by David Crane
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 mourni
ng. 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 o
riginal 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’?