BBC Radio 4 2016-07-01

Paul Fussell in his book The Great War and Modern Memory conjures a farmhouse in Picardy hours before the Somme attack, where men from the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry stood with glasses raised. A barrage of shells was reaching its crescendo, so intense it could be heard in England. It was meant to destroy German defences and clear a path for the Somme advance. The commander gave a toast – ‘Gentlemen, when the barrage lifts’ – and they drained their glasses. Within a day, of that one battalion of 800 men, more than 700 lay dead on the battlefield. The bombardment failed to account for the ingenuity of German defensive tunnels.

‘When the barrage lifts’ was a toast to courage, but also a prayer. You find yourself wanting to finish the sentence for them – ‘When the barrage lifts, may you live to see your families again’. But within a day, that toast falls into self-mockery. ‘When the barrage lifts, you will be cut down’. It becomes a prophecy. For decades after, every 1st July an anonymous message was posted in the Times’ In Memoriam column, saying ‘Gentlemen, when the barrage lifts’. An officer’s off-the-cuff toast turned from grim prophecy to a memorial. A single-line elegy.

The French Christian mystic Simone Weil told a story of prisoners in adjoining cells, communicating by knocking on the wall, so the wall is both what separates them and their only means of contact. ‘Every separation’, she says, ‘is a link’, between creator and created, between us. Our Somme commemorations will be soon be finished, tidied up. Stories like that toast in the Picardy farmhouse will recede into the distance. The separation of history is stark. We are not them. But we are like them, and a story, a line from a poem can be a means of contact.

One of the great poets of the Somme – David Jones – describes in his epic ‘In Parenthesis’ a wounded soldier struggling for cover: ‘It’s difficult with the weight of the rifle’, he writes. ‘Leave it, under the oak. / Leave it for a salvage bloke, / let it lie bruised for a monument/ Leave it for a Cook’s tourist to the Devastated Areas’. Even as battle raged, the poet was imagining people like us, in the future, touring battlefields. Our separation had already begun. How quickly the spark falters, and history falls back into myth. But the poems of Jones, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg still hold the voltage to connect us, however briefly, when the barrage lifts.