Naming the Unnameable

By ROBERT HUGHES

THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY

by PAUL FUSSELL 363 pages. Oxford. $13.95.

Everyone knows war changes culture; but it is hard to say how, since war is culture. From the mid-'30s, war has been so continuous and "normal" a state of society that we find it awkward, even impossible, to detach it from our unconscious assumptions about literature and its workings. Hence the value of this extraordinary and moving book by Paul Fussell, a Rutgers University professor. There is, he argues, a peculiarly modern consciousness of war. It began in the trenches of France in 1914, and it has continued to affect writing ever since. Indeed, European culture--especially in England--was so affected by the Great War that modernism itself owes no small part of its existence to the trauma of the Western Front. "The dynamics and iconography of the Great War," Fussell claims, "have proved crucial political, rhetorical and artistic determinants ... At the same time the war was relying on inherited myth, it was generating new myth, and that myth is part of the fiber of our own lives."

Sweet Wine. A fault line had opened in history, and all that had been taken as normal vanished into its rumbling cleft. Total war of this kind was unknown to living memory in 1914. Gavrilo Princip's bullet in Sarajevo destroyed a peace so long and so continuous that every European had come to take it for granted, as a given part of the fabric of his or her life. Nobody in England, France or Germany, not even the generals, had any idea what trench warfare--the dominant reality of the Western Front--would be like. When it came, it was indefinable: hundreds of thousands of young men existing like stupefied moles in the badly shored-up gutters of mud and decaying flesh that zigzagged their way across France, driven toward the machine guns of Poperinghe or the Butte de Warlincourt by the abstract decisions of rigid or incompetent staff officers. At 7:30 a.m. on July 1, 1916, 110,000 English and Australian troops started walking toward the rusty thickets of German barbed wire along the Somme valley; a few hours later, 60,000 of them were dead or wounded, and the cries of abandoned men were heard rising from no man's land for days afterward. The Somme offensive was the greatest military slaughter in history. The Edwardian vocabulary of war, with its ritual chants of "sacrifice," "honor," "comradeship," "red/Sweet wine of youth" (meaning blood), was impotent to describe the massacre of a generation. Trench warfare was all the more incomprehensible because those who were in it had inherited a tradition of war as sport. Indeed, at the Somme attack, an officer named Nevill, of the 8th East Surreys, signaled the advance by kicking a football toward the German lines. He was killed at once, but other officers kept dribbling their footballs across no man's land, earning a poetic encomium titled "The Game":

On through the hail of slaughter, Where gallant comrades fall,

Where blood is poured like water, They drive the trickling ball.

One of those footballs is now in a museum. The state of mind is gone forever. The sweet, class-bound innocence of such gestures now seems more distant than the moon, and madder than any war story in Pynchon or Heller.

Our remoteness springs, of course, from our situation--on the other side of the crisis of language that World War I provoked. In 1914, the existing imagery could not deal with the conflict. The war correspondents habitually lied or were censored. So the burden of description rested with the poets and writers in uniform. Rupert Brooke, the golden ingenue, might announce: "If I should die, think only this of me:/ That there's some corner of a foreign field/ That is for ever England." But for poets like Wilfred Owen, Herbert Read and Isaac Rosenberg, or writers like Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, the trenches could not be quilted with these Georgian heroics. To read their writings about the war, almost 60 years later, is to observe two processes: how this unnameable suffering and waste were named, and how the imagery of war bequeathed to English writing the marks of a modernist sensibility--the sense of absurdity, disjuncture and polarization, the loathing of duly constituted authorities, the despair and the irony.

The cratered battlefields, seen in 1915 as a 20th century realization of Bunyan's Slough of Despond, became in time the prototype of Eliot's Wasteland. The generation that perished between 1914 and 1918 was perhaps the last wholly literate generation of English-speaking men and, as Fussell shows in absorbing detail, they were as imbued with a sense of national literature as today's soldiers are with the imagery of network TV. In the trenches, this heritage collided with the 20th century. The results were not always masterpieces. But their poignancy was immense. So is their value as evidence. Nature poetry was interred in the mud of Flanders, and what emerged was something much more recognizable to us in its disillusion, like Edgell Rickword's poet, reading to the corpse of a friend: ... / racked my head

for healthy things and quoted Maud.

His grin got worse and I could see

he sneered at passion's purity.

He stank so badly, though we were

great chums I had to leave him; then rats ate his

thumbs.

There are moments when Fussell's exuberant pursuit of myth becomes overwrought, as when he tries to attach an unwieldy mass of archetypal triads -- from the three-headed Cerberus to the Sibyl's tripod to the British army's habit of numbering off in threes. Such flashes of dottiness are, however, rare. What remains is a scrupulously argued and profoundly affecting account of what the Great War changed; and that was nearly everything, for the innocence lost in France was lost forever. There had been modern art before 1914, but not modern culture.

Robert Hughes

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