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| We Are Making a New World by Paul Nash © IWM (Art.IWM ART 1146) |
So often we remember the Battle of the Somme in terms of tonnages of shells, numbers of bullets, and staggering casualty figures, within which individual lives are quite literally swallowed up. Beside these bewildering statistics, we also think of the Battle of the Somme as an historical volta marking the realisation of irreversible change in the nature of combat, and of our reactions to it. While these clichés do not necessarily stand up to close examination, the fact remains that the First World War, the Western Front, and the Battle of the Somme have become historical, psychological, and cultural landmarks.
It seems inevitable that Laurence Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’, and Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’, will play a significant part in official commemorations of the cataclysmic battle that began on 1 July 1916, despite the fact that both poems were written far earlier in the war. After all, Binyon and Brooke both represent a continuing need for consolation, and both satisfy that need through the suggestion of continuity, whether through memorial, or through a fusion with English pastoralism, a little piece of England abroad existing outside of the general horror.
Perhaps more fitting would be a recognition of the poetry of 1916, and the manner in which it reacted to what has been perceived as the moment at which the playing fields of Henry Newbolt’s ‘Vitai Lampada’ became the alien environment of Paul Nash’s We are Making a New World. Nash did not complete his oil on canvas panorama of totemic, boughless trees and bubbling shell holes until 1918, but his depiction has become synonymous with our understanding of what the First World War on the Western Front became, particularly from 1916 onwards.
In reflecting on Edmund Blunden’s involvement in the Battle of the Somme, Undertones of War describes an environment poised between two extremes, the pastoral on the one hand, and the military on the other. Blunden finds himself at the junction between these worlds, these ideals, tempting the suggestion that the Battle of the Somme was the point at which the war lost its balance and toppled over into oblivion. Blunden’s tone is calm, reflective, and, paradoxically, both empathic and dissociative, with similar being true of Edward Thomas’s ‘As the Team’s Head Brass’, written in 1916, and describing an evolving landscape and a natural England under threat from a modern, and far-reaching future.
However, in the cases of Ivor Gurney, Siegfried Sassoon, and Isaac Rosenberg, 1916 saw them writing very differently about their experiences, with language that was capable of reflecting disillusionment and cynicism on the one hand, and forms that challenged understanding and Georgian and Acadian composure on the other, paving the way for the post-Somme pleas, outcries, and protests of Wilfred Owen’s most readily remembered reactions to the Western Front. For me though, despite the fact that it was not published until 1937, the most poignant reflection of the importance of the Battle of the Somme can be found in David Jones’s In Parenthesis, in which the poet’s personal experience of the First World War on the Western Front introduces him to the camaraderie of soldiers and their individual voices, the horror and confusion of combat, portrayed with startling unfamiliarity and originality, and, ultimately, the crowning of the dead by the Queen of the Woods. This leads to the recognition that in human, historical, and poetic terms, nothing would be the same again. The march of In Parenthesis ends early in July 1916, just as, in Jones’s words:
The wholesale slaughter of the later years, the conscripted levies filling the gaps in every file of four, knocked the bottom out of the intimate, continuing, domestic life of small contingents of men….
In view of the sheer individuality of Jones’s poetry, perhaps it is his words that we should be hearing as we remember the Somme and everything it has come to mean, and as a reminder to ourselves that behind every numbing statistic there are millions of unique lives, unique stories, and unique reactions.
Owen Lowery, 30 June, 2016
