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Online papers
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Paul Gough
'That Sacred Turf'
War Memorial Gardens as Theatres of War
(and Peace)
in 'Monuments and the Millennium', James and
James / English Heritage, 2001, 228 - 236, 4 x b and w illus. ISBN
1-873936 - 97 – 4
A version of this paper was given at 'Monuments
and the Millennium' conference at the Victoria and Albert Museum,
London, UK in May 1998.
i
This paper examines the idea of garden spaces and planting regimes
as a form of natural 'anti-monument'. Drawing upon examples from
Gallipoli in Turkey and Caen in Northern France the paper shows
how design teams are beginning to rely less on stone and cast bronze
in preference to symbolic planting schemes that require the pilgrim-visitor
to enter into a discursive, theatrical space. In these spaces the
dramaturgical is prioritised over the purely visual in challenging
and novel ways. The paper also reflects on the political and symbolic
potency of the floral tribute suggesting that the direction and
protocol of official mourning in the aftermath of the death of the
Princess of Wales in 1997 was influenced by these private and transient
memorials.
There had been problems with the planting. The grass at the cemetery
was French grass, and it seemed to her of the coarser type, inappropriate
for British soldiers to lie beneath. Her campaign over this with
the commission led nowhere. So one spring she took out a small spade
and a square yard of English turf kept damp in a plastic bag.
After dark she dug out the offending French grass and relaid the
softer English turf, patting it into place, then stamping it in.
She was pleased with her work, and the next year, as she approached
the grave, saw no indication of her mending. But when she knelt,
she realised that her work had been undone: the French grass was
back again.
(Barnes, 1996)
The redoubtable Miss Moss (of Julian Barnes' short story Evermore)
was never to find satisfaction with the foreign planting schemes
of the Commonwealth War Graves Cemeteries in France. Her frequent
attempts to personalise the graveside environment of her brother's
stone was annually frustrated by the strict procedures of official
protocol meant that Miss Moss had to resign herself to alien turf
and 'dusty geraniums'. Barnes' story brings out some of the key
issues in the tensions between a public and private agenda of grief.
How, in the face of the vast monuments and cemeteries of the battlefields,
could an individual mourner hope to personalise the symbolism of
commemoration ? What role might plants, shrubs and trees play in
opening up the processes of remembrance ? And, thirdly, could these
arboreal devices act as metaphors for collaboration and interaction
in the future design of new commemorative landscapes ?
This paper will attempt to answer these questions. In doing so we
will examine three case studies. Firstly, a memorial park on the
Somme battlefield in northern France. Secondly, a consecrated landscape
on the beachhead at Gallipoli in Turkey. And third, a newly designed
commemorative landscape in Normandy.(1) In the
process of exploring these landscapes I will be concentrating on
the role that trees, shrubs and plants can play in both extending
and critiquing the language of monumentalism. I will also reflect
on the current debates on the role played by memorials in asserting
ideas of national identity and social memory.
Our exploration begins in north-east France, in a landscape that
has been given a number of extraordinary and evocative titles :
The Killing Fields, The Dying Zone, The Dead Ground, the Silent
Cities. (Hurst, 1929, Coombs, 1983, Middlebrook,
1991, Slowe and Richards, 1986) Yet this landscape is only
two hours by car from England. During the Great War it was within
earshot of London, families took picnics at Beachy Head to the accompaniment
of the great artillery barrages on the Western Front.
At first sight the Somme has little in common with the other great
funerary landscapes of the world - the valley of the Kings in Thebes,
or the buried city of Pompeii. The Somme is a prosperous and comfortable
agricultural zone. The villages are compact and well-kept. In 1916
British soldiers who were sent there to prepare for the Great Push
described it as something like Salisbury Plain with its long views,
gently sloping downlands, many copses and small woods.
After the war, in the 1920s and 1930s, artists flocked to the old
battlefields to record the painstaking restoration process as each
building - irrespective of its original architectural merit - was
returned to its pre-war state. Artists besieged the authorities
for sketching permits. At the Royal College of Art, London, Professor
William Rothenstein (himself an Official War Artist) despatched
his students to the old front line to paint and draw the picturesque
ruination of Picardy and Artois. One artist wrote that it was crucial
that he too made the trip because he had missed out on seeing the
aftermath of the terrible earthquake at Messina in 1908. (2)
In her 1919-1920 folio of Western Front drawings, artist Olive Mudie-Cook
made one with the title 'A Modern Pompeii'. (3)
The artists had to work quickly. The programme of restoration was
impressive and resolute. It was, though, a process of replication
rather than innovation. George Steiner has described this perfection
of renewal as having little more than a 'lacqueured depth' resulting
in an obsession with the literal. (Steiner,
1971) In some of the smaller Belgian villages - such as Passchendaele
which was totally obliterated in the war - it is as if the buildings
have been borrowed from a Wild West movie, comprising a frontage
and little else, just a few props and supports to lend a sense of
community and architectural continuity. Despite its antique appearance,
one travel writer has written, the city of Ypres is actually more
recent than Milton Keynes. (Fountain, 1998)
In his book on the Great War, Paul Fussell remarks on the difficulties
in recovering a feeling for the actualities of the trench war (Fussell,
1975) Entrenchment, he argues has long been a dead metaphor. Nowhere
is this more true than on the deserted agricultural plains of the
Somme. It takes a giant leap of the imagination to re-connect this
vast space with the teeming industrialised territory occupied by
the British in 1916.
From contemporary film and photographs we know that for tens of
miles the French landscape sustained a huge and complex supply line
that required a massive logistics effort, hundreds of vehicles,
thousands of men in supply depots, rail links, shipping lines, armament
factories all working to maintain a handful of men holding a shallow
ditch in the ground. The ditches, though, are still there. In some
places, such as at Vimy Ridge, they have been preserved in concrete
as a permanent marker to that most temporary existence.
But even where they have been ploughed over, the disturbed chalk
still marks out the line of the former trenches, zig-zagging and
weaving crazily across the gently sloping downland. At each ploughing
the earth coughs up more of its iron lode - encrusted shells are
heaped up at cross-roads to await collection by itinerant bomb-disposal
squads. Scattered in the fields is the archaeological proof of the
conflict - lead shrapnel balls, fragments of rusted shell casing,
a crust of clavicle or rib bone, lengths of grotesquely twisted
barbed wire. Historians speak of the importance of 'walking the
ground' in gaining a true feel for battle terrain and its related
fieldcraft. For others, the process of scouring the freshly ploughed
fields of the Somme is to try to unite the volume of memory with
today's actualities. It is, though, an almost unbridgeable chasm.
As James Mayo has observed of ancient battleparks 'Place and event
have been tied, but little more'. (Mayo,
1988)
There is then a restrained drama in this historicised landscape.
The scattered metal fragments are potent scenic props on this stage.
But the true players in this theatre of war are the monuments.
ii
Much has been written on the symbolic role and social value of war
memorials. For over fifty years the gigantic stone piles dotted
across the Western Front and throughout Europe have been regarded
with awe and deep respect. Despite their absurd size, the arches,
gateways and towers designed and built by the Allied side were revered
for their restrained neo-classical style and their subtle use of
materials and scale. In the past ten years though, architectural
and cultural historians have questioned the authority of the victor's
monument.
The debate has been particularly energetic in post-unified Germany.
By reflecting on the nation's fascist past and the rhetoric of military
commemoration, artists and historians such as Martin Brozsat have
argued that monuments do little but 'coarsen' historical understanding,
rather than clarify meaning they bury events 'beneath layers of
national myth'. (Brozsat, in Young, 1990)
Many commentators have pointed to the ideological function of the
war memorial as 'something constructed after the event which it
celebrates or indicates, and it entails an interpretation of the
event which those who come later are called upon to accredit.' (van
den Abbeele, 1994) James Young has argued that many war memorials
are little more than the 'locus for self aggrandising national memory'.
(Young, 1990) Artists such as The
Critical Art Ensemble use the world wide web to actively critique
our cultural assumptions about the status of monuments;
Monuments are the means to forgetfulness. Memory dissipates in
their shadow. We shall never forget. We will always forget. The
monument does not protect its slaves from repetition. In fact,
it ensures repetition. The classical ghettos of Derry and Palestine
are the products of forgetfulness.
(Buchler and Papastergiadis, 1996)
The last decade has seen the rise of the counter- or anti-memorial.
Such artists as Jochen and Esther Gerz have argued and built interactive
monuments that invite (indeed require) a public response, however
contentious, and an active participation in its making, however
critical of the larger cause. The resulting artworks are the antithesis
of the grandiose ennobling stone and bronze monuments of the public
domain. They are often crudely constructed, modestly located and,
above all do not alleviate a sense of guilt. A point recognised
by James Young when he writes that conventional memorials bear the
brunt of national memory and in so doing these 'monuments may relieve
viewers of their memory-burden'. (Young,
1990)
There is, though, little physical relief from the monuments on the
Somme. As if to compensate for the fragmented evidence in the surrounding
fields, memorials such as the Thiepval Arch and the Menin Gate are
immense, solid objects. They speak of immutability, permanence and
continuity of belief; everything that the infantryman's life was
not. Not only is the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme
'unmissable' writes Geoff Dyer:
'it is also, strangely and appropriately, unphotographable. No
photograph can convey its scale, its balance, its overwhelming
effect on the senses.'
(Dyer, 1994)
'Everything seems to be exaggerated; the huge stone wreaths, the
acres of carved names, the piling up of the arches, the way it
dominates every vista on the battlefield. In this highly charged
rhetorical space there is little room for personal negotiation;
the spectator remains firmly on the outside looking in or, more
often, up.'
(Harbison, 1991, Winter, 1995)
iii
To complement the emotional intensity of these architectural colossi,
several fragments of the battlescape have been set aside as memorial
gardens or peace parks. A good example of the former can be found
on the Somme. The Sheffield Memorial Park is a tract of ground that
has been periodically decorated with successive waves of commemorative
icons.
The Park sits on the northern sector of the old battlefield at Serre.
One of its perimeter edges is formed by the line of a British trench
that was the startline for troops from northern England. The park
is littered with official memorial architecture; a formal gateway,
an arch that helps to announce the space, while also declaring it
a place of reverence and designated memory, and a tract of conifer
trees that both projects the symbolism of regeneration, while serving
to maintain an uncluttered ground plane that makes it easy to read
the cratered surface of the old battlefield.
Over the decades, these official signifiers have been supplemented
by markers of local, individual memory - brass plaques hammered
into the conifer trees, a cross placed by a bereaved relative and
the annual harvest of poppy wreaths. More recently, a memorial wall
has been sited at the corner of the wood. It follows the shallow
line of trenches from which the doomed Accrington Pals advanced
onto the German lines. It is a curious construction - half wall,
half ruin. Visually it is reminiscent of the thousands of ruins
caused by the siege warfare along this front. Symbolically, it may
suggest that this is only a fragment of a building, that this is
a job only half done. Its material construction is especially important
- the bricks were made in Accrington and bought over to France for
this specific purpose. (Middlebrook, 1991)
As we shall see, this habit of sending native stones, plants, trees
and even soil to distant battlefields is a feature of many commemorative
gardens in France. It is part of the complex fetishism of remembrance
which is best served by transient natural forms rather than fixed
architectural emblems.
Aesthetically, the fragment of brick wall at Serre has upset the
designed relationship between the neo-classical archway and the
preserved battle space. But, in such rhetorically charged spaces,
aesthetics count for little. Sheffield Memorial Park has been re-appropriated
by a memory-interest group, as have many new sites in this part
of France.(4) The brick fragment is evidence of
a continued need to extend the iconography of mourning and to localise
(and so rejuvenate) memory, instead of accepting grief as something
national and abstract.
The Memorial Park is a piece of theatre, but one in which the memorial
furnishings are props that only seem to accentuate the emptiness
of the surrounding landscape. This notion of emptiness seems crucial
to our understanding of the impact of many Great War memorials.
After all, the 'first and best known' marker of martial memory -
the Cenotaph in Whitehall - was designed as an empty tomb, dedicated
to the honour of those buried elsewhere. (Greenberg,
1989) The Somme landscape is a place emptied of its military
occupancy but still saturated with its memory. It is as one writer
in the war put it 'not empty ... rather full of emptiness'. (Farrer,
1918)
Just as the Cenotaph remains largely invisible for 364 days of the
year so the Sheffield Memorial Park becomes truly activated when
swarming with visitors. Occasionally, the park is inundated with
British schoolchildren. Their teachers line the children in signle
file along the shallow trenches while relating the history of the
space. The talk is bought to an abrupt end when the teacher blows
hard on a whistle to mark the moment when the Pals battalions 'jumped
the bags'.
The preserved battle gardens of the Western Front might almost have
been expressly designed for this purpose. A favourite ploy of the
battlefield tour guides at Vimy Ridge memorial park is to divide
a coachloads of pilgrims and line them up either side of the craters
that once divided the two front-lines. In pakkamacs and golfing
caps they stand in mute rows just yards apart. Many commentators
despise this form of vicarious entertainment. 'It is the contemporary
visitor's duty to resist the "ease" of imaginary projection'
argues George Van Den Abbeele, we must 'remain acutely aware of
the gap between what is there, and what is not there (or there no
longer)' (Van den Abbeele, 1994) Yet,
despite its fraudulence, the physical act might help us appreciate
the absurd compression of space on the 1917 battlefield, and gauge
something of the sense of exposure experienced by men once they
left the relative security of the trench world. iv
By way of contextualising the symbolic power of plants and trees
in commemorative environments I cite a cartoon that appeared in
the satirical press recently. It depicted an accident or a scene
of disaster. Three figures clutching bouquets were trying to push
their way through the crowd. One of them was shouting 'Stand back,
we've got the floral tributes'.
The floral tribute extends the imagery of commemoration, acting
as an initial marker to more formal and solid modes of memory. Cut
flowers, wreaths and paper poppies allow anyone to participate in
the public process of grieving. This was exemplified in the aftermath
of the death of Princess Diana when the streets of Imperial and
governmental London relinquished some of their vested authority.
Normally, one can trace the routeways of civic power across central
London to Whitehall by plotting a line through the statues and memorial
architecture that are the 'public face of our national culture'.
(Rutherford, 1997) In stone and bronze
they are the powerpoints on an imperial and royal circuit board.
But as we know the funeral route had to be extended to encompass
the crowds and to accommodate the volume of grief. It had to allow
both spatial and symbolic respect for the acres of flowers spreading
from the emotional pressure points - like a floral aneurysm - at
St James Palace and Clarence House. It was extraordinary that the
symbols of transience and ephemerality - balloons, candles, cut
flowers wrapped in paper, messages and poems pinned to trees - should
so divert the momentum of official protocol.
Our appreciation of the symbolic value of flowers is very sophisticated.
It spans a spectrum of symbolism from the rose (the classical icon
of nurtured grief) to its opposite - the poppy, symbol of unpredictable
growth, ephemerality and the sleep of reason. On distant battlefields
the symbolic value of certain flowers has become part of a complex
process of nationalism and emotional jurisdiction. (Gough,
1996)
In Western Turkey - on the old battlefields of Gallipoli - there
are 31 small Commonwealth War Graves Cemeteries. Despite poor drainage,
insecure ground and occasional bush fires they survive the hostile
climate and are tended with the customary care of the war graves
commission. There have been some concessions to the conditions and
to the social environment: high perimeter walls and deep, stone
lined ha-has protect the lawns from animals and ensure adequate
drainage. Many cemeteries have a single stone screen-wall which
bears the cross of sacrifice in relief, as opposed to a free standing
cross found in Christian countries. However, to the frustration
of some Australian veterans most of the plants in the cemeteries
are indigenous to Turkey. In the 1930s commission horticulturists
attempted to acclimatise over 100 different types of eucalyptus,
but only succeeded in developing a robust strain for the lower slopes.
(Longworth, 1967)
Why should veterans show such frustration ? Partly it would seem,
because the process of planting was an essential part of their grieving
process. It was a process that was - and indeed still is - collaborative
and inclusive. As early as 1915 the commission had put in place
a scheme to plant home-grown maple seeds on Canadian graves in France
and Belgium. That same year the Australian wattle had been planted
around Anzac graves in Turkey and cuttings of olearia and other
native seedlings had been shipped over 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, for example, regard iris, marigolds and cypresses
as suitable. (Longworth, 1967)
Unlike the grand monuments on the Western Front, the rhetoric of
commemoration in Gallipoli is best conveyed through its planting
regimes. In one of the war cemeteries stands a lone tree planted
by a bereaved father. Bought over from Manchester, it is reputedly
the only English oak on the peninsula. It has an unofficial presence
within the strict regime and protocol of the cemetery, and is doubly
meaningful because of it.
The story of the Lone Pine is further evidence of the symbolic potency
of particular trees. At the height of the battles in mid-1915 the
Allies chose to name a Turkish strongpoint after a solitary dwarf
pine that dominated the horizon above the beachheads. (Moorehead,
1956) After the war, Australians clearing the battlefield
found the stump of the pine in a 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 symbolic locations in
Australia. Then, in a reversal of the original idea, seeds were
sent back to Gallipoli and planted in the presumed location of the
original tree. Luckily, that tree survived a terrible scrub fire
that ravaged the Anzac battlefields in 1994.
Surprising as it at may seem, there is nothing unique about the
Australian seed exchange. Last year a team of Bristol-based great
War enthusiasts re-planted a tree on the site of 'The Lone Tree'
which played a crucial part as a gathering spot and a datum point
during the Battle of Loos. The ridges of Gallipoli are strewn with
conifers planted by the returned Servicemen's league and other ex-service
organisations.
The British reserve a special veneration for the few trees that
survived the war. In a memorial park on the Somme stands 'the Danger
Tree' or 'Tree of Death' which acted as a landmark in the centre
of No Man's Land. The tree is long dead. It is now a petrified stalk
held in position in a barrel of cement but that makes it no less
popular as an icon for battlefield tourists.
Further south, in the middle of Delville Wood, is a hornbeam that
is reckoned to be the only tree in the wood to have survived the
terrible bombardments of 1916. Despite a shrapnel filled trunk it
thrives and is the focus of near-devotional attention. A large stone
marker proclaims its unique status. (Middlebrook,
1991)
It would be easy to put this down to a bizarre mix of arboreal sentimentality
and regimental ritual. But (as Joseph Beuys and Ian Hamilton Finlay
have constantly reminded us) tree planting is a political act. And,
to return to my theatre analogy, on some old battlegrounds trees
and shrubs are more than just stage scenery. After the fire in Gallipoli
the Turkish authorities cleared the entire battlefield area; many
commemorative trees were chopped down, war graves commission planting
schemes were threatened and new shrubs and conifers were planted
by the Turkish military. A compromise was agreed, but the tensions
are still evident. The argument is about who controls memory. After
all, the campaign in the Dardenelles was won by the Turkish army
and the modern Islamic state was forged on these precipitous ridges.
(Gough, 1996a)
The tension in who controls the historic perspective is being exacerbated
by a recent wave of statues installed by the Turkish authorities.
This new generation of memorials takes the form of giant striding
figures, cast in bronze and mounted on imposing pedestals. They
make a strange and uncomfortable contrast to the restrained and
rather discordant neo-classical architecture of the Allied war cemeteries.
They stand yards apart contesting control of ridge lines and once
important vantage points, 'parallel monologues, acting as if the
other were not present'. (Ayliffe et al,
1991)
So what have we understood by these strange horticultural games
being played out between Turkey, Australia, northern Europe and
South Africa ?
Firstly, for those of us who know anything about the highly ritualised
mythologising of the Great War, the trans-continental seed exchange
is typical of the veneration afforded certain icons from that period.
In his book on the Canadian response to the memory of the war, Jonathan
Vance, writes of the merchandise in stone fragments, shards of stained
glass, and other relics of the Western Front that found their way
back to Canada. (Vance, 1997)
Secondly, we must appreciate the symbolic value of tree planting.
In many Great War battlefields individual trees planted by bereaved
relatives help offset the formal planting of commission cemeteries
and add an idiosyncratic, subjectivised contribution to the highly
charged rhetoric of official mourning.
And, thirdly, arboreal intervention seems to have allowed the many
Dominion countries a continuing role on the European battlefields
of the Great War. The role is not a static role centred on repairing
masonry and building new museums, but an evolving, transformative
role channelled through plant life. Perhaps also, the trees and
shrubs are crucial metaphors for those Dominion countries (particularly
Australia and French-Canada) who are in the difficult process of
re-negotiating their relationship with Britain. v
My final case study is a memorial garden near Caen, in Normandy.
It was designed by a team of students and staff from a Canadian
University in an open competition. The brief was to design a garden
that would make use of the valley and steep walls immediately beneath
the huge museum of le memorial. It is intended that the museum will
be ringed by gardens designed (and funded) by each of the nations
whose armies liberated the city in 1944. (Gough,
1998)
The most ambitious garden has been built by American veterans organisations.
It takes the form of a walk culminating in a vast pool, which then
forms a continuous flow of water. Whereas there is something faintly
sci-fi about the futuristic curves of the pool, the waterfall space
is earthed in the spirit of seed and soil exchange that we have
seen so often in memorial gardens. Each of the military units from
the Normandy campaign has contributed a stone, a plaque, tablet
or painted rock to create a synthesis of trophy room and fireside
hearth.
The Canadian garden, by contrast, plays a much more subtle, but
very demanding game. In effect the designers have used the topography
of the valley to suggest a particular journey across water and land.
This is not a garden at all; it is a provocative piece of landscape
theatre which conflates a spatial symbolism with a temporal concept.
The space has been designed to mimic the Canadian's soldiers progress
during the Second World War - as he moves from home earth, across
water, through a period of exposure and hazard, up an arduous, often
disorientating climb, to the final breach in a seemingly solid defensive
wall. The progress culminates in the pristine lawn (the ultimate
symbol of horticultural supremacy) on the plateau above the valley
sides.
The journey begins with water. Another Canadian memorial (this time
in Green Park, London) also uses an unceasing flow of water to suggest
cleansing and regeneration. In Green Park the water is studded with
bronze maple leaves : at Caen the pool is inscribed with a Latin
text (No day will erase your generation from our memory). Is it
too fanciful to suggest that the pool acts as a metaphor for the
Atlantic crossing, a point somehow reinforced by the grid like structure
of the slabs which seem to echo the longitude and latitude lines
of admiralty charts? (Gough, 1996b)
The second episode is the zig-zag path that makes a slow ascent
of the steep valley side. Here, we are confronted by a steep wilderness
of thick, prairie grass. But the grass changes colour and texture
rather abruptly. A broad swathe some ten metres wide is planted
with brown grass, while either side the grass grows in rich green
clumps. The effect is rather disquieting: it is as if a broad band
of the hillside has been scorched, leaving nothing but burnt plants.
In addition, the tufts are knitted into the soil by a cellular plastic
webbing that resembles a thin veneer of skin flowing over the hillside.
These associations have caused considerable unrest amongst the gardens
critics. Veterans organisations have objected to the symbolic inference
that this part of the garden represents the fate of so many Canadian
soldiers in the campaign to liberate Europe
This garden takes us into a new and very different landscape of
commemoration. The burnt grass, the exaggerated awkwardness of the
zig-zag slope and the oppressive weight of the concrete wall above
make this a rather provocative design. It does not offer the solace
and reverence of some of the other funerary terrains we have examined.
If anything, it extends the vicarious role of the battlefield pilgrim,
but in an uncomfortable, perhaps rather harsh fashion.
vi
To conclude. I have argued that an understanding of the symbolic
and metaphorical role of plants, trees and shrubs in a commemorative
space is crucial in extending and opening out the process of remembrance.
Plant life has a natural cycle of growth, fertility, decay and death
which is assiduously avoided in the conventional iconography of
martial memory. Plant life rarely has the permanence suggested by
hewn rock and cast metals. Nor do trees and shrubs (however well
tended) offer the illusion of permanence. Lewis Mumford astutely
argued that 'stone gives a false sense of continuity, and a deceptive
assurance of life'. (Mumford, 1938)
Remembrance gardens, battlefield sites and symbolic plantings allow
a much needed interaction and participation. Even the greatest of
the post-war monument builders recognised the power of the unbuilt
space of the battlefield. In 1917 Edwin Lutyens described to his
wife the strange charisma of the military cemeteries, before (somewhat
inevitably) dedicating himself to the great task of solidifying
memory on solid metal:
The graveyards, haphazard from the needs of much to do and little
time for thought. And then a ribbon of isolated graves like a
milky way across miles of country where men were tucked in where
they fell. Ribbons of little crosses each touching each across
a cemetery, set in a wilderness of annuals and where one sort
of flower is grown the effect is charming, easy and oh so pathetic.
One thinks for the moment no other monument is needed. Evanescent
but for the moment is almost perfect and how misleading to surmise
in this emotion and how some love to sermonise. But the only monument
can be one in which the endeavour is sincere to make such monument
permanent - a solid ball of bronze!
(Percy and Ridley, 1985)
Endnotes 1
The fieldwork for this paper was made possible by research grants
from the faculty of Art, Media and Design at the University of the
West of England, Bristol. I am also indebted to Prof.Terry Copp,
Wilfred Laurier University, Canada for his generous support during
my research in Caen, France. 2
See artists file no. 346/7 part I, Department of Art, Imperial War
Museum, London. 3
Portfolio held in The Liddle Collection, Leeds University.
4 On the old Somme battlefield,
for example, there is a newly installed obelisk purchased and dedicated
by Ulstermen to commemorate the Ulster Division attack on 1st July
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