The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer Page B

island stronghold, the weary Tommies became sculptural
equivalents of the Home Guard: men from an earlier war whose effectiveness was largely symbolic. This time it was not gallant Belgium but Britain itself that had to be protected – and these
figures became everyday reminders of Britain’s resolve to stand firm. Battered but resilient, they were visible prefigurements of Churchill’s determination to fight invaders at every
street corner.
    In 1944 the Guards Division Memorial in St James’s Park was badly damaged by a German bomb. The sculptor Gilbert Ledward thought this improved it because ‘it looked as though the
monument itself had been in action’. When the Ministry of Works got round to repairing it, Ledward suggested that some ‘honourable scars of war’ be allowed to remain – a way
of registering how, in memorializing one war, his monument had participated in another.
    Sculpted by Philip Lindsey Clark, the Southwark War Memorial in Borough High Street shows a soldier striding forward. Soon after it was unveiled, this photograph was taken. Few
other images contain so much time.
    Time
    The statue preserves or freezes a moment from the war. This record itself ages, very slowly. Since it was taken, both the statue and the photograph itself have aged. Looking
at it now, what we see is an old photograph of a new statue. In the background, gazing at the camera, are four men and a boy. The long exposure time has caused these figures – who moved
slightly – to ghost, especially the two on the right whom we can see right through. Any figures walking past will have vanished completely. Because it is utterly still, the statue itself is
substantial and perfectly defined – all the more strikingly so given that it shows an infantryman moving purposefully forward. The photograph is therefore a record of time
passing
:
both in relation to the statue (which, relative to the people looking at it, is fixed in time) and through it (because the statue itself no longer looks quite as it does in the photograph).
Compared with the solid permanence of the memorial, even the buildings in the background seem liable to fade. What we see, then, is the sculpture’s own progress through time; or, more
accurately, time as experienced
by
the sculpture. Simultaneously, the old time of the onlookers, this moment of vanishing time, is preserved in the picture which records its passing.
    In a few days we will be leaving for Flanders. Mark tells me he has been reading Trevor Wilson’s huge history,
The Myriad Faces of War
, as preparation. I am
impressed and a little shamed by his diligence. My own reading of general histories of the war is characterized by a headlong impatience. Basil Liddell Hart, A. J. P. Taylor, John Terraine, Keith
Robbins – I read them all in the same inadequate way. With a cloudlessconscience I skim the same parts of each: the war at sea, air raids on London, anything happening on
the Eastern Front, Gallipoli . . . Then there are the parts of these histories I try hard to concentrate on but whose details I can never
absorb
: the network of treaties, the flurry of
telegrams and diplomatic manoeuvres that lead up to the actual outbreak of war. Consequently everything between the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the lamps going out over Europe is a
blur.
    Although I always dwell on the period of enthusiastic enlistment, I move attentively but fairly quickly through the period 1914–15. It is not until the great battles of attrition that I am
content to move at the pace of the slowest narrative. From the German offensive of 1918 onwards I am once again impatient and it is not until November, the armistice and its aftermath, that the
speed of history and my reading of it are again in equilibrium.
    For me, in other words, the Great War means the Western Front: France and Flanders, from the Somme to Passchendaele. Essentially, then, mine is still a schoolboy’s fascination. Uncertain
of