The Hell Where Youth And Laughter Go
- cepmurphywrites
- 39 minutes ago
- 7 min read
By J. Concagh
I have a soft spot for the Royal Artillery Memorial. It is not a conventional kind of memorial; dominated not by the people it commemorates but by their tools; the artillery shells, the chains of the gun train, the short, stout, towering mass of the Howitzer all dominate over the four human figures, the shrouded body of the fallen gunner, the workmanlike stance of the shell carrier and the officer, and the Christ-like stance of the driver. They are guardians not for the dead, but for the machinery of war: the gun.
In some senses, to our 21st century understanding of that war, the war of mud, gas, shellfire and machine gun, something so inhumane is the logical memorial. The press of 1925 disagreed. Most of the London broadsheets condemned it as vulgar and obtuse: even the literary and art papers struggled to say good things about it. Yet, in its present setting - alongside the long, deep carvings and standing stones of the respective Australian and New Zealand memorials - it seems antiquated. Still inhuman, perhaps, especially compared to the (literally) larger-than-life Bomber Command memorial, but still a part of the national fabric, no more noticeable than the columns marked with Dominions and Colonies down Constitution Hill, the Cenotaphs on Whitehall or the crosses in each parish village.
The idea of remembrance as a ‘contested’ space always seems modern to us: the absurdity of the football mascot dressed as the poppy, the politicians competing to seem more “sombre”, the increasing divide between those who wear their poppy and those who do not. But this question of memorialisation, of how to comprehend the incomprehensible, has always been an argument. It was an argument from the start of the First World War, when a moratorium on the return of bodies from abroad interrupted irrevocably generations of Victorian mourning tradition. The memorials - square, inhuman masses like the Artillery, mourning arches like Thiepval, the faceless crosses that dot British towns and villages - are a testament to an inability to find meaning. Compared with their predecessors and descendants, the gallant figures adoring memories to the dead of the Boer War, or the stalwart soldierly cut-outs of the new British Normandy memorial, there is something forever chilling about the memory of the First World War.
Yet this culture - perhaps cult, in the literal sense - of remembrance is specifically British. A French friend described her first experience of the two minutes’ silence as being like a “weird funeral” and, from an external viewpoint, I do think that is something we miss amongst the British Legion stands, the emotively blank politicians and the droll Facebook posts. This is a funeral rite for lost generations this nation - the world, really - has never recovered from.
It is hard for us a century later to comprehend what it meant for Britain to send a mass army to war. It is impossible to imagine what it meant to a society to take more casualties in a week in 1916 than men it sent to war in 1914. There were no rituals of remembrance before that: the dead of Waterloo, Balaclava, Iswandlana and the other gallant battles of Victorian Empire were rolled into anonymous graves, remembered perhaps as supplicants to gallant officers like Wellington, Gordon or Cardigan. Not remembering in Britain is a cultural impossibility: even if one is opposed to the “poppy fascism” (Jon Snow’s words, not mine), one is still in orbit of the remembrance ritual. Yet the First World War demanded national - international - memory. This was clear from almost the start: the scale of death demanded such.
“I would make a fine broad road in the No Man's Land between the lines, with paths for pilgrims on foot, and plant trees for shade . . . Some of the shattered farms and houses might be left as evidence, and the regiments might put up their records besides the trenches . . . Then I would send every man, woman, and child in Western Europe on a pilgrimage along the Via Sacra, so that they might think and learn what war means from the silent witnesses on either side.”
- Lieutenant Douglas Gillespie, June 1915
Yet the history of official remembrance, of the transformation of the war dead into a public duty (and national obligation), is as fraught with contest as our current conversation. From the start, Army and government fought with humanitarians, artists and families over how the dead would be remembered: collectively or individually? In their regiments or in their communities? Would they be returned home, or left in France? The Royal Academy set up a committee to defend memorials from “the pantomime of allegory”. Edward Lutyens, architect of the Imperial War Graves Commissions’ project and designer of everything from the Stone of Remembrance in every cemetery to the Thiepval memory, was not without his detractors. Said stones were pilloried by an anonymous writer in The Connoisseur Vol.55 as presenting “the appearance of a shop counter. One cannot look at it for any length of time without expecting a trim salesman to appear on the other side saying, "And what is the next article please?”" The now iconic uniformity of the cemeteries was contested by Catholics, Jewish leaders, atheists and prominent politicians. Viscount Wolmer would say in parliament that:
“Uniformity is not and never can be equality…Are you going to consider the feelings of the bereaved relatives or the artistic susceptibilities of the casual tourist? These graveyards are not and cannot be war memorials…you have no right to take the precious remains of bereaved widows, parents and orphans and build them into a monument which is distasteful and hateful to those relatives, as in many cases it is.”
Wolmer’s sentiment was hardly alone - but popular weight fell behind the cemeteries. The programme of Imperial (now Commonwealth) war graves, cemeteries and memorials that began in 1917, remains one of the largest peacetime public works projects in British history. In Empire of the Dead David Crane wrote that by 1937 it was reckoned that there were, in France and Belgium, “970 architecturally constructed cemeteries surrounded by 50 miles of walling in brick or stone, with nearly 1000 Crosses of Sacrifice and 560 Stones of Remembrance, and many chapels, record buildings and shelters; there are some 600,000 headstones resting on nearly 250 miles of concrete beam foundations.”
This funeral for the nation - for the Empire, really - had cost just over £8 million to construct, and was completed just in time for Europe to descend into another conflict. Many of the tokens and reminders of Allied victory - German field guns and British tanks, emplaced in villages and towns as reminders that something had been won - were removed during the crisis of 1940, either returned to military service or melted down for re-use in the new war.
Yet now the void that generation has left is gone; even the one left by their children has been filled, and the foundations of the new world they died to build have crumbled underneath them. They have become, in some sense, the pure monuments that Wolmer feared, catering to busloads of battlefield tourists punctuating their red-trousered tour of the Somme with a sombre twilight next to the portland stone, or gaggles of teenagers still too young to comprehend that soon they will see more life than the Newfoundlanders, Hanoverians or Moroccans whose graves they tramp past.
What does remembering sacrifice mean when we no longer understand the space left by their loss? What does remembering our war dead through their absence mean we can no longer sense the absence? So much of the remembrance rituals, the two minutes silence, the parades, the words and the speeches, is built on knowing who is missing from the ritual. Eighty years of relative peace in Europe means we are detached from it. The poppy, conceived as it was from a poem exhorting revenge now turned to a hymn of sacrifice, exhorted by Moina Michael as “The Victory Emblem”, has been fought and re-fought: transformed, like the gravestones, into a memorial to the Lions of the Somme, or condemned as the symbol of British power in Northern Ireland.
What exactly we are remembering now remains unclear. Harry Patch is long dead; it will not be long before a similar last survivor of the Second World War passes, leaving only with the discomfort of Imperial withdrawal and Middle-Eastern counter-insurgency. The poppy has to some, for good or ill, become simply a way to celebrate our “current forces” - a twisted, cargo cult rendition of American ‘Veteran’ culture that has little to do with the national funeral of the 1920s and 30s.
Will it cement that way? I don’t know. I know that younger generations - who will have to carry forward these rituals without parents and grandparents who remember the fall of bombs or the rattle of the machine gun - are distinctly detached from the loss the rituals are meant to acknowledge. Thankfully few of us have empty holes in our lives left by those who did not come back. It is foreign: it is strange: and it makes many uncomfortable.
In some senses there is something preferable to the continuing discomfort with remembrance culture: to a general concern with the transformation of a ritual of collective funeral rites into mantra and horror. It has been a long time since men took their hats off as they passed the cenotaph; longer since names were read out, one by one, every Remembrance day; even longer since pews were left empty every Sunday for those who had not returned. It would be precocious to say that the Generation of the Somme would condemn our hagiographic ritual, or support it. All that can really be said is that they would recognise our discomfort with what remembrance looks like.
I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.
In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
- Siegfried Sassoon
J. Concagh is a historian and fiction writer, and has written for the anthology Grapeshot and Guillotines.