Waterloo station, London: 8am. “I’m here, under the big clock,” said a man into his phone. So were about 20 young men, immediately conspicuous because they were dressed in the dull-green uniforms of the first world war. They were just there: not speaking, not even moving very much. Waiting, expressionless, for who knows what.

A small crowd gathered, taking photographs. A woman caught the eye of one of the men. She tried to speak to him. Without speaking or dropping his gaze, he pulled a small card out of his pocket and handed it to her. “Lance Corporal John Arthur Green,” it read. “1st/9th Battalion, London Regiment (Queen Victoria’s Rifles). Died at the Somme on 1 July 1916. Aged 24 years.”

There were similar scenes across the UK, from Shetland to Penzance and from Derry-Londonderry to Ipswich. There were more than 1,500 men in total. They gathered on the steps of the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow. They smoked roll-ups outside Bristol Temple Meads and marched, metal-tipped boots ringing, through Manchester Piccadilly. They stood in clumps by the entrance to Queen’s University, Belfast, and sat on the market cross in Lerwick, Shetland.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Men dressed as soldiers walk through Milton Keynes after taking a train from Euston. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

The groups tended to form at railway stations and then disperse, in smaller numbers, on foot to shopping centres, streets, markets, or by train to smaller towns and villages. Whenever they were approached, they silently handed the passerby a card. Photographs began to spring up on social media, under the hashtag #wearehere.



The event, which unfolded without advance publicity, can now be revealed as a work by Jeremy Deller, the Turner prize-winning artist who, in 2001, recreated the miners’ strike clash known as the Battle of Orgreave.

The participants were a volunteer army of non-professional performers, including social workers, farmers, security guards, farmers, shop assistants, students, labourers, flight attendants and schoolboys. All were sworn to secrecy, and rehearsals took place across the country over the past months. Deller worked with Rufus Norris, the artistic director of the National Theatre in London, and theatres throughout the UK to train the volunteer army.

Deller was approached to devise an artwork to mark the centenary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme by 14-18 NOW, the body responsible for art commissions commemorating the war. “I quickly realised that what I didn’t want was a static memorial that the public went to to be sad,” he said. “In the 21st century I felt we had do something different. So I thought about the memorial being human, and travelling round the country. It would take itself to the public rather than the public taking itself to the memorial.

“And also the public wouldn’t know in advance that there was this thing happening – they would encounter it in the shopping centres and carparks and outside schools and in everyday British life. And I wanted to avoid heritage places – churches, war memorials. I wanted to take it to the public.” His key idea, he said, was to “avoid sentimentality”. It was called We’re Here Because We’re Here.



The Guardian view on the Somme centenary: rest in peace | Editorial Read more

There were 19,240 British dead as night fell on the Somme frontline on 1 July 1916– a human catastrophe on an unthinkable scale. The British plan had been that heavy artillery rained down on the enemy defences for days beforehand would make it possible for the British to walk, starting at 7.30am, across no man’s land to take German trenches in time for a good lunch. The plan failed.

Instead of no resistance, the Tommies were met with machine-gun fire. At the end of the battle, four and a half months later, there was a casualty count for the British of 420,000, for the French of 200,000 and for the Germans of 500,000. The battle, fought in France’s rolling northern hills, remains the ultimate symbol of the futility of war.

It was Norris’s idea that the participants should not speak. “If they speak they become re-enactors, living history,” said Deller. “They’d have to assume a character for a day. We didn’t want that – we wanted them to have a detached quality to them. There is no narrative. They are not playing or acting the men who fought. They are a presence.”

Norris added: “It is a political work – with a small p. That day is generally remembered as being the greatest disaster in British military history. It’s not heroic. There was heroism all around, but it was a disaster, one that was neither necessary nor positive in its outcome. Now that we have a certain distance from the first world war, it is increasingly possible to see it as the very complex culmination of colonial manoeuvrings. Jeremy’s determination that it should not be sentimental is at the heart of it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘They are not playing or acting the men who fought. They are a presence.’ Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

One group of year 12s from Cardinal Pole School, Hackney, was passing through Waterloo station en route to the Forest of Dean for a Duke of Edinburgh trip. History teacher Alex Parker paused with one of his students. “Three weeks ago we took pupils on a trip to northern France and Belgium,” he said. “I saw the grave of my great-great grandfather, William Charles Merritt, who died aged 37.”

Surveying the figures before him, he said, “It’s an incredible display – that fact that they are silent, they are looking at you. They are not talking to each other, or to you. It’s eerie. It’s strange and disconcerting. I think it’s a good way of bringing it home to people.”

Shortly afterwards, the men, as if by some unspoken sign, began to sing, to the tune of Auld Lang Syne, “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here” – a song of weariness and resignation that was sung in the trenches, and the source of that title.

Later in the morning, a group of around 20 men left Euston station, where they had gathered first thing, and took a train to Milton Keynes. Arriving, they marched briskly through the modernist boulevards of the new town, attracting bewildered glances. They paused in the market. A trader called out, “Don’t lean against that post, stand on parade!” Another man shuddered, and said, “Respect, respect. Let’s do the talking before we do the fighting.”

For volunteers, the process had started with an introduction to the historical background, followed by weeks of rehearsal. One evening in Bethnal Green, London, earlier this summer, 90 men gathered in a community hall, where Norris led them through a series of improvisation games. There was a lot of singing, shouting, shaking, stamping and sweating. “Be alive,” he told them. “You don’t have to ‘act’. The most compelling thing you can do is be alert, be present.”

Arthur Lefol, 33, a volunteer in the project who works as a graphic designer, said: “There’s an extraordinary feeling within the group. I feel as if I really would help the other people if I saw them in trouble. There’s a kind of instinct: it’s quite scary in way, I feel I could be a soldier, which is so far from who I actually am. I feel as if it could happen and this is what I would feel like if I did.”