Monumental Conflicts

Twentieth-Century Wars and the Evolution of Public Memory

Derek R. Mallett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138282278
• eBook ISBN: 9781351346702
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Monumental Conflicts examines 20th century wars from the First World War to the First Gulf War, each chapter analyzing how public memory has evolved over time. The chapters raise fascinating questions about war and memory:

• Why are wars remembered as they are?
• What factors drive changes in public perception?
• What implications arise from remembering and commemorating a war or particular aspects of a war?
• What does public memory of a war say about us as a society?

The volume is divided into three sections focusing on political evolution, negotiated memories of war, and national pride and covers international wars from Afghanistan to Vietnam and German deserter monuments to Vietnamese war tourism.

PART I
Monumental conflicts: The sacred and the political

1
“THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING LIKE THE CARVING OF NAMES”: IMPERIAL WAR GRAVES COMMISSION SITES AND WORLD WAR I MEMORY

Hanna Smyth

It is 1917. World War I is still more than a year from being over, and men are dying and being wounded in the millions. Britain has instituted a repatriation ban, dictating that no bodies of its fallen soldiers will be returned home. These circumstances present a massive logistical challenge: how to find, bury, organize, and commemorate the war dead. For Britain and her empire, a new organization was formed to undertake this: the Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC), founded by Fabian Ware.

The war presented many new logistical challenges, but this one—the care and commemoration of the dead—was uniquely emotional and wide-ranging, encompassing and manifesting both the individual and the collective sorrow of those left behind. “Those left behind” were in countries often hundreds if not thousands of miles from the battlefields, as the dominions and colonies of Britain had been compelled to fight as well. Although by law they did not have a choice, loyalty to Britain and high numbers of British-born people among their citizens meant that, at the outbreak of war, the dominions embraced their involvement with a substantial amount of zeal.¹ Sentiments such as those expressed in this 1914 poem were widespread:

We are coming, Mother, coming—we are coming Home to fight. To defend the Empire’s honour, to uphold the Empire’s might. From the Plains of Manitoba, from the diggings of the Rand, we are coming, Mother Britain—coming home to lend a hand … From the islands and the highlands, from the outposts of the earth, from a hundred ships we hasten to your side to prove our worth. We’ve come to stick through thin and thick and woe betide the ones who dare to smite the Mother-might, forgetting of the sons … From the jungles of Rhodesia, from the snows of Saskatoon, we are coming, Mother Britain, and we hope to see you soon.²

The distance between the dominions and the Western Front made it extremely difficult for most people to make the journey. Deep ties were created between these countries and the foreign fields where their lost were buried or named. Canadian Prime Minister Arthur Meighen eloquently stated in 1921, speaking about a specific IWGC cemetery with a high concentration of Canadians, “Across the leagues of the Atlantic the heartstrings of our Canadian nation will reach through all time to these graves in France.”³

The results of the IWGC’s efforts were thousands of cemeteries and memorials, mainly located along the fighting fronts. Cemeteries and memorials are an example of “material culture” (they are tangible things), and the term “the material culture of remembrance” is an important one that will be used throughout this chapter to refer to them. The Western Front (modern France and Belgium) is the focus of this chapter, but it is worth noting that IWGC sites also exist in 152 other countries, including World War I commemoration sites in Iraq, Turkey, and Egypt.⁴

These memorials and cemeteries are an important lens through which to understand the evolution of both individual and collective relationships with World War I. What roles have these locations played as sites of memory, and how has this changed over time? Far from merely being a backdrop against which these relationships have been negotiated and performed, from the time of their construction stretching to the present, these sites have played active roles in representing, shaping, and reinforcing public memory(ies) and identity(ies) in relationship to the war. World War I was not only a “monumental conflict,” but also a conflict characterized by its monuments: The number, importance, and scale of World War I monuments established them to an unprecedented degree as authoritative loci for the interpretation and perpetuation of memory and identity. This role continues today. By the time of World War I’s centenary in the period 2014–18, living memory of the war had been effectively extinguished, meaning that even more weight is being given to the tangible expressions of that memory which have been left behind: memorials and cemeteries, artifacts, and the written word (namely memoirs and letters). As yet another generation grapples with defining, exploring, and performing how it “should” remember the war, these expressions are treated as signposts pointing the way to a past which can be imagined but never re-inhabited.

IWGC past and present

The Imperial War Graves Commission still exists today, albeit under a different name. It is now called the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC), having been updated in 1960 to reflect the changing nature of the British Empire. Its remit, as outlined in its Royal Charter of Incorporation in 1917, is

to make fit provision for the burial of officers and men of Our said forces and the care of all graves in such cemeteries, to erect buildings and permanent memorials therein, and generally to provide for the maintenance and upkeep of such cemeteries, buildings, and memorials.

It currently cares for the material culture of remembrance for more than one million dead of World War I.⁵

The term “war dead” is not as strictly defined as one might think. The conflict created new aspects of identity for many people, and also exacerbated existing ones; these were frequently overlapping and sometimes contradictory. This extended even to death, and affected whether a person was eligible for commemoration by the IWGC. If someone is killed in a battle this is clearly a war death, but other cases are not so clear-cut. Soldiers who died of disease or succumbed to their war injuries after the war was over, civilians killed by enemy action, and non-combatant deaths such as medical services and Labour Corps members all present more challenging decisions regarding classification as a war death.

The fundamental principles of the IWGC’s commemoration of the dead were equality and uniformity.⁶ The son of Herbert Asquith, the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister from 1908 to 1916, is buried in France with the same-sized headstone as untold scores of privates whose families may not have been able to afford a headstone at all.⁷ No matter how much money or influence a family had, they could not pay for special graves or have their dead soldier sons sent back home to them for burial. Each body would be buried as near as possible to where it fell, and if the body was never found then the person’s name would be inscribed on a “memorial to the missing.” Occasionally the principles of equality and uniformity contradicted each other, and religion is a prime example of this. To treat all of its fallen equally, the IWGC allowed for breaks in uniformity to accommodate various religious symbols, and in some cases even different burial practices, particularly regarding Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu soldiers.

Any overview of the IWGC must include introductions to its principal figures. In addition to founder Fabian Ware, among the crucial figures who helped to bring these “silent cities” of the dead to life were three architects and a poet.⁸ Edwin Lutyens left his mark on the material culture of World War I remembrance by creating several of its best-known iterations. He designed the IWGC Thiepval memorial to the missing of the Somme, the national Australian memorial at Villers-Bretonneux, and the Stone of Remembrance, an architectural feature repeated across the larger IWGC cemeteries (more on all of these below).⁹ He also created more than 60 war memorials in Britain and abroad and was responsible for designing 140 IWGC cemeteries on the Western Front.¹⁰ Before the war, he had been a leading country-house architect in Britain and also an architect of imperial Britain, namely in India.¹¹

His colleague and rival Herbert Baker, whose notable designs include the national memorials at Neuve Chapelle and Delville Wood, was also an imperially minded architect.¹² As early as 1916, he had a vision for the memorials that would be created in the war’s aftermath. He argued that “the outcome of this war will be an uplifting of the ideals of our Nation and of our Empire,”¹³ and the memorials he designed “promote[d] his vision of a harmonious imperial system across space and time and to represent the grandeur of the British Empire.”¹⁴ The third principal architect was Reginald Blomfield, former president of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Among other contributions, he came up with the final design for the Cross of Sacrifice that adorns most IWGC cemeteries, designed the Menin Gate Memorial, and was responsible for the first three “experimental” IWGC cemeteries on the Western Front.¹⁵

The last name on this list is not an architect but a poet. Rudyard Kipling was well known in Britain at the time of the war, and his son John (“Jack”) went missing in 1915. Jack’s body was finally identified in the 1990s, and his grave’s headstone in St Mary’s ADS Cemetery now bears his name.¹⁶ Kipling was asked to craft many of the inscriptions for IWGC memorials, and also contributed stock phrases—often drawn from the Bible—that are repeated in hundreds of IWGC cemeteries.

An element of “great man history” is inevitable with such instrumental figures.¹⁷ However, there are thousands more IWGC workers who should also not be forgotten: the myriad junior architects of the IWGC¹⁸ and, despite the comparative dearth of information about them, the stonemasons, gardeners, soldier employees, and administrative staff who labored to bury the dead and transform the landscapes into the pristinely beautiful sites of memory we see today. This work continues: The CWGC is a major horticultural employer worldwide.¹⁹

To understand an IWGC site, it is imperative to become familiar with the key features that are repeated throughout its locations. Its memorials are usually unique, but its cemeteries have a homogeneous consistency of identifiable characteristics, while allowing for variations. The Cross of Sacrifice i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of maps
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Monumental conflicts: The sacred and the political
• Part II Negotiated memories of war
• Part III Expeditionary wars and national pride
• Index