The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme
by Gavin Stamp
215pp, Profile, £14.99
Statistics first: the memorial wall in Washington contains the names of 58,000 Americans who died in the Vietnam war. On 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the British army suffered 60,000 dead and wounded. Over the course of the following four months the total number of British casualties was 419,000. The historian Denis Winter provides more detail: "A battle fought from July to November 1916 saw the British and German armies fire 30 million shells at each other and suffer a million casualties between them in an area just seven miles square ... No other battlefield in the Great War witnessed more killing per square yard." John Keegan, a writer not prone to emotive rhetoric, amplifies on the psychological legacy of these figures. "The Somme marked the end of an age of vital optimism in British life that has never been restored." Even as late as the 1960s, after another world war, that single word, Somme, hung like a tremendous, dark sun over my childhood.
It was not just the scale of the catastrophe that made a memorial necessary. All the cemeteries of the western front - some large, most small, uniformly beautiful - contain headstones inscribed "A Soldier of the Great War Known Unto God". The industrialised intensity of the slaughter meant that more than 70,000 of the dead of the Somme simply disappeared or were unidentifiable from their remains. The task of conceiving a memorial to these, the missing, fell to Sir Edwin Lutyens. One of the architects responsible for the overall design of the British cemeteries of the Great War, Lutyens brought to the task the signature mixture of intuitive grace and geometrical calculation that characterised his earlier Cenotaph in Whitehall. With its complex interlocking of arches, the memorial at Thiepval dominates the landscape for miles around with a stubborn serenity.
Gavin Stamp's book is part of a series on the Wonders of the World, whose editors are to be commended for including the memorial in this pantheon. Many people are overwhelmed by the experience of seeing it; even a visitor from Mars would be conscious of the power that converges on and emanates from this place. Stamp has provided an invaluable, detailed and illuminating study of how the memorial came to be built and how its effects are achieved.
The planning and construction of Lutyens's masterpiece is placed in the context of fiercely contested debate, not only about how but about what was to be commemorated. Victory? Impossible; the cost had been too great. Futility? That was the note sounded by the poets, but such a sentiment could not be state-sponsored. Loss? Sacrifice? Brotherhood? Hope that all had not been in vain? These were ideas that could, so to speak, be built on. Lutyens was opposed, absolutely, to any kind of religious symbolism. Those who lobbied for Christian memorials considered his designs offensively pagan but the result might better be termed elemental. Taking the triumphal arch as his starting point, Lutyens turned this into a three-dimensional pyramid of arches. A fusion of classical and modern, the memorial seems both dense - there are enough walls for the names of the dead to be individually inscribed - and airy. What is not there - the tunnels formed by the arches, each framing a view of sky and English-looking foreign fields - plays as important a part as what is.
The man who reconciled these oppositions emerges vividly if enigmatically from Stamp's pages. While his memorial embodied a feeling of fathomless loss, Lutyens cut a somewhat inappropriate figure at its inauguration in 1932. Fellow guests found themselves overwhelmed - not by the memorial, but by "the effort of sympathetic laughter" demanded by Lutyens's constant joking.
By then the battle it commemorated was more distant than the ones to come. Thiepval fell under German occupation in 1940 but the memorial survived the second world war unscathed. With a few bits of alteration and maintenance - years of rain having taken their toll - it endures today, its emotional resonance enlarged now that even survivors have died and the war they fought in has passed almost beyond living memory.
Lutyens's Cenotaph was a rare example of the vision of an individual artist articulating a public need that became tangible only when this vision had been realised. His other great memorial, at Thiepval, effectively brought a 13-year project of remembrance to a close. It is difficult, with the passage of time, not to view this larger undertaking - a collective elegy to a lost generation - elegiacally. As Stamp notes with astonished pride, "the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission between the wars constitutes both the largest and the most inspired programme of public design ever completed by a British government agency, despite difficult and worsening economic conditions - and this was carried out overseas". Thinking of the farce of the Princess Diana memorial, the ongoing debacle of the new Wembley, the relentless Swindonisation of every town centre in Britain, one wants either to weep - or, like Lutyens, to laugh.
· Geoff Dyer's book The Missing of the Somme is published by Phoenix