‘Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? – for even gods putrefy! God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.’8 To read these words beside the Somme, amid a landscape turned to mud and ash, and littered with the mangled bodies of men, was to shiver before the possibility that there might not be, after all, any redemption in sacrifice. Nietzsche had written them back in 1882:
