Interesting sounding exhibition
Jim Carroll

WHY SHOULD I SHOOT A MAN I NEVER KNEW, WHOSE LANGUAGE I COULDN'T SPEAK?
Sebastian Faulks, whose novels have brought the horror of the First World War to a new generation, on the greatest slaughterhouse in history
Our memory of the First World War - the Great War - has always been a problem. Look at the events that surrounded the death at the age of 111 of the so-called "last fighting Tommy", Harry Patch, in 2009. Patch saw action for three months, from June to September 1917, before being wounded at the Battle of Passchendaele, taken out of the line and shipped back to England in December. He believed war was "organised murder". He said in 2005: "Why should the g British Government call me up and take me t J out to a battlefield to shoot a man I never knew, whose language I couldn't speak? AO |?| those lives lost for a war finished over a table. Now what is the sense in that?" Yet towards the end of his life, two poets laureate wrote poems for him; Bristol University awarded him an honorary degree; ||§ he was given the freedom of the city of Wells; Radiohead composed a song for him; Bloomsbury published a biography of him; he was honoured by the French and Belgian Governments; he had a racehorse named after him; his funeral was held in Wells Cathedral; the Prince of Wales paid tribute. All this not for a military exemplar, but for someone who believed that war is the "condoned slaughter of human beings" that "isn't worth one life".
For more than 80 years, Harry Patch was a plumber; he then lived in retirement in Bristol. During this time, no one interviewed him about the Great War and he didn't talk about it. He was clearly a much liked man; but the excessive attention paid to his death seemed to be motivated in part by a sense of guilt about our collective failure to inquire into the nature of that holocaust. Could making a fuss of one reluctant Lewis gunner with three months' active service to his credit somehow make up for the fact that for decades we had failed to grasp the enormity of what took place, or extend to those who fought in the war the compassion and curiosity that was their due?
There are some good reasons why remembering has been so difficult First among these is that those in a position to remember -the servicemen - largely chose not to. Imagine. You leave your factory, office or farm because your country is at war and you want to "do your bit". Other chaps are going, too - old schoolmates, work colleagues. Training is brief and outdated, with mounted cavalry expected to be decisive. Then you find yourself in the greatest slaughterhouse in history, where almost ten million men will be exterminated by mounted machine guns and tens of millions more will be maimed, crippled or wounded. You will hear that three empires have collapsed as you build your makeshift home in mud and excrement and body parts.
And when you return home, on leave, wounded or, with luck, demobilised in 1918, you will find that people have little idea of what you have endured, and not much interest in it, either. They have their lives to get on with; and they urge you to do likewise.
How, then, would you put into words the experiences that no human being before you had undergone? The answer is that few men tried. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," as Ludwig Wittgenstein, a much decorated veteran of the Russian front, fighting for Austria-Hungary, remarked. Wittgenstein may have had a philosophical axiom in mind, but his was the approach adopted in practical terms by most soldiers of modest education.
The poetry that was written at the time did go some way to filling the silence. Many of the most memorable poems have something aggressively journalistic about them, as they attempt to expose the "old lie" that it is a fine thing to die for one's country by counter-proposing a harshly coloured picture of the reality of fighting; Wilfred Owen threw out almost all he knew of poetic diction to find a new language for subjects not previously deemed "poetic". His best poems, however, are to some extent distress signals, and by their nature lack perspective (Owen was killed shortly before the Armistice). The memoirs that emerged in the late Twenties had gained some distance, but most have an officer-class irony and are still numb with the sense of a trauma that has not been assimilated. The war novels of the period are largely reworkings of personal experience, although in the best of them, such as Frederic Manning's The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929), there is a sense of the material starting to be shaped.
The theatres of the Great War were all overseas; there were no battles in this country, and that fact may also have contributed to our difficulties with memory. A "foreign" war -even one that has personally affected almost every family in the country - is in some ways easier to forget. There was no eight-month siege of Dundee, no 60,000 casualties in a single day at Gloucester. In France, it was natural in the decades after the war for families to make regular pilgrimages to the charnel houses of Verdun. They had private grief, but they had public pride as well; and they dealt with their memories in a more active way - sometimes, it must be said, in a manner so francocentric that it could overlook the participation of other countries. Doubtless this grief, tended and watered like a shrub at the foot of a war-grave headstone, had a bearing on the popularity of the deal that Petain struck with Hitler at Montoire in 1940.
So at this point, when the population at large, with writers as their spokesmen, might have been expected to bring the events of 1914-18 into focus, a new disaster prevented them John Maynard Keynes's view that the Treaty of Versailles would be no more than a ceasefire for more than 20 years proved accurate. And the Second World War was to be remembered in quite different ways. The most important was that in which worldwide Jewry insisted that the victims of the Nazi Holocaust be enumerated, named and honoured. This admirably energetic memorialisation was co-ordinated across many countries and continues to the present day.
An unintended consequence was that it threw a further smokescreen across the events of 1914-18. While the average serviceman or woman was laconic about his or her part in the Second World War (those who were not reticent were lampooned as "saloon-bar majors" who were "shooting a line"), there were novelists, historians and, especially, film-makers who were anxious to remember and celebrate the role this country had played in a more obviously just and glamorous conflict. Spitfires, Desert Rats and Dambusters had more to commend them than trench foot, lice and slaughter.
Here is another stumbling block to proper memory: no one seems able to say for sure whether the Great War represents simply (as Harry Patch, for one, believed) a catastrophic human failure, with warring monarchs, many of whom were closely related, politicians and diplomats guilty of unleashing hell through their negligence, bumbling and self-interest; or whether Britain was obliged by its relations with France and Belgium to halt the intolerable advance of German imperialism. Was it, in other words, a form of natural disaster on an unprecedented scale; or was it a reasonable war, with more complex and nuanced justification than that of 1939-45, but essentially comparable?
And then there are the men themselves. It all comes back to the memory of the private soldier in his shell hole, the staff officer behind the lines, the stretcher bearer, the sapper; the individual sailor, airman, runner. I met and talked to quite a few while it was possible to do so, in the Eighties and Nineties. Their memories tended to have crystallised into anecdotes that they would happily retell, but they struggled to give an overall picture of what it was "really" like; it was hard for them to bridge that gap of years: "I cannot paint | what then I was..." as Wordsworth put it.
For many lonely men, the day-long company of others brought comfort. For those from the slums, the very idea of two meals a day was a novelty - and there were no complaints from them about the bully beef. § The friendships they formed were profound.
A minority "went over the top" into the great g killing fields; the majority survived - many had jobs behind the lines in "transport" and I administration. Some men lost faith in God and man on July 1, 1916, seeing swaths of England, Scotland, Wales and Ulster annihilated on the first day of the Battle of the Somme; the best this country had to offer - men who should have lived to make it a better place than it turned out to be - mown down and sacrificed for no clear reason. Others continued to believe they were fighting in a worthwhile cause.
The soldiers were not allowed to keep diaries (although many did); their record of the war exists mostly in letters home, preserved at the Imperial War Museum and other archives around the country. They are not quite "memories"; they are snapshots of a day or a moment and they need a reader or interpreter.
Visual images - whether paintings or photographs, of kings or corpses - have that same vitality, but also the sense of needing something more: what Keats called a "greeting of the spirit". These portraits have the priceless quality of being of their time; but this contemporaneous authenticity is nothing without the participation of the viewer.
I have trawled through thousands of written documents and still dread the letter home that says, "We are going to attack. We are all merry and bright, thumbs up and trusting to the best of luck," because it is almost always followed by a message of condolence from the King. Even at the distance of a century, these letters and images have the power to fill one with rage, sorrow and despair.
The trauma they underwent and the way that history conspired against them made it difficult for the men who fought in the Great War to give a full picture of that experience. We, in the decades that followed, have found it difficult to "remember" for them.
It is, however, possible that the passage of 100 years has given us the necessary perspective; it has certainly given us distance. It is too late for those involved to revisit, relive and finally to understand, with whatever grief, the nature of the convulsion. It has fallen to a later generation to complete the process by the energy of its imaginative outreach.
The Great War in Portraits is at the National Portrait Gallery from February 27 to June 15. This essay is from the exhibition catalogue, £18.95 (npg.org.uk). The spring season is sponsored by Herbert Smith Freehills
Sunday Times supplement 16th February 2013