Customer Reviews

Missing of the Somme

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I must confess that I bought this book only because Geoff Dyer wrote it and he is my favorite author and I am a completist. I figured it was an early novel, something to give me insight into his development.

Imagine my disappointment when it arrived and I discovered it was History. Mind you, I love history (check the other reviews I've written), but I tend to find a subject and read everything I can about before I burn out and move onto something else and I really couldn't be bothered to develop a new fascination for the Great War with so many others still going.

A year later, on a whim, I brought the book with me on vacation and found myself in Paris dining alone after marching against the war. It was the first book in my bag that I grabbed and by the end of dinner I was getting all choked up and teary-eyed. By chance sitting not so far from the Somme with this book in my hands, thinking of a war not yet started, at the table in the corner, it was very affecting. But I think anyone who is interested in this perspective will find it moving whether in peacetime or war, in Nebraska or Tokyo or Egypt.

The book itself succeeds because it's not about numbers and casualties, but how we remember these struggles and how we forget them at the same time. It succeeds by placing the reader not in the conflict, something he/she could never know, but in his/her own seat: remembering that which wasn't experienced. To say more would be to demean the book and Dyer's superb writing so just read it.

If you've ever wondered why it is you have a particular empathy with the soldiers of the first World War, especially of Flanders, this book is for you. It goes a long way towards explaining that peculiar fascination we have with the bravery of those who died, and how the details of this war, almost a hundred years later, can touch our hearts today in a way that nothing else can.

Geoff Dyer presents in this book a moving and multi-layered outcry against the slaughter and consequences of World War I -- the "Great War". The main theme is remembrance, private and public, and the manifestations of both in the post-war years in Great Britain. The role of well-known British poets who served and died in the War is woven throughout. This book is well written by a literate and talented author; however it may be difficult to follow for those not well steeped in the history of that period, and especially the fate of British Army units in various Western Front battles. The basic subject is well covered in printed literature; what Dyer adds here is yet another dissection of the far-reaching impacts of the cataclysmic years of 1914-1918.

In The Missing of the Somme (Vintage), Geoff wrote an essay of 130 pages. No real chapters, just double-spaced breaks with italicized headings as he transits from one related theme to another. To make his points the author cites numerous quotations from Sigfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Rudyard Kipling, Isherwood and others. Photos of statues and stone war memorials, including the two massive white pylons of the Vimy Ridge Canadian tribute to 11,285 native sons who were counted as "missing," scatter the text. Dyer also compares a desolate painting by Caspar David Friedrich with a photograph of a bombed wasteland; in each one man stands as if he were the last human being on earth.

The British author links himself in with his forebears...in particular his grandfather who enlisted in 1914 and served as a driver of horse-drawn vehicles on the Somme but who fortunately lived to the age of 91 instead of falling and never again rising from the blood-soaked earth. Dyer proposes that his grandfather's contemporaries embraced an ideal that made " 'a virtue of calamity' " and dressed up " 'incompetence as heroism,' " as exemplified earlier by the failed Scott expedition to the South Pole and then by the unbelievable loss of life in the trenches of the war.

When armistice came, Europe set about building vast cemeteries for those who could be identified and for those who were "missing" or unidentifiable. Dyer and three companions visited the Western Front/Somme and he expressed his thoughts about them. Among the chosen sites was the French cemetery at Notre Dame de Lorette where 45,000 named and unnamed are honored. Pressing onward to three "tiny, beautifully located cemeteries at Redan Ridge," they then viewed the aforementioned Vimy Ridge where the Canadian missing Great War soldiers' names are all engraved. The allies, the victors, made a conscious decision to record for posterity the names of all the confirmed dead and the missing.

This pilgrimage of Dyer's actually took place in the early 1990's (this Vintage edition is a reprint; the first edition was copyrighted in 1994) and was not the only one he embarked upon. He visited many memorial sites, including Thiepval where there were names of his own family on the markers.

Dyer's impressions of the sites are always vital and full of insights, but the somber travelogue represents a relatively small percentage of the essay. The author's ruminations are more broad-based. His fine, point-laden prose touches on so many aspects of memorializing the Great War. He teaches history, sociology, philosophy, and art appreciation, among other things. But mostly, he reminds himself and his readers that no matter what human beings do after a devastating war, the real lesson learned should be: don't do it (go to war) because the losses outweigh the gains. Yet, human beings are not likely to take heed, and so there will be more military cemeteries with interred soldiers who gave their lives for some cause or demand.

And perhaps because these soldiers died prematurely, unfairly, violently, it is best to do what Dyer wrote about a register of graves and its elusive truths of the war dead: "I let them stand for themselves, their mystery and power undisturbed." Among those graves he wrote he'd never felt "so peaceful" and wondered "if there is not some compensatory quality in nature, some equilibrium...which means that where terrible violence has taken place the earth will sometimes generate an equal and opposite sense of peace."

THE MISSING OF THE SOMME tenders a unique and affecting meditation on war and its remembrance. I recommend this essay highly.

[4.5 stars]

"If I should die, think only this of me,
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England."
-- Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)

"What passing bells for these who die as cattle?"
-- Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

Why is it that the Great War exerts such power over the European literary imagination, even as we approach the centenary of its outbreak, a power that the Second World War cannot remotely equal? Perhaps because of the sheer scale of the carnage. Perhaps because, in the popular mind, it remains a war without reason, whose causes only historians fully understand. Perhaps because, as novelist Geoff Dyer points out in this extended essay, it was a war that memorialized itself from its inception, to be fought and written about in the future perfect, with an eye to how future generations will see it. And it is a war that seems to have taken a 180-degree turn in public perception over the course of the century, without ever losing its enormity as a memorial to heroism or folly.

I have witnessed these changes for myself. At the age of ten, I was taught the structure of a sonnet, not from the works of Shakespeare or Keats, but from the poem by Rupert Brooke quoted above, then considered the epitome of English patriotic modesty. Remembrance Day in November, the red poppies in everyone's lapels, the two-minute silence observed nationwide, these were more than empty rituals. At chapel each day in my boarding school, I sat under the memorial to Rupert Brooke (an alumnus), whose complete sonnet was carved into the marble. Taking weekly communion in the Memorial Chapel, I was surrounded on three sides by the names of the fallen in the Great War (with only one wall for the later conflict). They were contemporaries, and in some cases the friends, of my father, who had gone to France as a lieutenant of eighteen, and returned a twice-decorated hero. But a scarred one, as I would later discover, unwilling to talk at all about his experiences, fleeing from almost every aspect of the England in which he had been raised. On his death, I would discover a letter written by his father in India on the occasion of his first posting, silently questioning the purpose of the War, but prevented from saying so by his position as a servant of Empire. Then, when I was at college, Benjamin Britten's WAR REQUIEM came out, setting the anti-heroic realism of Wilfred Owen against the Latin text. Owen was a poet entirely unknown to me, though I immediately bought his collected works with a college prize; Dyer refers to him now as "the poet everyone knows." Owen is remembered; Brooke is not. Somewhere around the middle of the century, the whole view of the War-once-called-Great had wheeled around almost completely.

Dyer writes a rather messy book, switching between personal narrative and objective analysis, between his own voice and numerous quotations from others, but it is full of magnificent insights. He too has a personal stake, trying to understand the lives of his two grandfathers, each of whom fought on the Somme. But his main focus is on how the War has been memorialized: in the poetry of Brooke, Owen, Blunden, and Sassoon; in the spate of memoirs that followed in the twenties; in official histories; in the sculpted memorials that sprang up all over Europe; in novels of the second and third generation, each trying to understand the inexplicable, to find some humanity in the inhumane, and standing on each others' shoulders to do so. Dyer himself draws heavily on Paul Fussell's THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY, an influence he freely acknowledges. If nothing else, Dyer has written an invaluable reader's guide to war literature, singling out such remarkable books as Erich Maria Remarque's ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, Sebastian Faulks' BIRDSONG, and Pat Barker's REGENERATION (in which Owen and Sassoon are characters). But he goes further, exploring how the significance of any great subject resides as much in how it is written about as in the historical facts.

The black and white photographs, the personal journey that occupies the latter part of the book, and the deep reflection all foreshadow the work of WG Sebald, whose AUSTERLITZ would anatomize the aftermath of the later war. I wish he could have used the Sebald model to organize the entire book. It must be to deliberately jarring effect that he emphasizes the sophomoric quality of his first of his two trips, made with two rambunctious college friends in a ramshackle car they call the "tank" and viewing the rain-sodden landscape through the barely working windscreen wipers, which of course they call the Ypres. But when Dyer returns alone, his reactions are powerful, as here at the German cemetery at Langemark: "At the edge of the Kamaradengrab stand four mourning figures, silhouetted against the zinc sky. Up close these are poorly sculpted figures, but from a distance they impart a sense of utter desolation to the place. It is as if the minute's silence for which they have bowed their heads has been extended for the duration of eternity." He is equally evocative at the Canadian Memorial at Vimy Ridge, treated so memorably by Jane Urquhart in THE STONE CARVERS (though after Dyer's book, which was first published in 1994). And he is soberly anti-heroic in pointing out that the brooding mausoleum at Thiepval, built without any Christian symbolism, "is a memorial if not to the death, then certainly to the superfluousness of God." My own worship in the memorial chapel is a thing of the past.

Modern warfare. We take it all for granted now. But this was the beginning of the horror, a derangement of the senses, a breaking of past and future so profound that a new language of remembering death had to be invented. The sheer scale of what happened in Flanders Fields and other battlegrounds simply beggers the imagination but this book beautifully attempts to get at a language that allows us to even begin to comprehend what happened in the Great War and why it should never, ever be forgotten.

Excellent, non-traditional book on the human dynamics involved in the battle of the Somme. Not a straightforward, chronological accounting of the fighting, but rather a series of tangential events and experiences by combatants and non-combatants that provide intellectual and emotional insight to much broader effects of war.

That is Geoff Dyer's caption for a photograph by William Rider-Rider of the devastated battlefield of Passchendaele. "The scene is divided evenly between land and sky. A line of blasted trees separates the shattered foreground from the land-ocean, the sea of mud, which * * * reaches to the horizon. There is no perspective. The vanishing-point is no longer a more or less exact point, but all around. A new kind of infinity: more of the same in every direction, an infinity of waste."

If I had been Geoff Dyer (please pardon the presumptuousness), "An Infinity of Waste" would have been the title of this book. Instead, the title, THE MISSING OF THE SOMME, is taken from the letters high on the Thiepval Memorial, on which are recorded the names of 73,077 men who lost their lives in the Battle of the Somme but whose remains were never identified. Thiepval and the site of the Battle of the Somme were the last places Dyer visited in his tours of the cemeteries of the Great War, as preparation for this book of meditations on the Great War, the ways it has come to be remembered, and its influence on Western humanity today.

Originally published in 1994 and recently re-issued, it is a superb book. It is not a history of World War I, but nonetheless it is a must for any serious student or scholar of WWI. Rather than history, it focuses on the ways the War has become history - the ways it is remembered.

Still, THE MISSING OF THE SOME contains plenty of historical factoids or anecdotes of note. For example, in the first months of the war "football [soccer] was used as an incentive to enlistment"; the recruiters advertised that the war offered men the chance to play "the greatest game of all" and by the end of 1914 half a million Englishmen had enlisted through sporting organizations such as football clubs. As matters developed, early in the war the British were completely unprepared for the massive number of corpses generated in this glorious game of War, and burial of the dead was haphazard and inefficient. "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."

Dyer is British (both his grandfathers fought in the Great War), so the book has a decided British orientation. And its geographic scope is limited to the Western Front (though, of course, that provides more than enough material for any meditation on the Great War). Much of the book deals with the cemeteries and memorials to the dead (of which there are a handful of photographs), or with the Great War in literature and poetry (including, of course, Wilfred Owen). This is territory previously explored by others, most notably Paul Fussell in "The Great War and Modern Memory", to which Dyer pays tribute. But Dyer adds much that is original, at least to me. And with a subject as rich and expansive as this one, even the occasional repetition is welcome.

If you have read any of Dyer's other books, you know that he can be willfully eccentric. THE MISSING OF THE SOMME is no exception. On occasion I found his idiosyncratic and mildly self-absorbed narrative annoying and/or flippant. Likewise, a few of the observations he offers are badly wayward. They, however, are offset several times over by the number of astute insights. It is a brief and intelligent book, well worth the several hours required to read it. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the Great War, provided you are not looking to it as a conventional history.

An unforgettable and beautifully written book that should not be overlooked by any student of the Great War. A work of personal impressions which left me in tears at times. Mr. Dyer touches the reader with cutting realism and deep emotion.