Why do they do it? Some thoughts about ‘battlefield tourism’ and the war poets of the Great War

HELEN MCPHAIL

Why would anyone want to visit a First World War battlefield? What do they expect to see? ‘Battlefield tourism’ began in France immediately after the end of the First World War, when families made the difficult journey to see the ravaged landscape along the Western Front – looking for graves or the shattered remains of towns and villages whose names are still famous for war-time events. Today, a remarkable number of people make the journey to the old Western Front every year, in many cases returning for repeated exploration of the area. The sources of their interest may lie in studying military or political strategy and the constraints of warfare, but very frequently the key purpose is personal: to trace a significant piece of individual or family background that represents an earlier generation of society or literature. Today’s visits to the sites and landscapes of historic events can be seen at various levels, from personal pleasure combined agreeably with a little learning, to an intense experience of historical and emotional awareness. For some it may be enough to enjoy the landscape, for others there is fresh understanding and an imaginative bridging of the gap between past and present. In the case of a group visit, there are always people wanting to visit a specific grave or walk across a field of battle famous in a particular regiment’s history – and there will be memorable shared moments of solemnity, levity and enlightenment, echoes of famous names and words, vivid anecdotes and companionable debate.

The continuing importance of 1914-1918 in world history is universally recognised. It was the founding event of the war-torn twentieth century and its outcome continues to shape modern world affairs – many of the complex strands of current concern in the Middle East, for example, can be traced back to political and military events in 1914-1918, while world affairs following the 1918 Armistice, up to and including the Second World War, all too often require reference to the Great War and its aftermath. But, still, why the battlefields of that particular war, apart from being a particular kind of car or coach tour with walks and, quite often, mud? Books continue to pour off the presses, covering every imaginable aspect of the First World War, innumerable websites spring up on the internet, local history societies examine their own war memorials and communities – there is never a shortage of material to consider at home, on the computer screen or in the library. A notable feature, particularly in the English-speaking world, is the remarkable range and significance of the period’s literature: the novels, memoirs and poetry give us the writer’s views of his or her war, shaping modern views of the past. In turn, they inspire a number of modern novelists, classics are re-issued or translated and receive expanding academic attention. After a period when attention was concentrated, naturally and almost exclusively, on the Second World War, the view has broadened out again and the earlier conflict once more offers a valuable series of topics for examination in the form of history, music, art, literature – and specialised visits. Modern leisure patterns make the battlefields an easy destination to reach.

In the absence now of veterans of the Western Front or Gallipoli, we need this kind of access and material in order to learn about early twentieth century society, the impact on it of war and its effects on family and community, about how directly the world wars have influenced modern culture and our own circumstances. In Britain, military life in its broadest sense has ceased to be a major part of the nation’s life and is, largely, invisible – except in unfamiliar settings on our nightly TV news; most of us lack any automatic terms of reference on which to base our understanding of how the armed forces operate, now or in the past.

Modern attitudes to events are naturally different from beliefs and reactions at the time to the way in which the war was conducted and endured – we no longer have survivors to give their personal narrative and, as historians firmly point out, our feelings about what was undertaken naturally reflect our own sensibilities, experience and level of knowledge. We need to recognise the gap between life as it was experienced nearly a century ago, in terms of society, culture, politics and literature, and our modern society; the most powerful material that has survived helps us approach the unbridgeable gap between our Now and their Then. When we are able to locate vivid description or well-loved lines, many of them now a part of our modern vocabulary, in the setting that marked the mind of the writer, we gain in emotional and psychological terms as well as in terms of historical understanding. The inevitable changes in attitudes to elements in the past and understanding of motives and events are of particular relevance in relation to something as vast as the social and cultural consequences of the First World War. Many of the significant battlefields have some form of explanation or interpretation and increasing numbers of visitors are drawn in by the physical landscape even as the final surviving trench-lines blur away into the woods and fields.

The remarkable body of English literature that emerged from this particular war is one of the most significant features for the British visitor or ‘consumer’ of historical material about the period; it constitutes one of the many differences in the ways in which modern nations recall those crucial years and has become a favoured route for exploring history. To the frequent bafflement of commentators and historians in other cultures, attitudes to the war among many readers of English literature in its broadest sense have come to be based heavily on a few poets of real literary stature, combined with a modern feeling for what any individual may reasonably be expected to face. It is ironic that Robert Graves’s title, Goodbye to All That, which has passed into universal acceptance as a general phrase (quite apart from appreciation of the contents of a book which has never been out of print since its first publication in 1929), represents anything but a ‘goodbye’ in terms of examining the war which shaped the whole of his long life. Those four and a half years are still with us in many ways, and it is often the writers of the day who are chosen as our guides to the war in a broader context.

The poets of 1914-1918 whose work we read, whom we can take as our guides in the now-peaceful fields of France and Flanders, were aware of their need to describe the war as they saw it, to counter the language of recruiting posters or bright-eyed tales of valour, and indeed a number declared – like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon or a lesser-known writer such as TP Cameron Wilson – that it was their duty as poets: if they had the skill to reveal the true conditions in the trenches or in battle, true courage and the strengths and weaknesses of human nature were the more greatly honoured. Would Osbert Sitwell have been surprised to know that what he wrote in 1917 could still be relevant many decades later?

You hope that we shall tell you that they found their happiness in fighting,
Or that they died with a song on their lips,
Or that we shall use the old familiar phrases
With which your paid servants please you in the Press;
But we are poets,
And shall tell the truth.

Today we look at these twentieth-century eye-witness reports of action at war and use them as our guide. Visitors explore the battlefields with their copies of the poets in their hands, and the writer’s internal landscape in their minds, as they gaze at the physical setting; for many people, these quiet fields of 1914-1918, still resonant with their bloody and desperate past, represent family history, for others a school syllabus or a broad curiosity about who we are today. With modern transport and roads we can set out in the afternoon from southern England, the home setting of many of the poets whose work we remember, and by evening be standing underneath the Menin Gate in Ypres, gazing at what Sassoon called ‘these intolerably nameless names’ or standing alone in the open fields of the Somme where the trenches can still be traced by the marks they have left in the farm-land.

Young visitors and older travellers respond to the landscape, scale and distance, in a way that no book, film or lecture can hope to replicate. So many of the poems and narratives from this period are full of the feel of the landscape, and still open the way for us to reach back as we experience it for ourselves, observing the lie of the land that was so crucial in wartime. Could I have survived that kind of life? How would I have reacted to the conditions of war? To read the best of the memoirs, poems or letters from the front line is, almost inevitably, to judge oneself, at the same time as recognising the skill and atmosphere of the writer: to read letters which are literary documents as well as personal witness, from writers as various as John Masefield and Ivor Gurney, or Julian Grenfell, Paul Nash and Siegfried Sassoon, is to find ourselves in two places at once, vividly back in the past even as we read them here and now. It is visitors, words, facts and opinions that range to and fro across the fields of Picardy today, not the great armies of the Great War. It may be dangerous to make too much of the link between site, personality and resulting creative work, but when trying to evaluate and fully appreciate the ‘eye-witness reports’ - poems, memoirs or novels that have endured for their historical or intrinsic literary value - the feel for the landscape that comes through physical exploration is irreplaceable.

To do this, at an appropriate battlefield site with the right background information and guide, is to absorb understanding at several levels: in the background are the political and strategic military decisions of the nation’s leaders, requiring decisions that may have been forced by the widest political needs and which may have appeared incomprehensible to the men and officers at the face of warfare; in the foreground is the guide who can offer a clear presentation of material, both factual and mediated through the best of the written material about what happened here; the two are filtered through each visitor’s previous knowledge. We are conscious of Philip Larkin’s post-Second World War evocation of 1914 – ‘Never such innocence again’ - and try to perceive what it was that these men did or did not know.

School groups have become a standard feature of modern battlefield tourism: the blend of history and English literature is a potent one, with a number of twentieth century classics providing the basis through which modern students can learn about their own heritage; and no matter how strongly – and often reasonably - the military historian may complain at the distorted view of the First World War derived from a rich diet of the classic literature of the period, in the form of letters and novels, poetry and memoirs, they are unable to withstand the power of description that helps today’s young visitors to appreciate not simply ‘what happened here’ but ‘this is what it meant in the war to be here, in this field in front of you, on that occasion, someone of your age, feeling like that’. It is a powerful way of learning how the modern world came to be the kind of place it is, and a striking feature of school visits is to see adolescents beginning to grasp the scale of their great-grandparents’ war in a way that is impossible from their class-room, books or television screens. There is the sheer number of graves in all those tidy peaceful Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries, the immense lists of names on the memorials to the missing, illuminating the past in a way that relates it firmly to their own lives. Seeing the ages on the headstones, realising that so many of the men lying there would have been their brothers, friends, neighbours, is a powerful aid to a clearer understanding of what the war meant to their own families; it is part of a fuller realisation of the implications of any war - of loyalties and ideals, illusion and disillusionment, achievement and waste, and the complex relationship between time, the individual and the nation.

Helen McPhail

This article was first published in the WPA's journal War Poetry Review 2007.