The Missing of the Somme Quotes

“So it comes about that the war [World War I] seems, to us, to have been fought less over territory than the way it would be remembered, that the war’s true subject is remembrance. Indeed the whole war — which was being remembered even as it was fought, whose fallen were being remembered before they fell — seems not so much to be tinted by retrospect as to have been fought retrospectively.”
― Geoff Dyer, The Missing of the Somme

“The most famous footballing episode was Captain Nevill’s kicking a ball into No Man’s Land on the first day of the Somme. A prize was offered to the first man to dribble the ball into the German trenches; Nevill himself scrambled out of the trench in pursuit of his goal and was cut down immediately. (Perhaps the Somme was not only an indictment of military strategy but also of the British propensity for the long-ball game.)”
― Geoff Dyer, The Missing of the Somme

“The recruits of 1914 have the look of ghosts. They are queuing up to be slaughtered: they are already dead.”
― Geoff Dyer, The Missing of the Somme