One of the great tenets on which Commission policy had always rested was a strict demarcation between commemoration and military celebration. As the ‘sole authority’ involved in the control of monuments, some kind of ‘brokering’ role was unavoidable, but from the very first Kenyon had been clear that this was and should be the limit of their involvement. ‘The design of such memorials does not appear to come within the scope of the Commission,’ he wrote of the ‘battle memorials’ that the Army and Dominions would undoubtedly want to mark their ‘most notable triumphs’:
The site of these monuments will not usually compete with those required for cemeteries … ordinarily the battle memorials will be on high and conspicuous spots, while cemeteries will be in villages and folds of the ground which have the air of shelter and of rest appropriate to a place of burial. It will confuse and obliterate the ground idea our cemeteries are intended to embody, if it is attempted to make them serve the turn of battle memorials also.
Kenyon had been right about both the popular demand for public memorials and the proactive role of the Dominions, and in the November of 1919, Winston Churchill, the Secretary of State for War, circulated a memorandum to the Cabinet on the need for government action. In the months since the war, Churchill explained, individual Army units had taken steps to commemorate their own exploits, but if memorials were not simply to be limited to units who could afford them and ‘the dignity of the Imperial Government’ compromised by the Dominions and India it ‘should erect at the public expense general memorials to the Army’ on certain symbolic sites.
Things were seldom quite as easy as Churchill could make them sound, however, and beyond the creation of a National Battlefield Memorial Committee (NBMC) under the Earl of Midleton, six months of departmental rivalries, personal animosities and institutional jealousies had left everything more or less where it was. In the November of 1920, a small subcommittee of Midleton’s NBMC went out to inspect the battlefields, but it would no sooner decide on a suitable site for a memorial – Villers-Bretonneux, where the great German spring advance of 1918 was finally halted or Vimy Ridge – than it would discover that the Australians or Canadians had got in first or that some division had already built its own private memorial.
There was not just a problem with sites, but also potentially with a resurgence of the ‘Little Englander’ attitudes that had dogged Ware in his early days with the Mobile Ambulance Unit. During the negotiations in Paris in 1915 he had done all in his power to prevent Britain turning France into a monumental theme park, but any thought now that their old allies might not want ‘perpetual reminders’ of their indebtedness looming over them from every ridge on the Western Front seemed utterly lost in a surge of competitive national dignity he was helpless to stop.
The generals wanted their own ‘victories’ marked of course, newspaper magnates lobbied for ‘great upstanding monuments that will strike the popular imagination’; Churchill wanted the whole of Ypres kept as a ruin, others, more modestly, merely its great Cloth Hall – the only feelings, in fact, not consulted were French or Belgian but then, as the Midleton committee put it, what was the point of a monument on the Hindenburg Line that ‘only a very few French peasants’ would see? There was a rare cautionary voice from Lord Crawford, the new First Commissioner of Works – a hint to tread carefully in French cathedrals with plans for commemorative plaques, a suggestion that Parisians might not take kindly to a major British monument in the centre of their city – but it was again Ware who came to France and Belgium’s rescue.
The issue at stake was, as ever in these negotiations, one of jurisdiction and from a position of impotence Ware found himself on strong ground. Under the terms of an Anglo-Belgian agreement of 1919, the Commission had sole responsibility for licensing memorials in Belgium as well as France, and when in April 1921 the Office of Works made the mistake of directly notifying Brussels of their plans to rebuild the Menin Gate, Ware stepped in to warn them off his patch.
In the ensuing argument the Foreign Office came down on the Commission’s side, and subsequent discussions made it clear to both sides that the Midleton committee’s plans for battle memorials and the Commission’s scheme to commemorate the missing must either lead to duplication or convergence. On 8 July, the Secretary of State for War circulated a Cabinet memorandum suggesting a fusion of the two schemes, and just under a month later the Cabinet, as Lieutenant Colonel Chettle, the Commission’s Director of Records, ingenuously put it, ‘agreed to abandon all general memorials other than the Commission’s; to regard the National Battlefield Committee as “having completed its functions” … Thus, by general consent, a new and independent duty was laid on the Commission.’
‘Thou hast it now – King, Cawdor, Glamis’, and if there is no suggestion that he ‘play’d most foully for it’ – it is worth remembering that what Chettle is talking about here is not so much ‘convergence’ as ‘takeover’. In the official history of the Imperial War Graves Commission, Philip Longworth conjured up a picture of a passive and almost reluctant Commission, but everything we know about Ware and his methods makes a nonsense of the notion that the whole thing simply fell into his lap.
Given the previous bad blood between the Commission and the Office of Works, it had been as Colonel Lord Arthur Browne smoothly explained, ‘rather necessary to scotch this later serpent’, but it was more than simply another of Ware’s turf wars. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1915 he had spent his time negotiating for this very moment, and he had not successfully fought off opposition in England to see his vision of imperial unity fragment on the continent into 135 private divisional memorials and a plethora of separate Dominion monuments.
The Canadians had voted a million dollars for monuments, the Australians already had two under construction with another £100,000 budgeted for a general memorial at Villers-Bretonneux; South Africa had purchased Delville Wood on the Somme; the Indian government had allocated £10,000 for a memorial at Neuve-Chapelle; the Newfoundlanders were buying at Beaumont-Hamel; the Anzac forces were going their own way on the Gallipoli peninsula – the mounting list of monuments must have made strange reading for Ware, because in one sense this was the future he had seen and preached in his last book before the war. In The Worker and His Country he had pictured a day when the leadership of the Empire would pass from the ‘weary Titan’ to the younger nations of the Empire, but it had clearly never occurred to him that an Imperial Victory would have the centrifugal influence that it had, or that Third Ypres or Gallipoli might add a different note to the Dominions’ burgeoning sense of national pride and self-reliance.
If the idea of Empire was Ware’s motivation for moving in on Midleton’s territory, the clinching argument for a government anxious to placate public opinion and still save money was a financial one. The Commission had already budgeted £5 for every name to be commemorated on their own proposed memorials to the missing, and with ‘at least 200,000 missing in France and Belgium alone’, and a further £100,000 of Empire money earmarked for an Ypres memorial, the saving to the government, as the Secretary for War reminded the Cabinet in a memorandum drafted by Ware, was ‘considerable’.
In a serendipitous sort of way, too, the ‘merger’ fitted in conveniently with the Imperial War Graves Commission’s more limited plans for their memorials to the missing. In Kenyon’s original scheme the geographical link between the place of death and commemoration had been as close as humanly possible, but once the topographical link was snapped there was no argument for eighty-five memorial cemeteries that would not equally apply to the four great monuments that Midleton’s committee had finally proposed for the Western Front.
One of these – the memorial in Paris – died its predictable silent death, but the Midleton plans for monuments at Ypres and on the Marne and Somme offered the Commission not just a way forward but possibly a way out. There had been absolutely no thought in its early days of building on a monumental scale, but as the business of squaring war diaries and casualty lists proved not just difficult but insuperable, the attractions of a chain of a dozen great memorials to the missing stretching down the length of the Western Front from Nieuport in Belgium to Soissons near the Chemin des Dames were increasingly obvious.
Few who have stood beneath the great arch of the Menin Gate at eight on a winter’s night when the Last Post is sounded, or seen Lutyens’s astonishing Thiepval Memorial towering above the Ancre, could wish it different, but it still needs remembering what a volte face this was. For many families it had been hard enough to see their dead commandeered by the state, but this merger of the War Graves Commission and Battlefield Memorial Committee represented an abrogation of the fundamental principle on which the whole work of the Commission had been based.
‘It will confuse and obliterate the ground idea which our cemeteries are intended to embody’ – it is worth repeating Kenyon’s words – ‘if it is attempted to make them serve the turn of battle memorials also’, and that was precisely what the Commission was now planning to do. It could be fairly argued that the temper of the memorials they produced is hardly triumphalist, and yet if nothing else or worse they are a reminder that while the Commission served two masters, its first allegiance, as it had already demonstrated, was always to the Empire and not to the bereaved relative.
The Commission faced a formidable new task, with monuments to build across the globe. If they wanted a preview of the challenges ahead then their first involvement on British soil, with the Royal Navy, was probably the perfect introduction. Under its original Charter, the Commission had a duty to commemorate all the missing of the war, but it was a particularly tough irony that an organisation that had grown organically out of the peculiar culture and circumstances of the Western Front and the Army, should have to cut its new teeth on a service that proudly stood as one of the last great bastions between Victorian Britain and the kind of democratic sentiment that the Commission stood for.
When it came to the subject of memorials, or most other subjects for that matter, there seemed no middle ground for the Admiralty between lordly indifference and a confident assumption that they could do what and where they wanted. In the immediate aftermath of war there had been only the vaguest idea of any commemorative monument at the Admiralty, and yet within the year they had swung from one extreme to another, coolly proposing to an un-amused King that the Army’s Duke of York should be replaced on his London column by Britannia, before making moves to appropriate the whole north side of Trafalgar Square. ‘The [Naval Memorials] Committee … visited Trafalgar Square’ – Admiralty minutes beautifully capture the tone of their deliberations,
The general opinion was that the ideal site in the Square for a Naval Memorial would be that occupied by General Gordon’s statue, but that site against the North parapet of the Square … was practicable and had much to recommend it. The First Lord repeated to the Committee his view that they were inclined to under-estimate the indignation which was invariably aroused by any proposal to move an existing statue from a desirable site, adding that the partisans of General Gordon might be expected to prove formidable.
With their tradition of burial at sea, and a resolutely unsentimental world vision, the Admiralty were no more sensitive to the claims of the missing than they were to General Gordon’s, and they had moved as slowly as possible to meet their obligations. The War Graves Commission had first tried to prod them into action as early as June 1919, but it was another eighteen months of internal dithering and external prompting before they were ready to come back to the Commission with their own inimitably unimaginative solution to the problem.
It was not possible to commemorate the dead of Jutland, say, on the site of the battle – the North Sea was hardly Navarino harbour – and as it made no sense to site a memorial on the nearest landfall on the Danish coast, the Naval Memorials Committee had finally decided on three identical monuments at the three principal manning ports. There were still other plans in the air for a general naval memorial in London, but with Trafalgar Square blocked by the wretched Gordon et al., and an alternative site on the Thames Embankment filched from under their noses by the submariners, it would in the end be these three monuments of Sir Robert Lorimer’s at Chatham, Portsmouth and Plymouth – giant obelisks, with lions couchant at each corner and surmounted by an allegorical confection of globe and winds – that became the chief memorials to the Royal Navy’s contribution to victory.
They are odd monuments, impressive enough from a distance, but ugly in detail and cold and predictably unlovable. The Admiralty had never wholly embraced a commemoration that was alien to all their traditions, and this was reflected in Lorimer’s obelisks – naval monuments of a resolutely old-fashioned kind, designed as leading marks for ships at sea, official and establishment monuments to a service that had always, historically, been a world within a world and, quite rightly, harboured a suspicion that the rest of the nation did not quite see what it had done to win the war.
Ware hated working with the Admiralty – the idea of them being involved in anything ‘fills me with dismay’ he complained – and it was not as if the Navy was the only problem when it came to putting up memorials on home soil. It can sometimes seem, in fact, as if post-war Britain was determined to get its own back for the Commission’s autocratic high-handedness, determined to avenge its impotence overseas in a domestic campaign of obstruction, snobbery, entrenched interests and petty jealousies that has effectively robbed England of a single First World War Commission memorial (the Cenotaph would not be the Commission’s work) of any real distinction.
There were again the usual suspects – the Treasury, the Office of Works, the RIBA – but there were also the Royal Parks, the London County Council, the rivalries between local and national government, and the Royal Fine Arts Commission, to remind Ware what an extraordinarily free hand the Commission actually enjoyed in its work abroad. There could be practical and political difficulties of a different sort of course, but if they wanted to commandeer the high ground over the Ancre, or erect a Gallipoli memorial that would dominate the sea lanes of the Eastern Mediterranean, there was no Fine Arts Commission to tell them – as they told Lutyens when they thwarted his plans for a mercantile marine memorial on the river side of Temple Gardens – that it would interfere with Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s ‘great scheme of decoration’ along the Embankment.fn13
For all the political and religious challenges of building in Iraq or Jerusalem in fact, or the desire of the Ypres citizens to reclaim their city, the real cultural battle-line was between the new, democratic Britain enshrined in the Commission’s principles and those thousands of families who had spoken so movingly in Lady Cecil’s petition to the Prince of Wales. In the great debate in the House of Commons, the Commission had effectively won its battle over its central policies, but if the country’s parish churches and their stained-glass windows, kneeling Galahads and weeping angels are any guide, there remained a great swath of the British public stubbornly resistant to the vision of secularised, democratic uniformity that was unfolding on the other side of the Channel.
There is a danger here, however, of politicising something that had nothing to do with politics, and Ware’s old habit of demonising his opponents has seeped into the way the Commission has presented its story. In his official history, Philip Longworth wrote censoriously of a reactionary rump that ‘unfortunately did not understand’ the new spirit of democracy, and yet a simpler and more profoundly human explanation for their opposition is that a deeply traumatised, grieving society needed far more than the Commission was prepared to give it.
They certainly wanted their own individual memorials, their crosses and their freedom of choice, but more importantly than that they wanted and needed some tangible connection with their dead that the Commission policies on repatriation denied them. They wanted a focus for their mourning. One wanted to see his son’s grave beside the pathway into his church and know that one day he would be buried with him. Will Gladstone’s mother wanted to have her son in the family plot surrounded by the graves of everyone who had ever cared for him. Australian parents wanted tracings of their sons’ names from memorials. Others wanted the ‘sacred earth’ of Gallipoli brought home. And many wanted, if they could have nothing else, the temporary crosses that had once stood over the graves of their sons and husbands and brothers. ‘May I suggest something,’ asked one vicar, the Reverend F. R. Marriot of Woodstock, whose boy had been killed with the 1st Cameronians and buried at Inverness Copse before being moved to Hooge Crater Cemetery near Ypres,
In this village of 500 people, we lost about 30 of our men. I feel sure that many of the parents etc. would like to have the Crosses.
I wonder if it could be arranged for the representatives of the Missing Men never traced and never buried to have similar crosses if they made application?
They have had a heavier burden even than us who were plainly told of the death of our lads.
The growth of spiritualism during and after the war, the burgeoning belief in paranormal phenomena, the apparitions and visions, the unearthly photographs of ‘armies of the dead’ hovering over the living in Whitehall, the crowds of thousands who queued across Australia to see the artist Will Longstaff’s ghost army in ‘Menin Gate at Midnight’ all testify to a yearning that the Commission had done nothing to ease. ‘Oh, the road to En-dor is the oldest road,’ Kipling wrote of the parents’ and wives’ bitter search for those who had gone,
And the craziest road of all!
Straight it runs to the Witch’s abode,
As it did in the days of Saul,
And nothing has changed of the sorrow in store
For such as go down on the road to En-dor!
There were longings here that neither the War Graves Commission nor any other secular body could satisfy, but that is only part of the case. There was plainly little that could be done to ease the appalling ache of families who had no grave, and yet even men like Marriot who had been notified of his lad’s death and grave were necessarily excluded from any share or say in the rituals that form an integral, healing part of grieving.
It must have made it all the more bitter, too, that families would only have to look across to the continent or to America to see their own aspirations fulfilled. At the end of the war the French authorities had imposed a total ban on exhumations within the Zone rouge where the fighting had taken place, but a nationwide campaign for repatriation and a booming trade in illicit exhumations had made it unworkable and in the end something like 300,000 bodies would be returned to their villages and towns across France.
The contrast between Britain and France was not simply a matter of finance or logistics either – the American government had pledged to honour the wishes of every family and shipped home sixty per cent of its dead – and paradoxically it was precisely that class that the Commission had set out to honour who would suffer most. It was one thing for Lady Violet Cecil to say that the soil of France would be ‘dearer’ to her ‘because my child is buried there’ – she was able to visit his grave every year between 1919 and 1940 – but the irony of the Commission’s obsession with ‘equality’ was that a policy designed to prevent the rich from bringing home their dead now made sure that the poor never got to mourn at their graves. During the 1920s and ’30s there was no falling off in the number of visitors to Commission cemeteries, but for most relatives – and virtually all from the Empire – a photograph and, perhaps, a wreath laid on Armistice Day by one of the more (or less) honest businesses that sprang up in Belgium and France to cater for the trade, were as close as they were ever going to get to their sons’ or husbands’ graves.
It was not enough – it was never going to be enough – but to be fair to the Commission, probably no one realised quite how inadequate it was until the extraordinary reaction to the unveiling of the model for Lutyens’s Cenotaph a year after the war. The original design for the monument had been made up in wood and plaster for the celebrations to mark the signing of peace in 1919, and then after the official ceremonies were over and the troops of the fourteen Allied nations had silently filed past ‘something’– as Gavin Stamp put it – ‘unexpected happened’:
the temporary structure became sacred, ‘the people’s shrine’. Tens of thousands of women, grieving for husbands or boyfriends or sons who were buried abroad or who had simply disappeared, found that Lutyens had created a visible focus for mourning. A mountain of flowers and wreaths piled up around it, and a million people made pilgrimage.
The slender, tapering pylon shows Lutyens at his most chillingly assured – elegant, austere, intellectual, its deceptive simplicity the simplicity of refined mathematics – but if ever a memorial was sanctified by association, it is the Cenotaph. In his brilliant and partisan celebration of Lutyens’s war work, Stamp evoked the immense power of architecture to articulate emotion and loss, and yet the inchoate outpouring of feeling that his empty tomb unleashed had less to do with the subtle use of entasis or classical pedigree than with an overwhelming need to find some centre in Britain for a communal act of remembrance and mourning.
This should not be surprising because the ‘stiff upper lip’ is one of the great fictions of British history – like rigor mortis a passing phase in the death of Empire – and the women and children who left their wreaths at the Cenotaph were in some respects truer to the national character than the Edwardian products of a setting Empire who made up the Commission. In his speech in Parliament, Burdett-Coutts had spoken movingly of the ‘Roman’ dignity and fortitude of Britain’s mothers during the war, but in villages, towns, schools, factories, railway stations, clubs, colleges and charitable organisations across Britain, men and women were coming together in acts of communal mourning, remembrance, commemoration and support that had little to do with the stonier virtues of ancient Rome.
It was ‘the human sentiment of millions’, as Lutyens put it, that forced the government to turn his temporary structure in Whitehall into a permanent national memorial and it was that same sentiment that found its myriad expression in the 54,000 war memorials that would be built across the country. Many of these were erected by families to individuals or by regiments to their dead comrades, but the overwhelming majority were civic or communal in character and raised by precisely the kind of committees of local dignitaries, councillors and clergymen who never had a voice when Kenyon and the Commission were canvassing opinion.
They erected cairns, columns, crenellated towers, crosses, memorial gates and pergolas, they built cottage hospitals, pavilions, village halls, gardens and fountains, they commissioned statues and dedicated plaques – everything, in short, that Kenyon had excluded – but the keynote is always, in the most local sense of the word, community. If Ware had been asked what the men in the Commission’s cemeteries had died for, he would unhesitatingly have said ‘the British Empire’. If the same question had been put to villagers across Britain the conventional answer of ‘King and Country’ that is inscribed on a thousand local memorials would have masked a deeper and more intimate sense of debt and belonging.
The villagers of Lydford on Dartmoor were no more thinking of Empire when they commemorated the eighteen-years-old Wilfie Fry, dead from pneumonia before he could even leave the country, than were those of Fulstow, Lincolnshire, who preferred to have no memorial to one that excluded the executed deserter, Charles Kirman. In many final letters from the front, young subalterns would express their hopes that their school or college would be proud; the village memorial is the other side of the same coin, a mutual recognition of obligation and relationships that is of a different kind from the institutional commemoration of the war cemeteries or the official language of imperial mourning.
There is no engine of social change to match war, however, and while Britain was commemorating a disappearing world of tight-knit communities, it was utterly appropriate that the first monuments to the new spirit should rise above the battlefields where it was forged.fn14 ‘In the autumn of 1919 I was sent out to Ypres by the War Office,’ Blomfield wrote, recalling the origins and long gestation of the most famous of these,
to report on sites for the great memorial to be built at Ypres to commemorate all those who had died in the war on the Ypres salient and had no known graves … After a careful examination … I recommended the site of the Menin Gate on the east side of Ypres … because it was the way by which most of our men had gone out to fight, and also because I saw a great opportunity here in the reflection of a building in the moat which is here about 100 feet wide.
The site was nothing but ‘a great ragged gap’ in the ramparts when Blomfield first saw it in 1919 and for ‘some little time’ nothing more was done. Blomfield later learned that there had been talk behind his back of an open competition for the design, but the problem could only be dealt with by someone ‘who had studied on the spot … and was familiar with all the problems’. And ‘I’, he continued with inimitable pomposity,
was in fact the only person who fulfilled these conditions … I should have taken it hardly had the design been taken out of my hands and … such a course would not have been in the public interest. Fortunately, Ware and his colleagues on the Commission were men of sagacity and abundant common sense, who did not allow themselves to be paralysed by red tape, and, finding that they had the power to undertake the memorial themselves, they took the matter into their own hands and in 1922 instructed me to proceed with my designs.
The challenge presented by the site was, as Blomfield was at great pains to point out, ‘a very difficult one’, and made more so by the irritating determination of the citizens of Ypres to behave as if they owned their city. ‘I tried hard to get the building line on the north side of the road leading from the Cloth Hall to the Menin Gate set back a few feet, in order to get a vista through from the Cloth Hall,’ Blomfield later grumbled,
but plans had already been got out for the building, and the citizens of Ypres were as tenacious of their sites as the citizens of London had been when Wren made his splendid plans for rebuilding London after the Great Fire. I had also hoped to be able to form a spacious ‘Place’ on the east side … but here also I was beaten by the indomitable proprietary instincts of the Belgians.
If it wasn’t the Belgians, it was the Belgian subsoil: he had been promised a solid bed of clay running from Ypres to Tournai and found running sand instead, but with the aid of a two-feet-thick concrete raft sunk on to massive concrete piles 36 feet long and 16 feet square he was ready to build. The challenge for Blomfield was to produce a design that would simultaneously celebrate Britain’s victory and commemorate its missing, and for inspiration he turned to a long and vaulted tunnel-like gateway he had once seen in the seventeenth-century fortifications of Nancy. The area covered by his monument was a massive 104 feet wide, 133 feet deep, and, somehow, on its 69-feet-high walls, he
had to find space for a vast number of names, estimated at first at some 40,000, but increased as we went on to about 58,600 …
Between the inner and outer arches I designed a Hall of Memory, 115ft. long by 66ft. wide, covered in by a half-elliptical coffered concrete vault, with a span of 66ft. A suggestion was made to me by Webb that I should deal with the archway by means of columns along the curb of the footpaths on either side of the road in the manner of the Mall Archway, but this would have ruined the design. The columns would have upset the scale; they would have been in the way, and it would have been impossible to light the inscription panels, an absolutely vital condition of the design.
It would probably have been enough for Blomfield that the proposal had come from Aston Webb to reject it, but he also had a deeply English suspicion of what foreigners would get up to if you did not watch them like a hawk. The Commission had already warned Lorimer against using any metals on his Salonika memorial that the ‘inhabitants’ could steal, and behind Blomfield’s insistence on an uninterrupted single span lay a similar fear that the Belgians would turn the whole thing into a giant pissoir if he gave them half a chance. ‘Having regard to the peculiar habits of the Belgian populace,’ he replied to Webb and the Commission’s Menin Gate subcommittee’s proposed alterations, ‘it is desirable that there should be as few points as possible behind which, or against which, people can take cover.’
There were, though, good architectural reasons for Blomfield’s preference and there is nowhere that can stop the heart quite like the Menin Gate. In his original plans he had envisaged a long brick vault above the road out of Ypres, but in the end engineering triumphed over prettiness and concrete over brick to produce the great, coffered vault we now have, with its three circular ‘eyes’ let into the crown to shed a calm, even light over the endless columns of the missing dead inscribed on the walls below. ‘It is a memorial … offered not to victory but to the dead – the victims,’ Stefan Zweig, the Austrian novelist, wrote of the result,
Here there is no image of the King, no mention of victories, no genuflection to generals of genius, no prattle about Archdukes and princes: only a laconic, noble inscription – Pro Rege Pro Patria. In its really Roman simplicity this monument to the six and fifty thousand is more impressive than any triumphal arch or monument to victory that I have ever seen.
The response might have been scripted by Blomfield and was gratefully quoted by him – it was his one building in which he would have changed nothing, he later said – and to his great credit there is nothing in that ‘Hall of Memory’ to distract attention from the impact of those names. Above the eastern arch a recumbent lion offers a reminder that this is also a battle memorial, but beneath the vault and along the flanking loggias on each side of the gate there are only the names – 54,986 of them in all, engraved by unit, rank and alphabet into panels of Portland stone – to bring home the sheer scale of slaughter recorded in Kipling’s measured inscription: ‘HERE ARE RECORDED NAMES OF OFFICERS AND MEN WHO FELL IN THE YPRES SALIENT BUT TO WHOM THE FORTUNE OF WAR DENIED THE KNOWN AND HONOURED BURIAL GIVEN TO THEIR COMRADES IN DEATH.’
The memorial was not to everyone’s taste – ‘Was ever an Immolation so belied/ As these intolerably nameless names?’ Sassoon famously demanded – but in his understandable bitterness he had missed the way in which Blomfield’s ‘sepulchre of crime’ works on the imagination. The slight air of imperial afflatus might offer its hostages, but is there anywhere that exposes the conventional piety of the text inscribed on Lutyens’s Stone of Remembrance – ‘Their Name Liveth for Evermore’ – quite so vividly as the Menin Gate? Anything that so numbingly emphasises the anonymity of an army its politicians and generals sacrificed with such an utter indifference to human values or scale as those neatly lettered and carefully costed columns of ‘intolerably nameless names’?
Craig, Crawford, Cresswell, Cripps, Cross – try as you will, concentrate as hard as you like, it is impossible to scan those columns of the missing without losing all meaning or individuality in a hypnotic repetition of names that, when rank, initials and regiment have rendered their all, have only their numbers to differentiate them. ‘For instance,’ a harassed Chettle wrote in a minute that might stand as a kind of clerical metaphor for the industrialisation of death on the Western Front,
the name of 192 Pte H. Robertson, 6/ Royal West Kents, would appear on the ‘Missing’ memorial at Bethune, and exactly the same particulars (in respect of 1576 Pte H. Robertson, 7/ Royal West Kents) would appear on a grave at Chauny on the Aisne. Pts 14193 H. Robertson, of the 12/East Yorks, might read his own name, initials, rank and regiment on the grave of 733 Pte H. Robertson, 5/East Yorks … Pte. H. Robertson, 21st Northumberland Fusiliers, who survived the war, would be equally [surprised to find himself] commemorated on the headstone of Pte. H. Robertson of the same Battalion, at Dozinghem British Cemetery.
‘He is not missing, he is here,’ Field Marshal Lord Plumer famously told a great crowd and a still vaster radio audience at the unveiling of the gate in July 1927. But for Ware there was one significant omission clouding its success. In the early stages of planning for the memorial, the Dominions had been reluctant to participate in a joint imperial monument, and although Ware had managed to bring round the Australians, New Zealand’s High Commissioner, Sir James Allen, had stood firm, refusing to budge on either the original principle of commemoration in the nearest cemetery to the place of death or the strict separation of memorial and battle monument.
If in one sense New Zealand was the only country that could ‘afford’ to take this approach – its soldiers had fought as a cohesive entity throughout the war and its units knew where their missing were lost – Sir James Allen’s austere adherence to principle was a reminder that something had been lost as well as gained when the War Graves Commission and the Midleton committee joined forces. In the end the Menin Gate had only room for the names of those killed in the Salient up until August 1917, but the separate New Zealand memorials at Messines Ridge, Buttes New British Cemetery and – 1,176 names among another 34,887 British and Empire missing – at Baker’s Tyne Cot, remain haunting reminders of a road the Commission did not take and of early cracks in Ware’s imperial edifice.fn15
For all the dilution of the original ambitions, however, not to mention other important Commission memorials on the Western Front, like Soissons, La Ferté, Truelove’s curiously academic cloisters at Le Touret, there is only one monument that can rival and outdo Blomfield’s Menin Gate in its impact, and that is the great masterpiece that Lutyens raised to the Missing of the Somme above the River Ancre at Thiepval. In one sense, of course, the difference between the two is simply the difference between competence and genius, and yet it still beggars belief that two memorials, so different in their architectural language, emotional feel, and in what they say about war, could have sprung from the same brief and been conceived at more or less the same time.
If there was not the evidence of Lutyens’s first sketch, in fact, drawn in 1923, it would be tempting to think that one memorial stands at the end of one phase of remembrance and the other at the beginning of a second. In the years while Blomfield was overseeing his gateway it was still possible to see and think of Haig as the Architect of Victory, but within a year of the dedication of the Menin Gate in 1927, Haig and his reputation were dead and a spate of revisionist texts – All Quiet on the Western Front, Journey’s End, Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man, Undertones of War – had created a permanent sea-change in the way the war would be remembered that Lutyens had in some way already anticipated.fn16
In some respects Lutyens was fortunate with his timing, lucky that Thiepval would be almost the last of the great Commission ‘Memorials to the Missing’, but it was still a long and fraught passage before his first ideas could be realised. The design had originally been intended for a monument straddling a road at St Quentin, but when a growing disquiet about the number and size of foreign monuments on French soil led to a scaling down of Commission plans, St Quentin was scrapped and Lutyens’s design transferred to the ridge over the Ancre and dedicated to the Missing of the Somme.
It was an inspired choice of site, because for the army of France, the Somme had the same significance that Ypres had for the army of Belgium, and Thiepval the same resonance as Passchendaele. The British Army had opened its attack there on the morning of 1 July 1916, and more than three months of heat and rain and blood and mud and shells and untold casualties later it was still in enemy hands, and the long, shattered, corpse-strewn slopes leading up to the heavily fortified German positions had become a landscape that would haunt the imagination of a whole generation.
‘One only has to glance at the hill on which they stand,’ John Masefield wrote a year after the Schwaben Redoubt had finally fallen into British hands after a last spasm of vicious close fighting,
to see that it has been more burnt and shell-smitten than most parts of the line. It is as though the fight here had been more than to the death, to beyond death, to the bones and skeleton of the corpse which was as yet unkillable … Blasted, dead, pitted stumps of trees, with their bark in rags, grow here and there in a collection of vast holes, ten feet deep and fifteen feet across, with filthy water in them. There is nothing left of the church; a long reddish mound of brick, that seems mainly powder round a core of cement still marks where the chateau stood.
It was here, on a spur of high ground above the Ancre at the northern end of the old British lines, that Lutyens created his masterpiece. He had initially chosen a site on the brow of the hill, but for reasons of economy he was forced to compromise, and his monument rises from a platform near the summit of the hill, a towering ‘pyramid’ of interrelated arches, with each ascending arch, opening on alternate axes, springing from the keystone height of the arch below to create a structure of massive, lowering solidity and improbable, airy mobility.
In terms of its utilitarian function – a structure that on its outer walls and along its interconnecting catacombs of arched tunnels has to carry the names of 72,085 missing men – it is a brilliant solution, but here, unlike the Menin Gate, it is the monument and not the names that resonate in the imagination. In the development of Lutyens’s work, Thiepval clearly stands as a stepping stone towards the designs for Liverpool cathedral, but as an abstract expression of the pity and horror of war, of emptiness and hope, of the triumph of the spirit and the crushing of all humanity – of all the polar opposites of emotion and interpretation that people have brought to it – it is this or any other war’s ultimate indictment and commemoration.
For a generation that had gone through the physical and mental degradation of the trenches – for a soldier like the artist and writer Herbert Read – the appeal of abstraction is obvious, but there was nothing escapist about Lutyens’s abstract design for Thiepval. In the years after the Boer War he had happily adapted the forms of classicism for his Rand war memorial, but here on the Thiepval ridge, faced by the unimaginable tragedy of the Somme, he stripped them down to their bare bones, paring away all the language and associations of their imperial heritage that Sassoon had so hated on the Menin Gate to leave a structure of pure form, intimidating in its size, admonitory in its grandeur and implacable in its intelligence.
From one aspect it is all air and emptiness, from another solid mass. If no two people see it the same or see it precisely the same way twice that is in part because it is so ambiguous in its message. As one approaches from the east along the main axis, the immense central arch opens out on to the Picardy sky, and then as one moves around towards the diagonal the whole structure closes in on itself, receding in ascending planes and spiralling upwards with its 70,000 dead, in a kind of architectural ‘rapture’, before opening out again on to what in 1932, was still the bare, desolate ridge of Blunden’s nightmares. ‘Its high arch screams … [he is] an enormous monster … the open mouth of death,’ the American historian Vincent Scully wrote of it. ‘He is emptiness, meaninglessness, insatiable war and death. There is no victory for the dead. All that courage wasted … It is not to be borne.’
This might be no more than anthropomorphising ‘histrionics’, as Gavin Stamp insisted, but there was something about the memorial that disturbed even Ware. From the earliest days of the Commission he had got on far better with Lutyens than with either Baker or Blomfield, and so it is all the more curious that he should be so reticent about the one monument of genius that the Commission built. ‘Many preferred to look forward rather than back,’ Stamp wrote of the puzzling conspiracy of silence that met the memorial when it was finally unveiled by the Prince of Wales on 1 August 1932, sixteen years and one month to the day after the greatest single disaster in British military history,
Even so it is hard to understand why even in The Immortal Heritage, Fabian Ware’s own account of the work and policy of the Imperial War Graves Commission published in 1937, while there are photographs of the Menin Gate, Vimy Ridge, the Ulster tower and many other memorials (including a perspective of Lutyens’s as yet unfinished Australian memorial) there is no illustration depicting the sublime grandeur of the Thiepval arch.
With anyone but Ware one might hazard compassion fatigue – the Chatham, Plymouth and Portsmouth dedications in 1924, the Menin Gate, Tyne Cot and Neuve-Chapelle in ’27, the Merchant Navy, Nieuport, Soissons and La Ferté-sous-Jouarre all in ’28, Le Touret in ’30, he had been at them all – but in the simple fact that Thiepval can no more be adequately photographed than described lies perhaps the key to his silence. In the early years of the Commission’s history, modesty and restraint had been the ambition and hallmarks of all their work, but whatever else might be said of Lutyens’s vast, overpowering memorial to the Missing of the Somme no one could ever call it either restrained or modest or square it with the terms of reference Kenyon had mapped out for the Commission in 1918.
It is not simply a matter of size or position – though at 150 feet high and 185 feet wide by 135 feet deep and visible across the length of the Somme battlefields, that has a lot to do with it – but that it says something about war and commemoration that directly challenges everything that the Commission had done up until this point. There are certainly days in winter, during the brief post-Armistice Day hiatus in the battlefield tourists’ year, when the cemeteries of the Ypres Salient or the urban sprawl of northern France can be grim places, but the overwhelming impression of all those Commission cemeteries constructed in the 1920s is one of pride and gratitude without mawkishness that is exactly what Kenyon and Ware had aimed for when they set out their guidelines.
‘I wanted a massive lion,’ Blomfield wrote of Reid Dick’s recumbent creature surmounting the Menin Gate, ‘not fierce and truculent, but patient and enduring, looking outward as a symbol of the latent strength and heroism of our race’, and the cemeteries insist on the same reading of national character and history. The great fear of the anti-Commission lobby in those early debates was that they would be too ‘militarist’ in their uniformity, but if this is militarism, the cemeteries proclaim, it is a very British kind of militarism, a militarism of knapped flints and Jekyll-inspired borders and poignant inscriptions and regimental crests and modest neo-classical pavilions that is as far away from ‘Prussian-ism’ and Prussian aggression as it is from the desperate rows of French crosses or fascist grandiloquence.
There is nothing more British than grass lawns and herbaceous borders, the Commission’s horticultural advisor, Arthur Hill, volunteered, and even in the care and beauty of the planting of the war cemeteries Ware saw a moral and cultural significance. ‘Let us pass on to the west of the town’ – he was speaking of Lorimer’s cemetery outside Damascus in an Armistice Day address to the Empire that perfectly encapsulates this sense of ‘Britishness’,
and there amidst a grove of trees, half concealed, not vaunting itself, we find a British War Cemetery with its six hundred graves – and two smaller Indian cemeteries near it. Rows of simple white headstones bearing the badges of historic British regiments, or the newer heraldry of the Dominions, flowers and shrubs and trees – a peaceful garden, the architectural design purely British … solid and foursquare and yet gentle, proclaiming the equality of all beneath the Cross which is graven on the monument facing the gateway. Could the strength and grandeur of the British Commonwealth be displayed to these people of the East in any way more in harmony with the spirit of our heroic dead, and could its character be more nobly expressed than by the constant loving care of those simple graves, thousands of miles from their homes and yet watched over as sacred possessions of the common crown?
The ‘typical’ Commission cemetery does not exist – on the one hand there are small, hidden ‘extension cemeteries’ like Oulchy-le-Château, red roses ablaze in mid-June, or pastoral cemeteries like Vendresse set in sloping fields of poppies, and on the other great base cemeteries such as Etaples – but they virtually all share this same unmistakable identity. ‘From the great wall or by the cross on the pyramid on a clear day,’ wrote John Dove, the editor of the imperialist The Round Table, when he visited Baker’s Tyne Cot near Passchendaele – in name, power of association, and organic growth, perhaps the most quintessentially English of the cemeteries,
and looking out, as the Germans used to do, westwards, a faint gleam will catch your eye far away to the north. It is the narrow sea, which, thanks to the men who lie there, the Germans never reached; and beyond lies England … If there are tears in things, it is here.
Nothing made a ‘deeper impression on old soldiers’ than Tyne Cot, P. B. Clayton of Toc H told Baker, and that was because England was not just the other side of that far away gleam to the north, but right there beneath the slopes of Passchendaele. ‘It was laid out around the graves of those buried on the field of battle, around one of the biggest of the German blockhouses that the Northumberland Regiments had called Tyne Cot,’ Baker explained,
I was told that the King, when he was there, said that this blockhouse should remain … On the pyramid [built over with stone to hide the concrete] we set up on high the War Cross; thus from the higher ground … the cross can be seen against the historic battlefields of the Salient, Ypres, and far and wide beyond … Tynecot, when the trees have grown, should have the appearance of a huge, well-ordered English churchyard with its yews and cedars behind the great flint wall, reminiscent of the walls of the precinct at Winchester, and its oak and poplars bordering the cemetery framing the distant view.
Churchyard, yews, oaks, flint walls, cloisters, Winchester – the ancient capital of England – it might be a checklist for a certain, deeply evocative kind of Englishness, but the most telling detail lies in Baker’s treatment of the blockhouse. The structure was only left there in the first place because George V had said that it had to stay, but it is characteristic of Baker’s whole treatment of the cemeteries that the one relic in the landscape that might bring home the brute ugliness of war – the one thing, too, that because of its ugliness had reminded the North-East troops of home and the ugliness of their lives and their England – had to be discreetly disguised. ‘[The King] expressed a natural sentiment,’ Baker explained, architect and devoted imperialist momentarily at odds with each other,
but in order to avoid the repellent sight of a mass of concrete in the midst of hallowed peace, which we wished to emphasize, a pyramid of stepped stone was built above it, leaving a small square of the concrete exposed in the stonework; and on this we inscribed in large bronze letters these words, suggested by Kipling, ‘This was the Tynecot Blockhouse.’
That ‘was’ says it all, but in spite of the evasions, Tyne Cot is deeply moving in precisely the way Baker wanted and with his memorials to the Indian missing at Neuve-Chapelle and to the South Africans at Delville Wood he works the same magic of dissolving harsh realities in the romance of his architecture. In the hands of anyone else there could feel something saccharine or even fake in these memorials of Baker’s, but the quality that invariably keeps them on the right side of pastiche or sentimentality is the utter sincerity and lack of cynicism that he brought to the great imperial project of commemoration.
No one but Baker could have crowned his South African monument with statues of Castor and Pollux to symbolise the peaceful union of the English and Afrikaner races and got away with it, and no one but Baker, in the decade of Amritsar, could have so promiscuously appropriated the symbolism and architecture of India to the cause of Empire. ‘It consists of a circular space of green turf,’ he wrote of the Neuve-Chapelle memorial, a hallowed space of ‘reverence and eternal peace’ enclosed at one end by a solid screen inscribed with the names of the Indian dead, and at the other by a pierced wall,
carved with symbols like the railings of Buddha’s Shrine at Budh Guaya and those surrounding the great Sanchi topes – low domes preserving the sacred relics of Buddha. In the centre … is an Asoka Column raised on high and guarded on either side by sculptured tigers. The entrance is through a small domed chattri with pierced red-stone grilles or jaalis … another similar chattri opposite forms a shelter.
In the mean, flat, north French countryside in which it is set, Neuve-Chapelle is about as congruous as the Prince Regent’s Pavilion at Brighton, but a man who could build Greek and Romanesque in South Africa and Cape Dutch summer houses on the Somme was perfectly at ease with that. ‘Oaks were planted in two rows on either side of the avenue,’ he wrote of the Delville Wood memorial, unthinkingly certain of the permanence of what he was doing and of the Empire he was serving,
reared from the acorns off the old trees which the early Dutch settlers had planted in Capetown, grown from seeds brought from Holland. In the centre [of the monument] and pathway … an archway was built with a flat dome on which is set a bronze horse. The idea was suggested to me by Macaulay’s poem on the Battle of Lake Regullus, telling how Great Twin Brethren appeared from the skies to fight in the ranks of Rome. Might it not seem miraculous, as the coming of the mythical Brethren did to the Romans, that Dutch and English, such recent enemies should have come overseas to fight for the British Commonwealth against a common foe?
Britain and Rome – Britain the ‘New Rome’, the old trope reborn in a shattered French wood, and nothing for Baker could be more Roman than the blessings of the gods on the Empire’s newest shrine. ‘The unveiling ceremony was a dramatic occasion,’ Baker recalled, with a blackening sky suddenly ‘bursting’ into a torrent of rain and hail as the visitors made their way up the long vista from the cemetery to the monument,
But as they reached the archway the storm disappeared as if by magic, and the sun from a blue sky shone down on General Hertzog, as he spoke, and on Mrs Louis Botha as she unveiled the bronze Twin Brethren above, symbols of the comradeship in arms of the two South African races.
This sense of destiny, the Churchillian perspective on history – and with it the faith and imagination to build for the future – are not just Baker’s prerogative, however, but one of the most remarkable aspects of the Commission’s work. The South African monument in Delville Wood now sits at the end of a long, beautiful oak avenue against a backcloth of dappled greens, but when Baker began there was nothing there – only one hornbeam survived from the wood in which there were 2,500 South African casualties in July 1916 – and it was the same story wherever along the old front that the Commission built.
Order out of chaos, beauty from ugliness – Kipling’s bereaved ‘pilgrim’ in ‘The Gardener’ stands in a bewildering forest of black crosses until she sees at the far end of the half-built cemetery the first of the clean, lucid lines of white headstones – it was a compelling vision and one few could resist. In some of his early cemeteries Charles Holden created a raw and desolate response to the carnage of war, but even Holden – ‘nine-tenths Quaker’ and the most disinterested, the most principled of the Principal Architects – softened in his style, moving from the uncompromising bleakness and horizontal gravestones of Wimereux to the classical refinement of Buttes New British Cemetery and Messines Ridge, mellowed by the passage of time, by the growing distance from the war, or simply converted himself by the note of pathos and proud patriotism that was the hallmark of the Commission’s work in the 1920s.
It is revealing to compare the Commission’s airy cemeteries with their darkly sylvan German counterparts, because while German sites offer nothing more than a muffled and apologetic echo of the Teutonic spirit, the Britain that went to war to save Plucky Little Belgium and sacrificed a generation in the cause of freedom, could unashamedly bask in its disciplined rows of headstones and crusader swords. ‘What I wanted to do in designing this cross was to make it abstract and impersonal,’ Blomfield wrote of his ubiquitous Cross of Sacrifice – in its moral smugness perhaps the one genuinely false note that the Commission struck,fn17
to free it from any association with any particular style, and, above all, to keep clear of any of the sentimentalities of Gothic. This was a man’s war far too terrible for any fripperies, and I hoped to get within range of the infinite in this symbol of those who had gone out to die. The bronze sword is there to identify it with war – and also there kept ringing in my head that text, ‘I came not to bring peace but a sword.’
It would be hard to imagine in a Commission cemetery Käthe Kollwitz’s great granite memorial at Vladslo Military Cemetery in Belgium, where her ‘Mourning Parents’, arms folded across their chests, the mother’s head bowed, kneel at their son Peter’s grave in a prayer for his forgiveness, because the generation that sent Britain’s ‘first holocaust of public schoolboys’ to their deaths in 1914 were not asking for forgiveness. ‘If any question why we died,/ Tell them because our fathers lied,’ Kipling wrote, but what he meant by that was something different from what Käthe Kollwitz’s kneeling figures mean. There are ambiguities about Kipling’s epitaph, but they are ambiguities only on the page. The author, who had done more than anyone to glamorise the brutality of war for the men and boys who filled the cemeteries, was not repenting or recanting. His anger was for the politicians who had not listened and left Britain unprepared, for the unions who had opposed conscription, and for those whose lies, complacency and cowardice had meant – the bitterness is still shocking – that his son John died ‘at eighteen instead of between nineteen and twenty, as he ought’.
This is what makes Thiepval so different. ‘His loss,’ John Kipling’s mother wrote of her dead son, ‘though so great a thing to us, is a little thing set against this greater.’ ‘This greater’ was the general sacrifice honoured in the Commission’s cemeteries but no one could look at the great gaping arch above the Ancre and believe that the mindless waste of the Somme or Passchendaele was a price that anyone should pay. Its impersonal, abstract indifference and intellectual sophistication are in themselves an indictment of the appalling stupidity and destruction of human potential it marks. Could anyone absorb the monstrous size of the thing, with its 70,000 plus names, and still believe his country cared? Could anyone stop to read the names of those under-sized boys of the Pals’ battalions – from Accrington, Bradford, Barnsley, Sheffield, Hull, Durham – and not wonder what the England of Gertrude Jekyll had to do with them? Could anyone who had survived, wounded, jobless and houseless, to find every promise of peace disappointed, not see in the beauty and seductive mythology of equality and unity that the Commission offered just one more establishment lie?
‘Let us honour if we can,’ wrote Auden in 1930, ‘The vertical man/ Though we value none/ But the horizontal one’ – those were more than just the smart lines of a man too young to have fought in the war to end wars. There was certainly no falling off during the 1930s of visitors to the Western Front cemeteries, but if somehow Thiepval slipped out of the popular consciousness that was because it conjured up a past that no one wanted to recognise and foreshadowed a future no one wanted to see. Memorials, Jay Winter wrote, are as much about forgetting as they are about remembering. But that is not true of Thiepval. It lets you neither forget nor forgive. It is war’s answer to Forster’s Marabar Caves, where the last words of Christ on the cross and the striking of a match produce only the same nihilistic echo. ‘Honour’, ‘Glory’, ‘Valour’, ‘Love of Country’– the words Roland Leighton grew to hate before a bullet in the stomach finished him – say them at Thiepval and they simply evaporate away through that great arch into the infinite sky, leaving behind only the massive, looming silence and the eternal reprimand of those 70,000 names.
The unveiling of Thiepval marked the end of the heroic period in the Commission’s history and if it was an odd irony that the greatest thing that the Commission ever did should be its least loved, it was an irony that Ware could live with. Less than anyone did he wish to hear what the monument said about the past or the future. He had begun his commemorative work to enshrine an idea about nation and Empire, but by the time Thiepval was finished another and even greater vision had grown out of it. Twenty years earlier, writing with his ‘filthy French pen’ in his Paris room and recalling the sunsets of South Africa, Ware had wondered if the great collective ideal he had learned there at Milner’s feet might not ultimately grow beyond the British Empire to embrace all mankind. Now, as the world moved towards another war, it became an old man’s dream that the cemeteries that had been born of a deep and inclusive patriotism should and must contribute to a greater unity.