Numbers suggest, but can never really convey, the impact of World War I. More than 900 cemeteries were built on the Western Front with more than 750,000 graves, approximately a quarter of which contain unidentified remains. If the Great War dead of the British Empire marched past the war memorial where the Remembrance Sunday service is held, the parade would take three and a half days.
Yet while the last surviving combat veteran of the Great War died earlier this year, British author Geoff Dyer suggests that even while it was being fought, "the characteristic attitude of the war was to look forward to the time when it would be remembered."
First published in Britain in 1994, Dyer's The Missing of the Somme is making its first appearance in a U.S. edition. A slim (176 pages), somewhat quirky work, Dyer considers World War I through the poetry, literature, biographies, and photography of the time, along with a bit of travelogue of monuments and cemeteries. It is as far from a history of the war as one might get. To the contrary, Dyer says his goal was not to write about the war itself but, rather, its impact on his generation. (He was born in 1958.) Nor was this to be a novel. Instead, he viewed the project as "an essay in mediation: research notes for a Great War novel I had no intention of writing, the themes of a novel without its substance…"
A meditation on remembrance is the best way to describe the work. The various literary and artistic works Dyer discusses deal with how the war would be and is remembered. In fact, remembrance started early, according to Dyer. He points to perhaps the best known poem by Laurence Binyon, "For the Fallen," which would come to adorn many war memorials. It was published in September 1914, about a month after the first British troops went to France and three weeks after the first British soldier died in the conflict. That means, Dyer says with just a hint of exaggeration, perhaps the leading remembrance of those killed in the war was written "before the fallen actually fell. "For the Fallen," in other words, is a work not of remembrance but of anticipation, or more accurately, the anticipation of remembrance: a foreseeing that is also a determining."
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