by Geoff Dyer
Similar works – better ones, sculptures stripped of Lehmbruck’s tendency to implicitly elide the suffering of the artist with that of the fallen soldier – could have forced themselves into existence in the inter-war years in Britain. Alternatively, given that the figurative sculptural tradition is inherently heroic, the possibility existed for a realist sculpture which showed the suffering of war more nakedly than ever before: a group of men advancing and falling in the face of machine-gun fire, stretcherbearers floundering in mud . . . Sculptures do show injured soldiers but the wounds tend to be heavily formalized, hindering rather than maiming. The sculptural representation of slaughter exists only in a bas-relief by Jagger. Now in the Imperial War Museum, No Man’s Land of 1919–20 shows a sprawling wilderness of men dying and wounded, one of whom hangs crucified from barbed wire.
That such an explicit depiction of battle was nowhere given fully three-dimensional expression highlights another absence – especially if the bas-relief as a form is considered as the bronze or stone equivalent of a photograph, as a static tracking shot. While they could convey the aftermath of action, it was physically impossible for photographers to capture battle itself (one of the reasons the sequence of soldiers going over the top at the Somme is obviously faked is precisely because it was filmed); as a medium sculpture was capable of rendering the unphotographable experience of battle. Although many had the talent, no British sculptor – not even Jagger – had the vision, freedom or power to render the war in bronze or stone as Owen had done in words.
This speculative account of sculptures that were not made is really only an attempt to articulate a sense of what is missing from those that were: a way of describing them in terms not of stone or bronze but of the time and space which envelop and define them. What is lacking is the sense of a search for a new form, a groping towards new meaning rather than a passive reliance on the accumulated craft of the past.15
Even taking this absence into account, the realist memorials represent a great flowering of British public sculpture. That they may not have been the work of exceptional individual talents illustrates how, at certain moments in the tradition of any art, the expressive potential of the average can exceed that of the outstanding at earlier or later dates. Nowadays the human form cannot so readily be coaxed into such powerful attitudes; only an exceptional artist today could achieve the power routinely managed by the memorial sculptors, almost all of whom, except Jagger, have been forgotten.
We drive through Keighley on our way to watch Leeds–Everton at Elland Road. Clouds hug the ground. The anorak, a foreigner would suppose, is the English national dress. The most frequently heard noise is a sniff. Everything
that is not grey – clouds, road, pigeons – is brown: benches, buildings, leaves, bronze soldier and sailor, the figure of Victory perched on the memorial behind them. Traffic and shoppers hurry past. The soldier stands erect, doing his best to ignore the fact that the bayonet on his rifle has long been broken off.
In Bradford, too, where we stop for a lunchtime curry, the bronze soldiers have met a similar fate. Once they must have strode aggressively forward, one each side of the memorial. Now they advance gingerly, as if about to surprise each other in a harmless game of hide and seek. That the bayonet was already virtually obsolete as a weapon by 1914 – ‘No man in the Great War was ever killed by a bayonet,’ claimed one soldier, ‘unless he had his hands up first’ – only enhances the lack. Then as now the bayonets’ function was symbolic and ornamental: without them the sculptures’ internal dynamic is thrown irremediably out of kilter.
In Holborn, by contrast – or, more quietly, in the French village of Flers, where there is an almost identical figure – an infantryman mounts a pedestal of land, rifle in hand, encircled by the vast radius of air that extends from head to bayonet-tip to trailing foot. This framing circle renders the sculpture (by Albert Toft) both more powerful and more vulnerable, extending his command of space and fixing our attention, as if through a sniper’s sights, on the soldier at its dead centre.
Near Huddersfield, in Elland, the light has called it a day. Twilight is falling through the bare trees. November here can last ten months of the year. The damp grass is covered in damp leaves. On a granite plinth a bronze soldier keeps watch in a drizzle of mist, looking out at the damp road. The collar of his greatcoat is turned up against the coming cold. Old rain drips from the rim of his helmet. Except for the verdigris streaking his shoulders, all colour is a shade of grey. Brodsky:
Leaning on his rifle,
the Unknown Soldier grows even more unknown.
At Stalybridge a soldier slumps into death. His body crumples beneath him but an angel is there; she has been waiting, it seems, for exactly this moment. Berger has described another almost identical memorial in a village in France:
The angel does not save him, but appears somehow to lighten the soldier’s fall. Yet the hand which holds the wrist takes no weight, and is no firmer than a nurse’s hand taking a pulse. If his fall appears to be lightened, it is only because both figures have been carved out of the same piece of stone.
They are all over the country, these Tommies: taking leave of their loved ones (in Newcastle), standing to, resting, reading letters, attacking (in Kelvingrove Park in Glasgow), binding their wounds (in Croydon), helping injured comrades (in Argyll), dying, returning home (to Cambridge). Representing and preserving a sample of the multitudinous gestures of the British soldier at war, these frequently duplicated poses put me in mind of the Airfix soldiers which moulded my taste in memorial art.
They are all over the country, these Tommies . . .
Elland Memorial
Age may not weary them but the years have condemned. Sundozed and snow-dazed, they sweat in greatcoats in the summer or freeze in shirtsleeves through the long winter months. Sprayed by feminists – ‘Dead Men Don’t Rape’ – and damaged by vandals, all are rotted by pollution. Powerless to protect themselves, their only defence, like that of the blind, is our respect.
The self-contained ideal of remembrance
Sometimes they are the only old things in the new No Man’s Land of bankrupt businesses and boarded offices, broken lifts and derelict estates. They have been around so long they seem part of the landscape: it is impossible to imagine a time when they were not here. For years now, children who watched the statues being unveiled have been dying of old age. Perhaps what they commemorate, then, is their own survival, the enduring idea of remembrance. The most common form of sculpture – a soldier, head bowed, leaning on his downward-pointed rifle – actually represents the self-contained ideal of remembrance: the soldier being remembered and the soldier remembering. Sculptures like this appeal to – and are about – the act of remembrance itself: a depiction of the ideal form of the emotion which looking at them elicits.
Throughout the 1920s, and especially in the early thirties, attempts were made to ally the rituals of Remembrance with the cause of peace: war memorials, it was argued, should be termed peace memorials; white ‘peace’ poppies were sold by the Peace Pledge Union as an alternative to the red poppies of the British Legion. Already, by 1928, however, the public was beginning to cease thinking of itself as ‘Post-War’ and was beginning, in the words of a contemporary commentator, ‘to feel that it was living in the epoch “preceding the next Great War”’. But this was exactly the period when the Great War was being remembered – in novels and memoirs – most intensely. Again there is a strange temporal elision as the idea of Remembrance merges into a notion of Preparedness. Accordingly, sculptures erected in memory of the First World War come also to look forward to the Second. As war with Germany looms again, the memorial sculptures come to represent a form of symbolic rearming whose job is not simply to protect the past but to guard against possible futures.
On the Croydon memorial P. J. Montford’s figure bandages a wound as if in readiness for further exertions; in Port Sunlight two fit men – sculpted by William Goscombe John – prepare to defend a third
who is wounded; John Angel’s figure in Exeter and Walter Marsden’s in St Anne’s on Sea show soldiers weary but ready (if necessary the rifle that was broken in victory in one sculpture will be wielded as a club in this one).
Jagger’s figures lent themselves particularly well to the new conditions in which remembrance merged into resolve. Resisting suggestions that any peace symbolism be included in the Royal Artillery Memorial, he had emphasized that the ‘terrific power’ of the artillery represented the ‘last word in force’. This, he had insisted, was a war memorial.
On the south coast, in Portsmouth, Jagger’s machine-gunners were already in place. As plans were made to entrench ourselves in our island stronghold, the weary Tommies became sculptural equivalents of the Home Guard: men from an earlier war whose effectiveness was largely symbolic. This time it was not gallant Belgium but Britain itself that had to be protected – and these figures became everyday reminders of Britain’s resolve to stand firm. Battered but resilient, they were visible prefigurements of Churchill’s determination to fight invaders at every street corner.
In 1944 the Guards Division Memorial in St James’s Park was badly damaged by a German bomb. The sculptor Gilbert Ledward thought this improved it because ‘it looked as though the monument itself had been in action’. When the Ministry of Works got round to repairing it, Ledward suggested that some ‘honourable scars of war’ be allowed to remain – a way of registering how, in memorializing one war, his monument had participated in another.
Sculpted by Philip Lindsey Clark, the Southwark War Memorial in Borough High Street shows a soldier striding forward. Soon after it was unveiled, this photograph was taken. Few other images contain so much time.
Time
The statue preserves or freezes a moment from the war. This record itself ages, very slowly. Since it was taken, both the statue and the photograph itself have aged. Looking at it now, what we see is an old photograph of a new statue. In the background, gazing at the camera, are four men and a boy. The long exposure time has caused these figures – who moved slightly – to ghost, especially the two on the right whom we can see right through. Any figures walking past will have vanished completely. Because it is utterly still, the statue itself is substantial and perfectly defined – all the more strikingly so given that it shows an infantryman moving purposefully forward. The photograph is therefore a record of time passing: both in relation to the statue (which, relative to the people looking at it, is fixed in time) and through it (because the statue itself no longer looks quite as it does in the photograph). Compared with the solid permanence of the memorial, even the buildings in the background seem liable to fade. What we see, then, is the sculpture’s own progress through time; or, more accurately, time as experienced by the sculpture. Simultaneously, the old time of the onlookers, this moment of vanishing time, is preserved in the picture which records its passing.
In a few days we will be leaving for Flanders. Mark tells me he has been reading Trevor Wilson’s huge history, The Myriad Faces of War, as preparation. I am impressed and a little shamed by his diligence. My own reading of general histories of the war is characterized by a headlong impatience. Basil Liddell Hart, A. J. P. Taylor, John Terraine, Keith Robbins – I read them all in the same inadequate way. With a cloudless conscience I skim the same parts of each: the war at sea, air raids on London, anything happening on the Eastern Front, Gallipoli . . . Then there are the parts of these histories I try hard to concentrate on but whose details I can never absorb: the network of treaties, the flurry of telegrams and diplomatic manoeuvres that lead up to the actual outbreak of war. Consequently everything between the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the lamps going out over Europe is a blur.
Although I always dwell on the period of enthusiastic enlistment, I move attentively but fairly quickly through the period 1914–15. It is not until the great battles of attrition that I am content to move at the pace of the slowest narrative. From the German offensive of 1918 onwards I am once again impatient and it is not until November, the armistice and its aftermath, that the speed of history and my reading of it are again in equilibrium.
For me, in other words, the Great War means the Western Front: France and Flanders, from the Somme to Passchendaele. Essentially, then, mine is still a schoolboy’s fascination. Uncertain of dates and eager for battles, I pause again over a passage I had marked years before, when I was a schoolboy, in Leon Wolff’s In Flanders Fields:
. . . a khaki-clad leg, three heads in a row, the rest of the bodies submerged, giving one the idea that they had used their last ounce of strength to keep their heads above the rising water. In another miniature pond, a hand still gripping a rifle is all that is visible, while its next door neighbour is occupied by a steel helmet and half a head, the staring eyes glaring icily at the green slime which floats on the surface at almost their level.
All of which is of no interest except in so far as my own interests coincide with the remembered essence of the conflict. Is it not appropriate and inevitable that I should move quickly through the period of the war’s relative mobility before getting stuck into every detail of the stalemate of 1916–17? Rather than being a quirk of temperament, perhaps this is how the war insists on being remembered, on remembering itself . . .
After meeting him in Craiglockhart in August 1917, Owen began immediately and consciously to absorb the influence of Sassoon. Enclosing a draft of the poem ‘The Dead-Beat’, Owen explained in a letter how, ‘after leaving him, I wrote something in Sassoon’s style’. Sassoon also lent Owen a copy of Under Fire, which he read in December. Sassoon took a quotation from Barbusse’s novel as an epigraph for Counter-Attack and Owen used passages as the basis of images in his poems. ‘The Show’ and ‘Exposure’.
If Owen found it helpful to see his own experience of the war through first Sassoon’s and then Barbusse’s words, it has since become impossible to see the war except through the words of Owen and Sassoon. Literally, since so many books take their titles from one – Remembering We Forget, They Called it Passchendaele, Up the Line to Death – or the other – Out of Battle, The Old Lie, Some Desperate Glory – of them. Owen’s lines in particular offer a virtual index of the themes and tropes featured in these books: mud (‘I too saw God through . . .’); gas (‘GAS! Quick, boys!’); ‘Mental Cases’; self-inflicted wounds (‘S.I.W.’); the ‘Disabled’; homoeroticism (‘Red lips are not so red . . .’); ‘Futility’ . . .
So pervasive is his influence that a poem about the Second World War, Vernon Scannell’s ‘Walking Wounded’, seems less an evocation of an actual scene than a verse essay on Owen. Owen’s ‘stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle’ becomes the ‘spandau’s manic jabber’ (the rhythmic similarity enhanced still further by the Owenesque near rhyme of ‘jabber’ and ‘rattle’). The wounded, when they enter, look like they have tramped straight out of ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’:
Straggling the road like convicts loosely chained . . .
. . . Some limped on sticks;
Others wore rough dressings, splints and slings . . .
Scannell was aware of this; as Fussell points out, he even wrote a poem about how ‘whenever war is spoken of’, it is not the one he fought in but the one ‘called Great’ that ‘invades the mind’.
The difficulty for recent novelists is that the same thing also happens when they are dealing with the Great War itself.
Recent novels about the war have the benefit of being more precisely written, more carefully structured than the actual memoirs, which tend, with the magnificent exception of All Quiet on the Western Front, to be carelessly written and structured. Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That, Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero, Guy Chapman’s A Passionate Prodigality, Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune (also known as Her Privates We) and Sassoon’s The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston all contain impressive passages, but none has the imaginative cohesion of purpose and design or the linguistic intensity and subtlety to rival the English tran
slation of Erich Maria Remarque’s masterpiece.16
The problem with many recent novels about the war is that they almost inevitably bear the imprint of the material from which they are derived, can never conceal the research on which they depend for their historical and imaginative accuracy. Their authenticity is mediated; they feel like secondary texts. In 1959 Charles Carrington complained that certain passages in Leon Wolff’s In Flanders Fields read like ‘a pastiche of the popular war books which everyone was reading twenty-five years ago’. Thirty-five years on, Wolff’s evocative historical study of the Flanders campaign is likely to be a major source book for anyone wishing to fictionalize the war. We have, in other words, entered the stage of second-order pastiche: pastiche of pastiche.
In the Afterword to the 1989 edition of Strange Meeting (the title is, of course, from Owen), her novel about the friendship that develops between two English officers at the front, Susan Hill notes that as well as immersing herself in memoirs and letters, she had, in writing her book, to make ‘an imaginative leap’ and ‘live in the trenches’. Though successful in its own terms, this leap is over-determined by the material amassed in the run-up to it. Especially in the sections of the novel which try to pass themselves off as unmediated primary sources – the letters supposedly written by David Barton, the younger of the two central characters.