‘A crowd flowed over Westminster Bridge. So many, / I had not thought death had undone so many,’ wrote T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land.
The line of soldiers marching past the Cenotaph stretches out of sight, out of time. If we followed the line, it would take us back to another photograph, of men marching away to war. These two images are really simply two segments of a single picture of the long march through the war. There is a single column of men, so long that by the time those at the back are marching off from the recruiting stations, heading to trains, those at the front – the dead – are marching past the Cenotaph.
An early draft of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Apologia Pro Poemate Meo’ is entitled ‘The Unsaid’. In an accidental echo of Owen, John Berger has written that the two minutes’ silence
was a silence before the untellable. The sculptured war memorials are like no other public monuments ever constructed. They are numb: monuments to an inexpressible calamity.
The Cenotaph is the starkest embodiment of Berger’s claim. It is a representation in three dimensions of the silence that surrounded it for two minutes on Armistice Day. The public wanted a permanent version of the Cenotaph to record – to hold – the silence that was gathered within it and which, thereafter, would emanate from it. During the silence it had seemed, according to The Times, as if ‘the very pulse of Time stood still’. In recording that silence, the Cenotaph would also be an emblem of timelessness. A temporary version of the Cenotaph was an impossible contradiction: it had to be permanent.
For two minutes in each of the years that followed, the silence of the monument was recharged. Since the Second World War and the diminished power of the Sunday Silence, that silence has drained from the Cenotaph. The clamour of London encroaches on it annually; its silence is becoming inaudible, fading.
In the 1920s neither the permanent Cenotaph nor the Unknown Warrior could satisfy the passion for remembrance. In many ways the 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’.
‘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 simply appalling but ‘grimly appalling’, Nigel Viney, in Images of Wartime, soon finds himself descending into ‘the very depths of infinite horror’.
The most horrific aspect of the Great War was the waste of lives as men were sent to the front in battles of meaningless attrition. Is their cause served appropriately, one wonders, by a verbal strategy which relies, for its meaning, on constantly reinforcing attrition?
Strings of shuddering adjectives dull the reaction they are intended to induce. The calm, measured tread of Elaine Scarry’s formulation, by contrast, is terrible in its simplicity: ‘The main purpose and outcome of war is injuring.’
‘Before the Great War there was no war poetry as we now conceive the term,’ writes Peter Parker in The Old Lie; ‘instead there was martial verse.’ So pervasive were the conventions of feeling produced by this tradition that in 1914 the eleven-year-old Eric Blair could write a heartfelt poem – ‘Awake, young men of England’ – relying entirely on received sentiment. In exactly the same way, an eleven-year-old writing fifty years on could, in similar circumstances, come up with a heartfelt poem expressing the horror of war – while also relying solely on received sentiment.
In some ways, then, we talk of the horror of war as instinctively and enthusiastically as Rupert Brooke and his contemporaries jumped at the chance of war ‘like swimmers into cleanness leaping’.
This is not just a linguistic quibble. Off-the-peg formulae free you from thinking for yourself about what is being said. Whenever words are bandied about automatically and easily, their meaning is in the process of leaking away or evaporating. The ease with which Rupert Brooke coined his ‘think only this