The Missing of the Somme

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Geoff Dyer. The Missing of the Somme

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Also by Geoff Dyer

Zona

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On 12 November, in the collapsed tent, the bodies and their documents were found by a rescue party and the legend of Scott of the Antarctic began to take immediate effect. ‘Of their suffering, hardship and devotion to one another,’ wrote a member of the rescue team, ‘the world will soon know the deeds that were done were equally as great as any committed on Battlefield and won the respect and honour of every true Britisher.’

Scott’s headstrong incompetence had actually meant that, from an early stage, the expedition had been riddled by tension. Captain Oates – the ‘very gallant Englishman’ of legend – had earlier written that ‘if Scott fails to get to the Pole he jolly well deserves it’. Although clad in the guise of scientific discovery, Scott’s expedition contributed nothing to the knowledge of polar travel unless it was to emphasize ‘the grotesque futility of man-hauling’. But with Scott, futility (the title of one of only a handful of poems published by Wilfred Owen in his lifetime) becomes an important component of the heroic. That Scott had turned the expedition into an affair of ‘heroism for heroism’s sake’ only enhanced the posthumous glory that greeted news of his death when it reached England on 11 February the following year.

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