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Geoff Dyer on 'Gassed' | |
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Unit 2
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from 'The Missing of the Somme': John Singer Sargent's painting Gassed shows a line of ten men making their way through the mass of other gas victims sprawling on the ground on either side of them. Their eyes are bandaged and, as in Brueghel's Parable of the Blind, each man has his hand on the shoulder of the one in front. In the middle of the group a soldier turns away to vomit. Another, near the front, raises his leg high, expecting a step. An orderly guides and steadies the two men at the head of the line. Further off, to the right of the low sun, another group are making their way uncertainly forward. The soldiers in the foreground lie sleeping or resting, propped on one another. One drinks from a canteen. In the sky there are planes where birds should be, flying haphazardly. Henry Tonks, another war artist who was with Sargent when he saw the gassed soldiers, recalls the scene: They sat or lay down on the grass, there must have been several hundred, evidently suffering a great deal, chiefly I fancy from their eyes which were covered up by pieces of lint. In Gassed there is little suffering. Or rather, what suffering there is is outweighed by the painter's compassion. In spite of the vomiting figure the scene has almost nothing in common with Owen's vision of the gas victim whose blood comes 'gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs'. What Sargent has depicted, instead, is the solace of the blind: the comfort of putting your trust in someone, of being safely led. At the same time the light itself seems enough to restore their sight, light so soft that it will soothe even their gas-ravaged eyes. Pain is noisy, clamorous. In Sargent's painting coughing and retching are absorbed by the tranquillity of the evening..... The scene is already touched, in other words, by the beauty of the world as it will be revealed when their vision is restored. The only sound, that is....But no, I am getting ahead of myself. In the first months of the war football was used as an incentive to enlistment; the war, it was claimed, offered the chance to play 'the greatest game of all'. By the end of 1914 an estimated 500,000 had enlisted at football matches. By the following spring, professional football had been banned: matches, it was feared, were so popular that (a reversal of the initial strategy) they deterred men from enlisting. At the front the enthusiasm for the game continued unabated. Whether a match actually took place in No Man's Land between German and English troops on Christmas Day on 1914 is doubtful; even if it did not, it is entirely appropriate that that the day's events should have generated the myth of a football match as the embodiment of fraternization. The most famous footballing episode was Captain Nevill's kicking a ball into No Man's Land on the first day of the Somme. A prize was offered to the first man to dribble the ball into the German trenches; Nevill himself scrambled out of the trench in pursuit of his goal and was cut down immediately. (Perhaps the Somme was not only an indictment of military strategy but also of the British propensity for the long-ball game.) Lawrence's admonition - that tragedy ought to be a great big kick at misery - could not have been fulfilled more literally. Move close to Sargent's painting, closer than its size compels. Through the legs of the gassed soldiers - and especially in the gap opened in the line by the vomiting man - you can glimpse a game of football being played in the background. One team in red, the other in blue, the ball in mid-air, suspended in the lovely evening light. The only sounds not absorbed by the light are the shouts of the game, just audible to the line of blinded men.
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