Scars of the Somme are healing at last

Press, 24 October 1980, Page 13

Scars of the Somme are healing at last

By

DAN VAN DER WAT,

“The Times,” London

There are many ways of promoting new books, but for a publisher to take a group of veterans and journalists to some of the battlefields of northern France to launch a work on the role of volunteer nurses in the First World War must rank as not only unusual,, but also significant. The significance lies in an identifiable change of attitude towards the cataclysmic war which shaped the twentieth century. Two generations after it ended it appears at last to have become possible to take a long look at it without flinching while still being able, though only just to draw at first hand on the memories of those who saw it. In literary terms, a handful of unforgettable books on the “Great War” was followed by a deafening silence. The number of books on it, fact or fiction, sensational or serious, - amounts to a tiny, fraction of the output on the Second World War.

The explanation for this seems to be that the second war was fought comparatively publicly, on a broad, worldwide canvas, while the first, for all the millions who took part

and the mountainous casualties, was. a closed affair concentrated upon 90 miles of mud in Flanders and northern France, where the horror proved to be, in the most literal sense, unspeakable. Tjie second war provoked a still unstaunched haemorrhage of public reminiscence which began almost as soon as demobilisation was completed. In Britain, the nostalgia for “the finest hour” remains a bottomless well, as witness the quantity of commemoration of the recent

40th anniversaries of Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain. The nation preferred, however, at least until quite recently, to draw a veil over the First World War, in which, its casualties were far greater, as if the merest mention of the subject amounted to an intrusion into private grief. Perhaps the wound to the national psyche, the gentlest probing of which seemed to cause unbearable pain, has healed at last,' now that most of

those who took part have faded away and so many of their children who were born to grief have followed them. The taboo has finally been lifted. Thus in the past few years there have been fictional television series on families who lived through or died in the war, on the Royal Flying Corps and the like, as well as the beautifully handled “Testament. of Youth” recalling Vera Britain’s experiences as a volunteer, nurse. There has even been an entirely superfluous re-

make of the film “All Quiet on the Western Front” which seems only slightly less unnecessary than wallpapering the Sistine Chapel. Before all this, John Terraine’s televised masterpiece, the “Great War” series of the 19605, and the brilliant original of “All Quite on the Western Front” all but stood alone. Books, other than historical and military works, were few and far between. This month, Miss Lyn Macdonald saw the publication of her book, “The Roses of No Man’s Land,”

a well researched account of the heroic and grisly work of the women who tended the wounded. Miss Macdonald is clearly hooked on the First World War, as she admitted during our tour of northern France.

After entering the field with “They called it Passchehdaele” she gave up her job as a 8.8. C. radio producer to concentrate on the war. She has already begun to tackle that Everest of horror, the battle of the Somme, and plans a fourth book on the events

of 1918. . To see the Somme battlefield for the first time is profoundly moving. The scale of this military folly is such that it is immune to cliche. There are cemeteries everywhere, large and small, all beautifully kept. One contained 14,000 gravestones, more than an infantry division of the dead. The colossal monument at Thiepval lists the names of 73,367 men whose bodies were either not found or not identified after the battle. You can still see the

Even Belsen in the rain was less affecting than the Somme in the autumn sun. Small wonder that those who were there did not speak of it very much trenches at Newfoundland Park, now a Canadian war memorial. A battalion of Newfoundlanders numbering 829 men went over the top, desperately keen to do battle. That evening 81 answered the roll call. The coach took four minutes at a leisurely pace to traverse the ground it took the British and Empire troops four months to gain. More than 57,000 men died on the first day. As you stumble into the craters, now gently lined with grass, these figures numb your mind, just as the shellbursts temporarily addled the brains of the tragic young men who passed this way. There are ghosts among the sheep which crop the grass on this useless piece of ground. Even Belsen in the rain was less affecting than the Somme in the autumn sun. Small wonder that those who were there did not speak of it very much, and that those who were not there could not imagine what it was like. Now the trickle.- of books is turning into a steady flow, if not exactly a flood, and time appears to have healed even this wound. The relatively small numbers of the survivors are all in their eighties and nineties and seem prepared to help

their grandchildren’s generation to understand. Among those accompanying us were three former VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment) nurses aged 93, 86, and 84, a retired general of 93, and a former rifleman who at 83 was' the baby of the veterans’ contingent. All of

them had that eerie foible of the very old, a capacity for total recall of events of two thirds of a century ago combined with entirely forgivable vagueness about what happened yesterday. lively Miss Kitty -Kenyon,,

the former V.A.D. of 93, at once recognised the field in which her hospitai, No. 4 General, had stood, its marquees still imed with the red velvet sewn on for King George v>g at durbar in i9H y there, we. no trace of it now.