TALES FROM THE WESTERN FRONT
CHAPTER 2 - AMIENS
Today Amiens is the capital of the Somme department which makes up part of the ancient province of Picardie. As the largest town in the area with a population approaching 140,000 it has much to offer tourists of all types, not just battlefield visitors. However it’s the Great War connection that draws me back year after year.
During the War Amiens was of huge importance to the British Army as a centre for supplies due to its excellent rail communications and also as a haven where the troops, especially officers, could draw breath away from the trenches. After being briefly but brutally occupied by the Germans in 1914, it remained relatively unscathed until the Kaiserschlacht of Spring 1918 when it was only by the dogged resistance of the Australians at nearby Villers-Bretonneux that it was saved.
Though much has changed since then, the troops might still recognise at least some of the town. Up near the station the Carlton-Belfort Hotel, scene of many a convivial meal for seemingly most of the Great War literati, still stands and not far away is the undisputed gem of Amiens, the glorious Cathedral. Beautifully maintained, it looks much better than anyone has the right to expect after nearly 900 years of continuous use and occasional bombardment. Before I go in I always have a quiet saunter on the esplanade in front of the great main entrance trying to imagine the sounds and sights of days gone by, from the pleas of medieval mendicants to the more martial sounds of hobnailed boots, the scent of freshly lit Woodbines and the laughter of men free for a blessed while to enjoy the basic pleasures of living.
The cool splendour of the interior never fails to impress me as I wander about amidst the parties of tourists, schoolchildren and still, even in these secular times, pilgrims. A creature of habit, I would feel my visit to be incomplete if I didn’t pause under the Weeping Angel, perched above the visitors with his head resting on his hand and looking like he’s got a most unholy hangover. A medieval mason’s little jest, maybe?
Further along the alleged skull of John the Baptist never fails to raise a smile as I’m sure it did for Salome after she danced. Then there’s the labyrinth, an intricate maze on the central floor of the cathedral, designed as a training ground for would-be entrants to Heaven. Take my tip – start from Heaven (the centre) and work your way back to the beginning and then amaze and impress friends when next you visit by doing it first time the right way round! Having enjoyed these diversions I push on to the main reason for my visit, the wall plaques connected to the War.
The most personal of these memorials is undoubtedly the one dedicated to the memory of Raymond Asquith. Raymond somehow symbolises just what was swept away in Britain by the War. Born to privilege and with a glittering career in law and society prior to 1914, he met his end near Ginchy on the Somme in September, 1916. I must admit to having a very ambivalent view towards Asquith and the other members of the crème de la crème of Edwardian England who were ‘in charge’ in 1914. I also know that much of what I’m about to write will appear mean spirited, though if you bear with me you’ll perhaps find that I am cognisant of and very sympathetic to, the sacrifices made by all classes of society. It’s just when I read the appreciation of Raymond’s life by John Buchan, a novelist incidentally whom I greatly admire, that I find, shall we say, a little difficulty. First though, let’s have a look at who Raymond was and then consider what Buchan wrote in ‘These For Remembrance’ in 1919 when memory, and grief, were all too fresh.
Raymond Asquith, the eldest son of Herbert Asquith the future Liberal Prime Minister, was born in 1878. He was educated at Winchester School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he won all the prizes worth winning. According to Buchan he was the epitome of all that was praiseworthy in the Edwardian young gentleman. A true Corinthian, he was successful at everything to which he turned his hand while, at the same time, giving the impression of not trying. The quintessential amateur, he conformed to the code of his class, studiously avoiding being tagged with the dreaded stigma of ‘pothunter’. Practising to succeed was frowned upon as unsporting though I suspect that quite a few of the sporting nobs would sneak in a bit of training when no one else was looking. It was precisely this attitude which condemned British sportsmen, with a few notable exceptions, to years in the wilderness once the rest of the world picked up on the games we’d invented. As Buchan puts it :
Raymond, who won every possible prize and scholarship, must have worked hard some time or other, but
no one could say when.....an air of infinite leisure hung about him.....
Raymond’s interpersonal skills, a term which I suspect he would have hated, seem to have left something to be desired. Buchan once more :
I do not think he could ever be called popular.....In the ordinary he inspired awe rather than liking…his
courtesy had no warmth in it…..he was apt to be intolerant of mediocrity….There was always a touch of
scorn in him for obvious emotion……and all the accumulated lumber of prosaic humanity.
Not your obvious companion, then, for a night down the pub or at the music hall. One wonders how he could possibly have understood the needs of those whom he was to lead once the final game kicked off. In fact, Raymond seems to have had a complete contempt for everybody outside his immediate coterie of friends. He even seems to have extended this attitude to eminent solicitors and “heavy-witted” judges once he took up the law. But now comes the paradox.
Remember that Raymond came from the Asquiths, one of the great Liberal families, the Liberals whose credo was to help the working classes to better themselves. It would appear that at least some of the Party’s compassion had rubbed off on him as, when he began to make noises about a political career, Raymond found an admirer in none other than J H Thomas and other prominent members of the nascent Labour Party. It may well be that his apparent concern for the less fortunate members of society was both patronising and even paternalistic but at least it did exist. Who knows how radicalised he may have become had he been spared the untimely death he met as a subaltern on the Somme? As he revealed in a letter to J H Thomas he “sought no privileges not accorded to the ordinary soldier” and felt he belonged among “the close comradeship of his battalion”. And it was with his companions in this battalion of the Grenadier Guards that he died on the road from Ginchy to Lesbouefs on September 15, 1916.
Raymond was memorialised thus by Buchan, "Debonair and brilliant and brave, he is now part of that immortal England which knows not age or weariness or defeat."
Perhaps it’s best that I leave these last words by Buchan on Raymond to stand uncommented upon. After all Buchan knew him and his society whereas I do not. I’m also acutely conscious of the fact that any opinions I express are the product of later developments and discoveries, socially, politically and historically, and that I’m being influenced by my own knowledge and beliefs in coming to conclusions that are, perhaps, unfair.
The next time I stand before that plaque in Amiens I don’t know how I shall feel. Guilty perhaps that I have by my writing demeaned the memory of a great man and others of his class who died. On the other hand it may well be that I’m only being true to myself and the memory of the thousands of men and women from across the social spectrum who perished on the battlefields or at base hospitals, sheep betrayed by the very shepherds who should have done more to protect them from the wolves of war. Note that I wrote 'betrayed' not 'abandoned' as Raymond and his fellow glitterati ended up just as dead as those who became, regardless of class, their comrades in death as they never could have been in life.
Regardless of, or more probably because of, what I have just written, I shall pay a visit to Raymond’s grave in Guillemont Road Cemetery and make amends if any are necessary.
Having now broken the thread of my tour of the cathedral in no uncertain manner, this is probably as good a time as any to address the question of my cemetery visits. Why do I go out of my way to stand at a white headstone in a graveyard far from home?
You know, I don’t really have an answer. The best I can come up with is to let the man, or woman, who lies before me ‘know’ that I remember them and respect that they have done something that I could never have done. I touch the stone and talk softly, just saying “I’m here because you’re there. I’ve had all the dawns and sunsets you’ve missed. So thanks.” Pure superstition, of course, and probably completely meaningless. But it isn’t to me. I’m not in the least religious nor a believer in the hereafter but there, in the beautifully maintained cemeteries of Flanders and France, I experience spirituality and, especially, peace. In addition, all those dead who are forever young make me realise what an incredibly lucky little lad I’ve been, never having to have faced the prospect of a very early bath. Like Raymond.
I finish my cathedral tour by looking at the various other plaques erected after the War, all seven of them, each one honouring the sacrifices made by the countries of the British Empire and also the USA. Then it’s time to return to the sunlight and I set off down to the River Somme and a literary connection.
I suppose that for my generation, the one whose fathers participated in the War, the very word ‘Somme’ evokes a shudder of horror and that bleakest of statistics, ‘20,000 dead on the first day’. Ironically, the river herself is a serene old girl flowing in gentle fashion through the town as she has done over the centuries.
Nowadays she hosts dinner cruises and picnic outings and prospects of a catch for the ever hopeful fishermen on her banks, but flip the calendar back to those wartime years and she was alive with hospital barges transporting the wounded to the big hospitals at Abbeville and on the coast. On the far bank of the Somme from the Cathedral runs the Boulevarde du Cange where lies the house immortalised by Sebastian Faulks in his magnificent novel, ‘Birdsong’, the first part of which is concerned with the passionate affair between Isabelle, a married Frenchwoman and Stephen, a young Englishman. Isabelle’s house isn’t hard to find. It’s the rather forbidding one behind railings, with windows peering out from the thick ivy in which it’s covered. The owner is a very amiable gentleman, at least he was when I was sticking my camera lens through his front gate. Though he happily admitted that his was the model for Faulks’ house of passion, la maison de rumpy-pumpy, he was at pains to point out that there was no red room indoors. Read the novel and gasp!
Now it's time to sit in one of the riverside cafes, sip a glass of beer and contemplate what's gone and what's to come.
