largest entry
in the latent index of any such book will always be: ‘War, horror of’. Before we have even settled down to read the first stanza of Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, we
are already murmuring to ourselves the old mantra, ‘the horror of war’.
    War may be horrible, but that should not distract us from acknowledging what a horrible cliché this has become. The coinage has been worn so thin that its value seems only marginally
greater than ‘Glory’, ‘Sacrifice’ or ‘Pro Patria’, which ‘horror’ condemns as counterfeit. The phrase ‘horror of war’ has become so
automatic a conjunction that it conveys none of the horror it is meant to express.
    Partly this over-use is a product of decorum. One cannot, in good taste, dwell on death, mutilation and injury without stressing their horror. Horror, consequently, becomes a mere formality, a
form of words. One is reminded, also, of washing-powder commercials, which have relied for so long on prefixing brand names with ‘new improved’ that the expression has actually come to
mean ‘same old’. The words have bleached themselves out, become an unnoticed part of the brand name. To convey the new and improved nature of the product you have to add a prefix to the
prefix: New Improved New Improved Ariel.
    ‘The horror of war’ has become similarly self-erasing. A review from
The Times Educational Supplement
, quoted on the back of the paperback edition of Lyn Macdonald’s
1914–1918:
Voices and Images of the Great War
, stresses ‘the sickening repetitive monotony of hopeless horror’. ‘Horror’ on its own, in
other words, has no power to horrify. The more you pile it on like this, the faster linguistic wear proceeds. Having emphasized that the scenes in Paul Nash’s paintings are not