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Online papers
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Paul Gough
Conifers and Commemoration - the Protocol of Planting
A version of this paper was published in Landscape
Research vol 21, no 1 (1996) issn 0142
6397
Abstract
This study examines the symbolic role of trees, shrubs and flowers
on 20th century battle grounds and military cemeteries. By By focussing
on the imagery of commemoration and on the power of horticultural
symbols the paper explores the emergence of an iconography during
wartime and its perpetuation in ritualised peacetime landscapes.
The paper makes specific reference to the Western Front in France
and Belgium, and to the consecrated ground of the Dardenelles peninsula
- a commemorative terrain that is being infiltrated by Turkish planting
and memorial schemes that are bringing into sharp focus the problems
of maintaining Christian burial grounds in perpetuity across the
globe. The paper concludes by asking whether tree planting may have
replaced memorial building in the rhetoric and culture of commemoration.
Introduction
The symbolic role of particular trees and flowers associated with
death and mourning is fully articulated in most dictionaries of
traditional symbols and signs. (Whittick, 1960, Cooper, 1978, Cirlot,
1988) The yew, weeping willow, cypress and rosemary have a central
role in this symbology derived in the main from traditional Christian
sources. The weeping willow (salix babylonica), for instance, derives
its name from Psalm 137 which relates the story of the Jews' lament
for Zion while in captivity, when they sat by the rivers of Babylon
and wept and hung their 'harps in the willows'. With its gracefully
wilting branches and mournful demeanour the willow became a symbol
of mourning that enjoyed especial popularity in English grave monuments
and funerary plaques in the mid-19th century (1)
(Llewellyn, 1991). The cypress, by comparison, may be a pre-Christian
symbol of death, as it is clearly evident in the tomb gardens of
Pompeii. (Jashemski, 1979) It was much revered as a symbol of death
because it was thought that it was the only tree that once cut down
would never grow again (Whittick, 1960). Simon Schama has usefully
related the appropriation of pagan arboreal symbols onto Christian
iconography (Schama, 1995) but in summary we can assume that these
four trees are widely accepted funerary symbols evoking notions
of mourning, immortality and regeneration.
Death in warfare, though, has its own arboreal iconography. In the
popular imagination the two flowers most readily associated with
martial death and prolonged national mourning are the rose and the
poppy. The rose, as Paul Fussell, has pointed out represents the
paradigm of Englishness as well as bearing the 'traditional priority
amongst apocalyptic flowers'(2) It has assumed
a gigantic importance in the commemorative language of all wars
fought by the British this century and is sufficiently emotive to
divert even the most fastidious of historians. In a gesture more
emotional than factual, for example, one usually exacting writer
asserts that the rose is so numerous in British war cemeteries that
'the shadow of an English rose falls across every grave at some
time during the day'(3) As if to rise to the challenge
and satisfy the emotional need for this national symbol the authorities
planted 57,000 roses in France, Belgium, Germany and the United
Kingdom during 1993 - 94.(4)
Whereas the rose has to be carefully nurtured and cared for within
a proper horticultual regime, the poppy grows erratically and without
warning on broken ground. Although it has a vital role in the mythology
and visual culture of the Great War its unpredictable and short
life-span affords it no actual place in a formal planting system.
In a sense, the rose and the poppy mark the two poles of horticultural
symbolism, the one formal, labour-intensive and permanent; the other
arbitrary, spontaneous and ephemeral.
The role of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) is crucial
in the development of this horticultural symbolism. Its jurisdiction
reaches far beyond the commonwealth, with the commission responsible
for over 23, 000 cemeteries in 146 countries. In Britain alone it
maintains over 12,000 separate burial gounds containing a total
of 170,000 identified graves. But the burden of its work lies in
France and Belgium. These two countries contain, respectively, 356,775
and 102,462 identified burials located in 3,500 named cemeteries.
Turkey, by comparison, has a mere 36 Commonwealth cemeteries, nearly
all gathered on the seaward slopes of the Dardanelles Peninsula.
The recent spate of war anniversaries has stimulated considerable
growth in recent British military history and the sites of these
conflicts. Pilgrimages, once the prerogative of the veteran, have
become hugely popular giving rise to a sizeable tourist market that
sustains at least half a dozen travel firms. The larger part of
these tours is spent inspecting the CWGC cemeteries whose history
has been fully recounted in several studies (Longworth, 1967 and
Hurst, 1929) while the individual social histories of war memorials
has been extensively researched by Alan Borg (1991) and Middlebrook.
(1991) Gazetteers and guidebooks to the old battlefields in France
and Belgium have been available since 1919 but in the last 10 years
there has been a flood of literature for the field archaeologist
and diligent tourist with books by Middlebrook, Coombes and Holmes
amongst many others. The architectural framework has been examined
in studies of memorial building (Curl, 1980 and Colvin, H. 1992)
and some interesting work has been done on the symbolism of plants
in funerary environments (Colvin, B. 1947 and Schaal, 1994). Although
Schaal has taken the design of funerary planting to its sculptural
extreme - craters of weeping willows, arcs of cypresses - there
has been suprisingly little explanatory work on the role of plants
in military commemoration.
Recent cultural studies by Samuel Hynes (1990) and Modris Eksteins
(1989) have cast a critical eye on the rhetoric of memorial architecture
(and the rise of 'anti- memorials' in literature and painting) but
only Paul Fussell (1975) explores the relationship between the English
pastoral tradition and its revival in times of extreme crisis. Elsewhere
most writers pay homage to the extraordinary care and devotion given
by the CWGC gardeners to these corners of a foreign field but very
few pause to examine the symbolic language and assumptions implicit
in the planting and design of these cemeteries.
Much of the political and administrative framework that has helped
shape these British military cemeteries has been thrown into sharp
relief by recent events in south- west Turkey where a large tract
of the infamous Anzac beach-head on the Dardenelles peninsula was
ravaged by fire in the summer of 1994. Great tracts of CWGC maintained
ground and several burial sites were scorched, their plants burnt
and the trees destroyed. Over the past 18 months replanting has
caused something of a minor political storm, arousing considerable
debate about the commission's authority and its role within a National
Park. Planting has become not just a horticultural issue but a delicate
political game requiring a complex understanding of protocol, precedent
and above all, a need to appreciate and articulate the historic
and symbolic value of trees on a former static battlefield.
The Tree as Battlefield Landmark
On any battle zone trees en masse can present considerable problems
at both a strategic and tactical level. In 17th century France the
great rides cut as allees through the dense forests of the Versailles
hinterland where designed as much for rapid deployment of troops
as much as for aiding the hunt. In more recent wars dense plantations
and forests have given a false impression of impenetrability: at
the Ardennes in 1940, on the Singapore peninsula in 1942 and more
recently in Vietnam, commanders have relied on the density of trees
to act as a protective barrier only to be undone by bold penetrative
strikes by the enemy. On many battlefields trees provide natural,
often complete, cover from retinal observation; on especially flat
battle landscapes trees can offer a quite unique vantage point to
a terrestial army.
One place where the tactical and strategic value of trees played
a crucial part in the course of the conflict was on the flattened
battlefields of northern France and Belgian Flanders during the
prolonged siege warfare of 1915 - 1917. During this period woods,
copses and even individual trees attained a symbolic and tactical
function often out of all proportion to the size of a plantation
or the height of an individual tree. In addition, an awareness of
the appalling damage being done to the natural order began to turn
attention to trees. One memoirist speaks for many when he writes:
'I never lost this tree sense: to me half the war is a memory
of trees; fallen and tortured trees; trees untouched in summer
moonlight, torn and shattered winter trees, trees green and brown,
grey and white, living and dead. They gave their names to roads
and trenches, strong points and areas. Beneath their branches
I found the best and the worst of war.'(5)
There was, though, a real downside to this relationship: trees were
often the harbingers of doom. Combatants soon learned that a single
isolated tree could become a registration point for enemy artillery.
A tendency to collect around isolated trees was often a mistake,
as one frontsoldier learned to his peril:
'The 'Lone Tree' was the assembly point for the wounded, and all
around on the grass there were dozens of wounded on stretchers
waiting to be taken down by the ambulance column. This tree was
a favourite for the German artillery and I I could never understand
why the wounded, transport, cookers and ambulances were allowed
to congregate in this area. Apparently, somebody later recognised
the danger and the tree was felled.'(6)
Trees became such crucial reference points on the flattened terrain
of Picardy and Flanders that engineers frequently cut down and re-located
distinctive trees in order to frustrate German gunners who might
be using the tree for registration; camouflage officers soon designed
hollowed-out, dummy trees lined with steel and faced with bark to
act as observation posts. (7)
In this way single, identifiable trees earned a notoriety that would
last long after the war, becoming a recurrent motif in war memoirs
and eventually becoming highlights on any battlefield pilgrimage.
This phenomenon was also true of the woods and copses on particular
stretches of the Western Front in Picardy. Possibly the most infamous
collection of small woods was to be found on the Somme battlefield.
The woods of Mametz, Trones, Longueval, and Delville had been transformed
into fortress strongholds by the German defenders and fought over
ferociously during the later summer of 1916. Their names have become
synonymous with all that was terrible about trench warfare - 'a
poor miserable mess of splinters and gashed soil'(8)
The battles for these woods reduced them to little more than burnt
stumps and bare shredded poles, in many instances any trace of the
wood vanished completely. Nevertheless, the regenerative power of
nature has proved quite remarkable. After the war many of the woods,
even some hedges and rows of trees, have grown to their original
positions. On other parts of the battlezone woods and forests have
been heavily replanted, though usually within pre-war perimeters.
On battlefields so brutally pulverised by artillery and chemicals,
horticulturalists have sought to cover the still-cratered surface
with hardy foliage. After 20 years of trial and error on the old
Verdun battlefield, the French authorities, in the 1930s, had to
resort to blanket plantations of fir trees to coat the pestiferous
pock- marked slopes of the Mort Homme and other deadly hills - a
task more demanding than planting on any industrial slag-heap or
noxious waste ground.(9)
On other theatres of war Allied troops began to ascribe a symbolic
function to certain trees. The Lone Pine Plateau above the Anzac
beach-head was first known, rather anonymously, as 400 plateau.
The pine in question was a single stunted specimen, all that remained
of a wooded area chopped down by the Turkish troops for charcoal
and for timber to line their dug-outs. In the scrub-covered environment
it became a natural landmark. And although the Turks felled the
tree several days before an Australian offensive the name remained
and was applied to the whole of the southern lobe of the plateau.(10)
As with other trees and copses on the peninsula the pine assumed
an important symbolic role, later to be enriched by the commemorative
rituals of the post-war period. 'Some
corner...' - Commemoration
The pattern of official commemoration of the dead was dictated very
early in the course of the war when, first, the war registration
commission and, in 1917, the Imperial War Graves Commission (under
the redoubtable Fabian Ware) took responsibility for gathering the
dead, registering burials and photographing graves on every battlefront.
As early as 1915, at the ouset of this massive and exhausting task,
it was recognised that a basic horticultural effort could make the
battlefield cemeteries 'less miserable and unsightly'. Ware's men,
with the help of French gardeners, began planting grass and simple
flower borders.(11) During the war such cemeteries
had become important places for contemplation and privacy, and after
the war, following the momentous decision not to exhume and repatriate
the bodies of servicemen, the cemeteries began to assume the air
of intimate, if somewhat formalised, funeral gardens. By the mid
1920s this became official policy as the ambitious architectural
and memorial building programme was complimented by planting schemes
designed to evoke the English garden. Paramount within this scheme
was the lawn. In Longworth's fascinating account of the CWGC global
scheme the commission's gardeners seem to have become fixated with
creating a neat, carefully manicured and pristine turf - an incontrovertible
symbol of a successful English garden.
The other extraordinary ambition (and achievement) of the commission
was to overcome climactic and natural obstacles in pursuit of this
ideal. On the deserts of Iraq and Libya, on the crumbling slopes
of Turkey and the sodden clay of Flanders, the commission gardeners
established new drainage systems, grew windbreaks, overcame the
deficiencies of local stone, dealt with the truculence and religious
differences of local populations, nurtured trees and plants in hostile
climates and achieved all this within the confines of the public
purse. But the commission's planners and gardeners had also to satisfy
two further, highly significant, conditions: patriotic sentiment
and religious belief. In 1915 a scheme had been founded to plant
home grown maple seeds on Canadian graves; that same year the Australian
plant wattle had been planted on graves in Gallipoli. Similarly,
cuttings of olearia and Veronica traversii were bought across from
New Zealand. In cemeteries with Chinese or Indian graves the commission
had to ensure that only plants considered sacred and appropriate
for commemoration were planted. Indians regarded iris, marigolds
and cypresses as suitable. In France and Belgium, gardeners attempted
where possible to plant flowers and shrubs of especial relevance
to Dominion soldiers, in the event only West Indian and African
plants would not flourish. Elsewhere the commission undertook a
wholesale planting scheme in which roses (of the dwarf polyantha
type) played a major part and were complimented by pinks, saxifrages
and other border flowers.
By 1927, just eight years after the end of hostilities, the commission
had established more than 500 cemeteries on the Western Front, erected
400,000 headstones, planted sixty-three miles of hedges and sown
540 acres with grass. The result of these neat ranks of pure white
stones, the prim box and beech hedgerows, trimmed lawns and colourful
plant beds was to create what one renowned guide described, quite
tellingly, as 'the moral advantage of these almost English gardens'.(12)
Pine and Shrine
In the 31 cemeteries on the Gallipoli battlefield the moral imperative
had to be balanced against harsh local conditions of soil type,
shade and rainfall. The architect in charge of cemetery construction,
Sir John Burnet, bemoaned the insecure ground, poor drainage and
the propensity of the impoverished locals to remove stone and metal
intended for the commission. There were also calls from Australian
and New Zealand ex-servicemen to designate the entire Anzac area
consecrated ground - a lobby that, while unsuccessful at the time,
would later lay the foundation for territory disputes that have
become inflamed since the Turks agreed the Treaty of Lausanne in
1923.(13)
On the peninsula, the solutions to the many problems have proved
longlasting and graceful. High perimeter walls and deep, stone-lined
ha-has have protected the lawns from animals and ensured adequate
drainage. The large stone screen wall (which bears the Cross of
Sacrifice in relief, instead of it being free-standing as in Christian
countries) is invariably backed by a screen of pine trees (pinus
Maritimum) which serves as a dark backdrop to set off the white
stone. Tamarisk has been planted just beyond the retaining walls
to help bind the soil.
Despite the wishes of the Australian authorities much of the planting
has had to be of indigenous flowers and shrubs.(14)
Efforts to acclimatise over a hundred types of eucalyptus were unsuccessful,
though in time a robust strain was grown on the lower slopes at
Anzac. Elsewhere, at Skew Bridge cemetery near Alcitepe, for example,
Judas trees, oleandor and other local flowering shrubs take pride
of place alongside more familiar bedding plants and flowers among
which are rosemary, dianthus, irises, petunias and violas. Nearly
all of the larger trees and shrubs in Turkey have to be local -
cypress trees are plentiful, as are the remarkably coloured strawberry
trees (arbutos inedo and arbutos andrachne).
What is especially striking on stretches of the barren, scrubby
peninsula is the formality of the cemetery layout. While this is
also true in the larger concentration cemeteries on the Western
Front it seems to have been taken to an extreme in Turkey. Twelve
Tree Cemetery for example, stands a little distance south of the
site of the original stand of pines. These trees were used for observation
posts by the British artillery in 1915 but were destroyed in the
battles for the heights of Achi Babar. After the war the trees were
re-sited within the perimeter of the eponymous cemetery, but not
in an informal way. They became an integral element in the architectural
plan planted in two rows either side of an imaginary line down the
centre of the garden. Fieldwork carried out in the spring of 1995
shows that this is largely typical of the planting schema on Gallipoli:
cypresses are invariably planted either side of the main screen
wall, tightly clipped rosemary bushes are arranged in symmetrical
lines down the central aisle, strawberry trees are planted in pairs
each side of the entrance gate. As a planting concept it is not
unnecessarily obtrusive, but it is a curious denial of the informality
and irregularity of the Picturesque aesthetic that is typical of
so much garden planting in England. Conversations and interviews
with CWGC officials and Turkish gardeners suggest that the formality
of so many of these graveyards is largely inherited and is not necessarily
that favoured by the new generation of planners.
The one fascinating element of dissent in this strict planting regime
is the part played by individual trees that have been planted for
personal and historic reasons in the face of the formal scheme.
On the Dardenelles two trees in particular make this point. The
first is the English oak planted, in 1922, by the father of 2nd
Lt. Eric Duckworth of the Lancashire Fusiliers who died in August
1915. He travelled from Dunsterville near Rochdale to plant an oak
sapling in Redoubt cemetery, near Cape Helles. Against all odds
the tree survived and thrives, standing to the right of the entrance
gate it upsets the harsh symmetry of the formal planting and is
reputedly the only English oak on the peninsula.
The other example is the single pine that dominates the cemetery
of the same name on the plateau above Anzac. As we have seen, the
tree was an important tactical landmark which lent its name to a
place, a campaign and a series of events during the Allied landings
of 1915. After the war Australians clearing the old battlefield
found the stump of the felled dwarf pine in a Turkish trench. A
number of seeds were retrieved and sent to Australia where they
were planted in the grounds of the National War Memorial in Canberra.
One tree grew and flourished, bearing seeds that were replanted
at other locations in Australia and, in a neat reversal of the story,
were returned to Gallipoli and planted at the presumed location
of the original tree. An imposing pine now dominates the exposed
lawns at the eastern end of Lone Pine cemetery.
More recently, other seeds and saplings have been planted within
the vicinity. Veteran institutions such as the Returned Servicemen's
League of Australia and New Zealand have now turned a quixotic act
into a important sentimental and patriotic campaign. A campaign
that, as we shall see, has been given real impetus by the recent
scrub fire.
On the Western Front commemorative tree planting has also played
a part in reinforcing, and occasionally subverting, the self-conscious
symmetry of many war cemeteries. It was often the case that the
distant dominion countries - notably Canada and Australia - took
a lead in planting for symbolic reasons. The Canadian government,
for example, accepted as a gift from the French people a vast tract
of the battlefield on Vimy Ridge. In the decades after the war it
was painstakingly transformed into the Vimy Memorial Park, 240 acres
of pock-marked ground strewn with preserved tunnels, trench systems,
cemeteries and a major war memorial. Here, as at other points on
the Western Front the Canadians have invested considerable financial
and emotional energy in commemorating their part in the conflict
and everywhere the maple leaf, national symbol of Canada, plays
a major role. South of Hooge on the Ypres Salient the Canadians
constructed a new road, lined with these trees. Called Canadalaan,
or Maple Avenue, it leads to the imposing Canadian Memorial on Mount
Sorrell (also known in 1915 as Hill 62). Several kilometres north,
at Westhoek, a single maple tree has been used in the memorial to
Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. It takes the rather
uncomfortable form of a circular stone seat built around a maple
tree that had been bought over from Canada and planted in 1958.
As recently as 1994 the Canadians were still drawing on the symbolic
power of the leaf in the modernist water fountain in London's Green
Park designed to commemorate the Canadian dead from two world wars.
In this remarkable piece several dozen leaves have been cast in
bronze and set into broad slabs of black marble to be washed over
by an incessant tide of water - reminiscent perhaps of the bodies
of Canadians killed on the beaches Dieppe or Normandy, or drowned
in the glutinous mud of Flanders.
Individual, preserved trees on the old battlefield are equally as
evocative. One such tree is fossilised as a relic on the Newfoundland
Memorial Park, near Beaumont Hamel on the Somme battlefield, an
80 acre tract of land on which the opposing trench lines have been
maintained. Half way across the green space of No man's Land is
'The Danger Tree' or 'Tree of Death' - a landmark that marked the
furthest advance of the Newfoundland troops on 1st July 1916. It
is possibly as well known now as it was on the original battleground.
The symbolic value of the tree as a marker point is more important
than its survival as a plant : the tree is long dead, a petrified
stalk held in position in a barrel of cement, but a popular and
important icon on battlefield tours.(15)
Further south, near the South African museum at Delville Wood guidebooks
draw ones attention to another tree - a hornbeam that is reckoned
to be the only tree in the whole wood to have survived the battles
of 1916. The tree has become an important staging post, another
shrine for the battlefield pilgrim. Unlike its counterpart in the
Newfoundland Park, the hornbeam has thrived and 'despite its shrapnel-filled
trunk, is carefully tended by the CWGC'. (16)
As at Gallipoli considerable value is given to trees derived from
home-grown seeds. The new South African museum and war memorial
at Delville Wood on the Somme is announced by two double lines of
oaks grown with great care from acorns bought across from French
Hook on Cape Colony, South Africa.
The value of such trees to the memorial process is crucial: individual
trees offset the strict regime of many military cemeteries and add
an idiosyncratic, personalised contribution in an otherwise highly
charged rhetorical environment.. They have also allowed relatives
of the dead an individual, sometimes dissenting, voice in the face
of official policy. (17) Furthermore, aboreal
intervention seems to have allowed the Dominion countries a continuing
role on the European battlefields of the Great War, one that is
not rendered static having been turned to stone and bronze, but
is instead constantly evolving and transforming itself through plant
growth. Australia and South Africa have constantly been re-defining
their relationship with the Mother Country, and more recently New
Zealand has been re-assessing its standing with Europe. Trees and
shrubs that serve as commemorative icons may be one expression,
in metaphorical guise, of the evolving dialogue with their imperial
past and the debt in human lives spent perpetuating that relationship.
The Politics of Planting
On the evening of July 25th 1994 a fire, on a front some 2 kilometres
wide and nearly 8 kms deep, swept across the former Anzac battlefield
on the Dardenelles. It consumed the forested peak of Chunuk Bair,
scorching the stone obelisk built as a memorial to the New Zealand
stand on that hill, and the next day swept north burning the scrubland
and almost devoured the CWGC compound at the beach-head. The regional
officer recalled that, as the fire traversed the old battlefield,
it ignited buried grenades and small arms ammunition adding to the
apocalyptic scene. (18)
When the flames were eventually extinguished over 4000 hectares
had been damaged, most of it within the boundaries of the Milli
National Park in which the majority of the CWGC land is located.
The destruction had been quite erratic: large stretches of ornamental
shrubbery at The Nek had not burnt, and the statuesque pine at Lone
Pine Cemetery had survived after strenuous efforts by CWGC staff.
Within weeks of the fire the Turkish local authorities - in the
first of several controversial moves - hired an army of migrant,
unskilled workers to clear the area. Although much of the burnt
wood may have recovered and sprouted in time, these workeds hacked
every twig down, cutting their way indiscriminately across the hillsides
lopping off the living with the dead, chopping down mature trees
and even prized specimens such as sandalwood and eucalyptus.
To have cleared such a vast area in so short a time was an extraordinary
achievement but it now seems that the Turkish authorities had other
motives. 1995 marked the 80th anniversary of the Landings in Gallipoli,
a large contingent of the world's press and media would be there
to mark the occasion. It must also be remembered that the Defence
of Gallipoli was a victory for the Turkish army - their single triumph
in five seperate campaigns - and 1995 has to be regarded as an important
anniversary in their history. The need to remember this period of
military achievement is a fairly recent phenomenon in Turkish culture.
In the past five years, after seven uneventful decades, the Turks
began to install gigantic figurative statues at key points on the
Gallipolean landscape. Like the CWGC monuments at Cape Helles and
Anzac, the original wave of Turkish memorials built in the 1920s
were fairly restrained objects, albeit highly modernist when compared
with the neo-classical obelisks and screen walls that mark the Empire
burial sites. The new generation of Turkish memorials are strident
figures that depict soldiers charging with bayonets drawn, fending
off attack, or helping wounded comrades. They are all made in bronze
and mounted on imposing pedestals and they are all large. The largest
and certainly the most bombastic is a 25 feet high figure of a soldier
charging down the crest of a hill as if about to turn back the Christian
invaders.
The patriotic symbolism does not stop at bronze statues. In March
1995 as the deadline for the 80th anniversary approached Turkish
foresters and soldiers began adding the finishing touches to their
battlefield. Already the charred slopes of Anzac had been systemmatically
replanted but with shrubs and saplings that may prove to be totally
unsuitable for the terrain and for the climate - row after row of
poplars, cypresses and large trees have been planted instead of
the thick, low scrub that previously existed. Furthermore they have
been planted in long straight lines that ignore the natural topography
of the land. Many of these plants have been positioned within the
boundaries of the CWGC land and will soon have to be moved and returned
to the authorities - a delicate task for the commission representative.
The final touches were made by the Ministry of Forestry, aided by
the local fire brigade, who began installing mature trees and large
shrubs to act as a floral dressing for the statuary. The project,
however well intentioned, will probably fail. Held up by guy ropes
and regularly hosed down by the parks' fire engines the trees will
have lasted until the actual anniversary day but not for much longer.
Twenty year old cypresses cannot be transported and transplanted
with such ease and be expected to survive in the Turkish climate.
The CWGC gardeners and officials, meanwhile, have managed to patch
up the ravages of the fire. The lawns are green and neatly clipped;
prompt intervention saved a number of trees from the indiscriminate
chainsaws of the clearing gangs, including a screen of mature conifers
that form a symbolic and decorative backdrop behind one of the key
cemeteries on the plateau. Elsewhere a number of trees planted by
the Returned Servicemen's League of Australia and New Zealand, though
they survived the fire, fell to the cutting gangs. Such indiscretions
cause a minor political furore, requiring considerable negotiating
skills of the commission's regional officer, a job described as
a fusion of 'horticulturalist, water-diviner, engineer and diplomat'.
The recent events in Turkey mark, perhaps, a new era in the culture
of commemoration. With the great period of memorial building long
past and the era of expensive and extensive repair now falling upon
the CWGC, perhaps it will be through the metaphor of trees, shrubs
and flowers that we can best remember the glorious dead. Perhaps
also, in our increasingly secular era trees and shrubs will become
the most appropriate icons of commemoration - inter-denominational
and culturally hybrid. So much of the work of the commission is
based upon the precept of land given 'in perpetuity' to be maintained
within a given notion of Englishness. This notion has been tested
to breaking point in recent years though it has not yet threatened
the commission's sense of mission.
The idea that trees could offer the most suitable form of war memorial
is not new. In 1916 a serving British officer suggested that the
most appropriate way to commemorate the war dead was to plant one
long avenue stretching from the Vosges to the sea. It would be a
self-perpetuating monument shorn of bombast and the rhetoric of
stone and bronze. 'It would', he wrote from the front 'make a fine
broad road on the 'No Man's Land between the lines, with paths for
pilgrim's on foot, and plant trees for shade, and fruit trees so
that the soil should not be altogether waste'.(19)
But this vision of a Via Sacra was not to be. The idea, with its
creator, perished in the trenches. Notes
1 Llewellyn, Nigel
(1991) The Art of Death, London, Reaktion Books, p.99 2
Northrop Frye (1957) Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton, New Jersey,
cited in Paul Fussell (1975) The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford,
Oxford University Press, p.244. 3
Middlebrook, Martin and Mary (1991) The Somme Battlefields, London,
Viking, p.18 4
CWGC Annual report 1993-94, p.29 5
Richard Talbot Kelly (1980) A Subaltern's Odyssey: A Memoir of the
Great War, London, William Kimber, p.45 6
A Stuart Dolden (1980) Cannon Fodder, Dorset Blandford Press, p.39
7 See Solomon J.
Solomon (1921) Strategic Camouflage, London and Guy Hartcup (1979)
Camouflage: A History of Concealment and Deception in War, Devon,
David and Charles, Devon. 8
Keith Henderson (1917) Letters to Helen, February 3 1917, p.99
9 Alistair Horne
(1962) The Price of Glory, London, Macmillan, p.351 10
Taylor, P and Cupper, P, (1989) Gallipoli: A Battlefield Guide,
Sidney, Kangaroo Press, p.177 11Philip
Longworth (1967) The Unending Vigil, London, Leo Cooper, p.15
12 Rose Coombes
(1976) Before Endeavour Fades, London, p.152 13
Longworth (1967) op.cit., p.113 14
Much of the layout at Gallipoli is in keeping with the stated wishes
of the Australian government. In 1919 the second report on the future
of graves on the peninsula suggested that:
" ... all Anzac graves should be retained in their present
positions namely: (1) all cemeteries remain on their present sites
strongly, fenced with slavaged material, the paths made up and
the cemeteries planted with small australian trees, not altering
the appearance of the battlefield. " Bean, Appendix V, Gallipoli
Mission, 1948/1990, p. 379-384.)
15 Coombs (1976) op.cit.,
p.85 16 ibid,
p. 96 17 The
insistence of a headstone instead of a cross, the principle of uniformity
and a ban on repatriation of bodies aroused much public anger after
the war instigating a powerful anti-IWGC lobby, culminating in a
fierce debate in the House of Commons (4th May 1920). The issue
is dealt with in detail in Longworth (1967) p. 44-55 18
See John Price, "Duty under Fire" The Gallipolian, No.76,
winter 1994 19
Alexander Douglas Gillespie (1916) 'The Sacred Way', Letters from
Flanders, London, Smith, Elder and Co. Note
on the Fieldwork
The fieldwork and research for this paper was carried out in Turkey
during March 1995. The CWGC staff and gardeners were able to guide
me to points of particular importance, especially the places where
commemorative trees had been chopped down, but much of the groundwork
was done by exploration and following battlefield maps and guidebooks.
Research on the western front, in Belgium and France, has been undertaken
during many visits in the past 10 years. References
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