The New Death: American Modernism and World War I

4 / The Missing of Sartoris

4 / The Missing of Sartoris It always needs all the accompaniments of visible sickness and slow dissolution quite to convince us that our living have become our dead. The boys killed in the trenches are still a present force because our brains cannot believe them dead, when our eyes have not seen them die. —winifred kirkland, new death Monuments to the Missing Rising above a plain in the Valley of the Somme in northern France, a large monument stands in commemoration of “the missing of the Somme” (see figure 10). The monument at Thiepval is subtly modeled on the triumphal arch. It is inscribed with names of the dead and backed by a large cemetery. Designed by the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, it has been called a “silent scream”—a work of pacifism protesting the deaths in the Battle of the Somme and, by extension, the whole of World War I. In Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, Jay Winter emphasizes its minimalism, which allowed Lutyens “to express the inexpressible nature of war and its human costs.” Winter reads the monument’s geometrical structure of arches within arches as “an embodiment of nothingness.” Lutyens, he suggests, “took the form of a triumphal arch, and multiplied it. . . . The progression [of arches and framed empty spaces] extends upward, from smaller arch, and therefore smaller area of emptiness to larger arch, and larger area of emptiness, to still larger arch in the centre of the monument , to nothing at all.”1 Rather than triumph, the monument focuses one’s awareness on emptiness. Its “sequence of staked arches,” insists Allyson Booth, frames “empty space” so that “absence is rendered in a way that constitutes gigantic presence.”2 The huge monument draws the visitor’s eye to what is simply not there. Expressing the inexpressible and symbolizing nothingness are difficult charges for the artist in any medium. But in a very real sense, making THE MiSSiNG OF SARTORIS / 161 “nothing” concrete was Lutyens’s goal. The monument stands in the place of bodies that were never recovered or, if recovered, never identified . During the war, the Western Front moved backward and forward across the Somme River Valley, churning up the landscape and littering it with human remains. Bodies interred behind the lines one month would be relocated within no-man’s-land by subsequent fighting. John Keegan explains that during the Battle of the Somme, which went on from July to November 1916, the area became an “arena of attrition” and a “holocaust” of human life where over a million soldiers died. Britons recall it (especially July 1, 1916, the battle’s opening day) as their “greatest military tragedy ” and continue to make pilgrimages to the site today.3 The Thiepval figure 10. Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme (Somme, France), designed by Sir Edward Lutyens. (Photograph provided by and used with permission of the Historial Museum of the Great War [Péronne, Somme, France]) 162 / THE NEW DEATH monument was built not simply to honor the dead but to embody those who were never found. The monument signifies not just a euphemistic “loss” of individual soldiers to death but their actual material disappearance . It draws attention to the missing through its geometry and through the inscriptions on its surface—the names, dates, regiments, and ranks of the dead. These inscriptions allow visitors who come to the battlefield to visit not the physical remains of the dead but their names—disembodied traces of men who have been, quite literally, lost.4 Despite the monument’s impressive size and evocative design, one might feel that it offers, in fact, precious little to a mourner: not because Lutyens failed but because of the inherent difficulty of representing the missing dead—what the monument invokes as “the missing of the Somme.” The particular means by which people waged World War I challenged traditional mourning practices and languages of commemoration , such as the triumphal arch. Modern artillery, trench warfare, and the unprecedented scale of mobilization enabled men to do new violence to the human body: Many of those who died in battle could never be laid to rest. Their bodies had been blown to pieces by shellfire and the fragments scattered beyond recognition. Many other bodies could not be recovered during the fighting and were then lost to view, entombed in crumbled shell holes or collapsed trenches or decomposing into the broken soil battle left...