 |
from 'The Missing of the Somme': The Great War and Photography | |
|
|
It is difficult, now, to imagine the Great War in colour. Even contemporary poems like Gurney's 'Pain' depict the war in monochrome: Grey monotony lending 'I again work more in black and white than in colour,' Paul Klee noted on 26 October 1917. 'Colour seems to be a little exhausted just now.' Many photographs - like those from the first day of the Somme - were taken under skies of Kodak blue, but, even had it been available, colour film would - it seems to us - have rendered the scenes in sepia. Coagulated by time, even fresh blood seems greyish brown. Photos like this are not simply true to the past; they are photos of the past. The soldiers marching through them seem to be tramping through 'the great sunk silences 'of the past. The photos are colour-resistant. They refuse to come out of the past - and the past is sepia-tinted. Peter Porter in his poem 'Somme and Flanders' notes how 'Those Harmsworth books have sepia'd'; Vernon Scannell in 'The Great War' refers to the 'sepia November' of armistice. And if, as Gilbert Adair has suggested, Auden's poems of the thirties are somehow 'in black and white', then Owen's, by extension, are in sepia monochrome. It is impossible to colour them in; like photographs, they too are colour-resistant. Having seen all things red, In Blunden too 'vermilion', 'damask', the 'pinks and whites' of roses and 'golden lights' of daisies are out of place: ... the choice of colour The world had had the colour bombed out of it. Sepia, the colour of mud, emerged as the dominant tone of the war. Battle rendered the landscape sepia. 'The year itself looks sepia and soiled,' writes Timothy Findley of 1915 'muddied like its pictures.' This is why - to return to an earlier theme - the photographs of men queuing up to enlist seem wounded by the experience that is still to come: they are tinted by the trenches, by Flanders mud. The recruits of 1914 have the look of ghosts. They are queuing up to be slaughtered: they are already dead. This characteristic sensation - Larkin's 'MCMXIV' begins with a photo of 'long uneven fines' of men queuing up to enlist is articulated by Owen in 'The Send-Off', a poem describing recruits about to entrain for France: Down the close darkening lanes they sang their way The landscape they leave in these first two lines is a premonition of the one 'a few' may return to, 'up half-known roads', in the last. At the moment of departure they are already marching through the landscape of mourning. The summer of 1914 is shadowed by the dusk of drawn blinds. Before boarding the train they have joined the ranks of the dead: Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray But Owen's poem does not, so to speak, stop there. The train pulls out into a future that seems, to us, to stretch away from the Great War and extend to the memory of another, more recent holocaust: Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp
Relative to the scale of the slaughter, very few pictures of the British
dead survived the Great War.[ This contrasts sharply with the American
Civil War; T. H. O'Sullivan's 1863 photograph, 'A Harvest of Death',
for example, showed the fields of Gettysburg strewn with dead Any photographs that did get taken were subject to strict censorship so that no images prejudicial to the war effort found their way into print. After the war the archives were vetted so that the number of photographs of British dead was whittled down still further.[ In an early visit to the Imperial War Museum photographic department I began to suspect that this 'cover-up' was continuing into the present day. Photos from the Great War are catalogued by subject and, despite extensive filings under 'Destruction', there was no classification for 'Dead' or 'Injured' or any other heading I could think of. By chance I came across a photo of a dead soldier. Beneath it was typed, 'Transferred to Casualty Album'. In red handwriting another note read: 'Not for sale or reproduction'. Having established the correct generic term I moved back to the subject catalogues, but as I thought - there was no Casualty Album. Feeling certain that I had stumbled upon a classic example of the missing-file conspiracy I explained to one of the assistants, in tones of baffled innocence, that I couldn't seem to find the so-called Casualty Album. 'Ah, the Casualty Album,' he said. 'It's next door. I'll get it for you right away, Mr Dyer.' The injunction in red, it turns out, dated from the twenties so that relatives of the dead would not come across photographs of mutilated loved ones in the morning paper. It had long since been waived; stored separately as a gesture of decorum the file itself was on my desk within minutes of asking for it.] Like all the most efficient restrictions, these successive measures worked consensually rather than simply repressively. Reflecting, establishing and perpetuating a broad agreement between state, photographers and public as to what fell within the limits of acceptable taste, they defined that which they claimed to be defined by. The pictures that have been preserved show isolated or small groups of dead soldiers. They give no sense of death on the scale recorded by a German Field Marshal on the Eastern Front: In the account book of the Great War, the page recording the Russian losses has been ripped out. The figures are unknown. Five million, or eight? We ourselves know not. All we do know is that, at times, fighting the Russians, we had to remove the piles of enemy bodies from before our trenches, so is to get a clear field of fire against new waves of assault. On the Western Front, months after the Battle of the Somme had ended, John Masefield wrote how the dead still 'lay three or four deep and the bluebottles made their faces black'. Photographs of the missing are themselves missing. Typically, pictures from the front line show not the dead, but people
who have witnessed death. Like this well-known photograph of a soldier
suffering from battle fatigue. We stare at the picture like Isabelle Rimbaud - sister of the poet - who, in August 1914, took water to a group of exhausted soldiers coming out of battle. 'Where do they come from?' she wondered. 'What have they seen? We should greatly like to know, but they say nothing.' This picture, too, is mute. It is immune to our gaze. We are looking into the eyes of a man who has seen the untellable. In a letter written on the last day of 1917 Owen wrote to his mother 'of the very strange look' he had noticed on soldiers' faces at Etaples. It was, he said, an incomprehensible look, which a man will never see in England ... It was not despair or terror, it was more terrible than terror, for it was a blindfold look, without expression, like a dead rabbit's. It will never be painted, and no actor will ever seize it. And to describe it, I think I must go back and be with them. Looking across the Channel before he did exactly that, Owen quoted a favourite passage from Rabindranath Tagore: 'When I go from hence, let this be my parting word, that what I have seen it unsurpassable.' Owen's poems are overwhelmingly concerned with this, the fact of having seen: ... As under a green sea, I saw him drowning In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He had come to France to help his men, he said, by leading them and 'indirectly by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can'. In so doing he affirms, repeatedly, his reliability as a witness: I saw their bitten backs curve, loop, and straighten, He focuses frequently - as in the passage from 'Insensibility' quoted above - on 'the blunt and lashless eyes' of men he has seen, men who have been blinded by what they have seen: 0 Love, your eyes lose lure '0 sir, my eyes -I'm blind - I'm blind, I'm blind!' The anger in his poems always comes from this: from the fact of having witnessed what civilians at home could never conceive of seeing. This reaches its most intense expression in the transitional passage in 'Dulce et Decorum Est: If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Owen, the best-known poet of the First World War, wrote that he was
'not concerned with Poetry'. Robert Capa, the bestknown photographer
of the Second, declared that he was 'not interested in taking pretty
pictures'. During the Spanish Civil War he took the most famous war
photograph of all time, which showed -or purported to - the precise
moment of a Republican soldier's death in action. In his photographs of the Second World War we come across the dead almost casually, in houses and streets. A photograph from December 1944 shows a frozen winter scene with bare trees, cattle and huts in the background. A G I advances across the photo towards a body lying in the middle of the field. Some way off, beyond the margins of the frame, in the next photograph, there will be another body. Through Capa's photos, in other words, we follow a trail of bodies. This trail leads, ultimately, to the photos of mass death at the core of our century: bodies piled up in concentration camps. Capa, personally, had no intention of photographing the concentration camps, because they 'were swarming with photographers, and every new picture of horror served only to diminish the total effect'. Theodor Adorno said famously that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz. Instead, he failed to add, there would be photography. Since the concentration camps we have seen hundreds, thousands of photographs of the dead: from Cambodia, Beirut, Vietnam, Algeria, Salvador, Sarajevo. After the Second World War the work of Capa - an invented name anyway - came less to suggest an individual's work and, increasingly, to identify the kind of photograph associated with him. The original dissolved into the hundreds of reproductions that came in his wake. Photographs of the dead are now ten a penny. More and more news bulletins come with the warning that some of the images in them might upset some viewers. Not only is ours a time when anyone - from Presidents of the United States to nameless peasants -might die on film; this has been the time when, to a degree, people only die on film. Like many people I have seen hundreds of bodies on film and never one in real life: an exact reversal of the typical experience of the Great War. The drift of photography since then has been from looking into the eyes of men who have seen death to seeing things through their eyes.
|
Geoff Dyer |
|
|
||
].This
was due principally to restrictions on reporting. Only official photographers
were allowed at the front; ordinary press photographers were almost
totally excluded from the battle areas; front-line soldiers themselves
were discouraged from carrying cameras (or keeping diaries)
