Geata Póeg na Déanainn

Reading war’s unsung songs September 10, 2023

This post is part of a series of articles that I previously published in various Australian newspapers when I was working as a reviewer between 2001 and 2012. The vast majority of these do not exist in digital format, and I’ve decided to reprint them here for digital preservation. Much of what is said in these republished reviews does not represent my current thinking, but rather my understanding at the time of writing and original publication. The titles of the posts are the titles that were given to the articles by subeditors upon publication.

Summer in Australia is usually a lazy time, spent lounging at the beach or pool wiht some light-weight holiday reading, having turned the brain off after a long year of work or study. However, this summer, for me at least, has been, unintentionally, the summer of World War I. Completely coincidentally I chose to spent January transcribing my great-grandfather’s diary, which he kept as a young soldier in France between 1916 and 1918. This diary is a mixture of the banal — observations on the weather, lists of towns on his journey to the front — and the devastating. While it’s a sometimes heartbreaking account (at one point he says, ‘Lest I forget if by God’s Grace I return home, War is Hell, terrible. Lord forgive us.’) it is difficult to get a complete sense of what World War I was like from his words alone. As the opening scenes from the World War II movie Saving Private Ryan show, the special effects now available allow us to experience everything but the smell of total war with a sense of reality beyond the written word.

This singular ability of film to enable us to more closely experience the horrors of war is demonstrated again in the current French film A Very Long Engagement, which draws the viewer into the almost unspeakable existence of soldiers in the muddy trenches during World War I. In watching this film, where a beautiful love story jostles for position with scenes of the most appalling death and destruction, I was reminded of Sebastian Faulk’s novel, Birdsong, which makes use of the same juxtaposition. This book, like the movie, attempts to deal with the same aspect of World War I — the indescribable nature of trench warfare, and traumatic effect it had on the lives of the mostly young men who fought. A Very Long Engagement relies on the redemptive power of love to give the story a happy ending; but this is not enough for Faulks, and so Birdsong is a story about the attempt to put words to events which defy description. It’s a meditation on the challenge of describing the indescribable.

The soldiers in Birdsong live in a hell far worse than that of the trenches: many of them, miners and underground train workers in previous lifetimes, spend their days digging tunnels deep within the earth, stoic in the knowledge that their German counterparts could be in similar tunnels just around the corner. It is as if these men are buried before they are even dead, living in a subterranean world like a pack of medieval devils.

However, the real devils of Faulks’s novel are the politicians and generals, safely removed from these nightmares, in French villas or in England, sending their men to suffer for what Faulks clearly believes is no reason. Their ignorance is breathtaking — one officer talks of his fondness for the bayonet as a weapon, failing to recognise that new military technology means that soldiers never get close enough to their enemy to use it. This incredible naivete highlights the strangeness of World War I. As Faulks points out, the soldiers were trained in the old style of warfare — drilling, cavalry charge and so on — but used new, much more destructive weaponry. As a result, these bewildered boys, many as young as 17 or 18, blundered into a nightmare, physically capable of fighting but not mentally able to deal with the massacres, or the degradation of trench life.

Faulks’s major concern is with innocence corrupted, with humanity depraved. According to his philosophy, it was not only the terrifying fighting, but also the squalor, filth and disease of trench life which dehumanised the young soldiers. Early on in the book, its central character, Stephen Wraysford, professes a horror of birds and their ‘prehistoric cruelty.’ Faulks clearly intends a connection between avian behaviour and human barbarity during World War I. Faulks’s characters literally wallow in the mud, their clothes crawling with lice.

He makes the point that soldiers (like my great-grandfather) who suffered the singular ghastliness of life in the trenches were unable ever fully to share it with those who hadn’t been there. Stephen Wraysford shuts himself up inside an emotionless vacuum, surviving on blind hatred of the Germans. Another character longs for death because he feels unable to return home and carry on a loving relationship with his wife. He feels closer to the other men in the trenches, strangers before the war, than his family back in London. A third soldier returns home on leave, and becomes filled with anger at his family’s inability to understand his suffering. There is a sense that words are inadequate, description futile, that eloquence died on the fields of Flanders. Birdsong is ultimately life-affirming, but in a cathartic sense: the novel is tragic, rather than depressing.

And yet Faulks remains uncertain right up to the end of his book. In the last sentence, he returns to birds, to the crow and its ‘ambiguous call.’ His writing makes his theme paradoxical — his characters speak eloquently of their inability to describe their experiences. Faulks is too modest — he has found the words to describe the indescribable: ‘No child or future generation will ever know what this was like. They will never understand. When it is over we will go quietly among the living and we will not tell them. We will talk and sleep and go about our business like human beings. We will seal what we have seen in the silence of our hearts, and no words will reach us.’

This article first appeared in the 30 January, 2005 issue of The Canberra Times.