The Missing of the Somme. Geoff Dyer

       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.