Lutyens' Thiepval Memorial Monument commemorates troops who died in the Battle of the Somme. Photograph: Chris Radburn/PA
On the way to the south of France the other week, I drove over the battlefields of the Somme. In a matter of minutes, I passed over land that hundreds of thousands had died to win. I could tell you no more about it than that, in the pale winter light, it looked flat, dull and brown.
It required a leap of imagination to picture the horrors once endured on that nondescript patch of Normandy. But at least I had a ready stock of imagery to call upon: men who "marched asleep" and "limped blood-shod"; gas victims "guttering, choking, drowning"; mouths "earth-stopped"; soldiers running "blind with blood", trampling "terrible corpses"; "shrieking iron and flame" hurled over "torn fields"; a "decent chap" turned into "a jolting lump".
The poetry of the first world war, I imagine, haunts us all. Even on the approach of its 100th anniversary the impact of that desperate burst of creativity remains. Wilfred Owen still trounces "the old lie" : dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. We can still feel Siegfried Sassoon's rage at the "cheery old card" general's plan of attack. Isaac Rosenberg's droll rat still has a lot to teach us about futility.
On a personal level, an all too vivid understanding of "the pity of war" was for me - like so many others in the UK who are taught the poems at school - a crucial step in my coming of age. So too was the realisation that the arts can provide the nation with a conscience when the politicians who are supposed to speak for us are going insane - perhaps something to consider as the Olympics hoovers up more and more arts funding. Equally, it could be taken as proof that art and dissent flourish best free of state meddling, even in the most horrible circumstances imaginable.
But such considerations are dwarfed by the continuing need to revisit the poems as an act of memory - a reminder of things we should never forget. Perhaps the attempt to give meaning to such senseless slaughter is hopeless, but by attempting to learn its lessons we at least ensure it wasn't entirely in vain. I suppose that's why I offer this blog now. It's also why I decided that on my way back to the Channel tunnel, I would pull off the road to pay my respects.
I stopped at a former battlefield. It wasn't the poetry that struck home; it was the lack of it. I was visiting Thiepval, the biggest British battle memorial in the world, a huge arch designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, whose clean, sombre art-deco lines provide a solemn pastiche on the ornate triumphs of previous wars. There is a large inscription carved into its Portland Stone: "Here are recorded names of officers and men of the British Armies who fell on the Somme battlefields July 1915 February 1918 but to whom the fortune of war denied the known and honoured burial given to their comrades in death."
There are more than 72,000.
In the abstract, this figure is hard to comprehend. Carved into stone, it's more than the eye can take in. The names merge into one overwhelming mass. Only when you concentrate enough to focus on them one at a time do you remember that each represents an individual death: "Aarons, Ernest Alfred." "Dack, William Henry Herbert." Sackett, Richard Rupert." "Wadams Gilbert Harry." "Palfreyman, Frank Twigg." "Gable, Walter John." "Gabb, Albert A." These men were 29, 21, 20, 19, 21, 20 and 21 respectively. Some of them might have become poets themselves. Plenty of them would have been fools. Few of them saw their parents grow old, but then, probably, none of them held their own babies in their arms.
It's at this point you realise that words fail.
