Army of silent ‘ghosts’ recall the Somme

July 4, 2016 Ken 0 Comments

Young men – even schoolboys – all volunteers …

They were all volunteers. More than 1,500 men, mostly quite young, and even including some schoolboys. They were kitted out in similar uniforms worn by the men they represented. And they had all been sworn to absolute secrecy in the weeks before they appeared.

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What was this strange mission? How is it that over 1,500 men in dull, old fashioned military uniforms suddenly started appearing all over Britain, like silent ghosts, on the morning of July 1st? They tended to form in groups at railway stations mostly, though they split up later and moved on to shopping centres, art galleries, outside schools, car parks, and all kinds of other places where people congregate.

Commuters stopped in their tracks

Commuters stopped in amazement and watched … but the men did not speak. They never spoke a word, or interacted in any way. When approached, they would simply reach into a pocket and take out a card and hand it to the person facing them. Silently.

On the card – on each of the many, many cards that were handed out that day – was the name of a young man who died exactly one hundred years ago, the young man that particular ‘actor’ represented.

Example:

Each man … each card … a silent and touching tribute to the men who lost their lives on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, a battle which began on the morning of July 1st and went on for four blood-soaked months, and saw the casualty count rise to shocking levels. To this day, the Somme remains the ultimate symbol of the absolute futility of war.

Honouring the sacrifice of the Somme

On that morning, almost 20,000 British soldiers lay dead. A days-long bombardment by heavy artillery had softened the German defences, it was believed. Sadly, that proved to be a huge miscalculation. Soldiers went ‘over the top’ in their hundreds only to be met with a hail of machine gun fire that cut them down in minutes.

The mission, or artwork, was the brainchild of Jeremy Deller, a Turner prize-winning artist, who decided to bring the event to the people, instead of the people having to go to the installation. It was kept strictly secret to compound the effect. And what an effect it had … bringing tears to the eyes of onlookers all over the UK, and stopping commuters in their tracks.

As Deller explained:

“I quickly realised that what I didn’t want was a static memorial that the public went to to be sad. In the 21st century I felt we had do something different. So I thought about the memorial being human, and travelling round the country. It would take itself to the public rather than the public taking itself to the memorial.
“And also the public wouldn’t know in advance that there was this thing happening – they would encounter it in the shopping centres and car parks and outside schools and in everyday British life. And I wanted to avoid heritage places – churches, war memorials. I wanted to take it to the public.”

They were not acting – they were just a presence

He worked on the project with Rufus Norris, the artistic director of the National Theatre in London, whose idea it was that the participants should stay silent. He simply wanted them to be a presence, rather than each one playing a part. Of the battle, Norris says:

“That day is generally remembered as being the greatest disaster in British military history. It’s not heroic. There was heroism all around, but it was a disaster, one that was neither necessary nor positive in its outcome. Now that we have a certain distance from the First World War, it is increasingly possible to see it as the very complex culmination of colonial manoeuvrings.”

One person who was stopped in his tracks was history teacher Alex Parker, who happened to be passing through Waterloo Station with a group of boys on a school trip. He said:

“Three weeks ago we took pupils on a trip to northern France and Belgium. I saw the grave of my great-great grandfather, William Charles Merritt, who died aged 37. It’s an incredible display – the fact that they are silent, they are looking at you. They are not talking to each other, or to you. It’s eerie. It’s strange and disconcerting. I think it’s a good way of bringing it home to people.”

This is one of the great things about art, that it can bring home to people something they might have only tangentially been aware of. It can speak more eloquently than words ever could, and it can teach history far more effectively than Mr Parker, or any other history teacher, ever could, no matter how skilled.

Will we ever learn the lesson of history?

This was a group of well over a thousand men, in full uniform, and trained to act in a certain way, and to say nothing. They were businessmen, teachers, students, social workers, shop assistants, labourers … and schoolboys. Much like the men they represented. Men from all walks of life, cut down in their prime. A whole generation wiped out through the insanity of war and the recklessness of shoddy decision-making.

Let’s just hope that artwork like this opens people’s eyes to the terrible things that have happened in the past. Or something I read in a newspaper a very long time ago will continue to be true – that the lesson of history is … that we don’t learn the lesson of history.

For more information, visit the 14-18NOW website.