In one of the best passages in his memoirs, Sassoon watched an exhausted Division returning from an offensive on the Somme:
Now there came an interval of silence in which I heard a horse neigh, shrill and scared and lonely. Then the procession of returning troops began. The campfires were burning low when the grinding, jolting column lumbered back. The field guns came first, with nodding men sitting stiffly on weary horses, followed by wagons and limbers and field-kitchens. After this rumble of wheels came the infantry, shambling, limping, straggling and out of step. If anyone spoke it was only a muttered word, and the mounted officers rode as if asleep. The men had carried their emergency water in petrol-cans, against which bayonets made a hollow clink; except for the shuffling of feet, this was the only sound. Thus, with an almost spectral appearance, the lurching brown figures flitted past with slung rifles and heads bent forward under basin-helmets.
Sassoon was ‘overawed’ by what he had witnessed; it seemed as though he ‘had watched an army of ghosts’. In that characteristic wartime attitude of projected retrospect Sassoon felt he ‘had seen the war as it might be envisioned by some epic poet a hundred years hence’. Almost ninety years later this film is the epic, endless poem of the war.
Bearing a wounded comrade over his shoulder, a soldier floats towards the camera. Silent, ghostlike, slow.
Watching the sleep-walking figures we enter dream time, dead time: the remembered dreams of the dead.
A river of men, flowing towards death. Marching to the front, endlessly. Survivors limping back, lessly.
One thing emerges plainly from all this footage: war, for the ordinary soldier, was a continuation of labouring by other means. The battlefield was a vast open-air factory where hours were long, unions not permitted and safety standards routinely flouted. It thereby combined the worst aspects of agricultural labour and industrial shiftwork. The ‘mysterious army of horsemen, ploughmen and field workers who’, in Ronald Blythe’s words, ‘fled the wretchedness of the land in 1914’ discovered, in Flanders, an intensification of wretchedness. Miners found themselves engaged in exactly the same activity they had pursued in peacetime — except here their aim in burrowing beneath the earth was to lay hundreds of pounds of high explosive beneath the enemy’s feet. The Germans, meanwhile, were engaged in similar operations and sometimes the two tunnel systems broke through to each other. Hundreds of feet beneath the earth ‘men clawed at each other’s throats in these tunnels and beat each other to death with picks and shovels’.
For those above ground the chief activity recorded on film is carrying. Before the battle, shells; after, stretchers. Life, one realizes, is primarily a question of loading and unloading, fetching and carrying. Many of the shells are too heavy to be lifted and have to be winched or rolled into position. Every piece of equipment looks like it weighs a ton. There were no lightweight nylon rucksacks or Gore-tex boots. Things were made of iron and wood, even cloth looks like it has been woven from iron filings. Everything weighed more then. Weighed down with equipment, men do not march to the front so much as carry themselves there. Greatcoats are not worn but lugged:
We marched and saw a company of Canadians,
Their coats weighed eighty pounds at least.
This is one of the lessons of history: things get lighter over time. The future may not be better than the past but it will certainly be lighter. Hence the burden, the weight of the past.
We feel this especially strongly when looking at the memorial sculptures of Charles Sargeant Jagger. Some sculptors coax stone into a deceptive lightness; Jagger emphasizes its heaviness.
In the 1907 relief Labour (since destroyed) men strain and sweat to shift a piece of equipment; one figure in the right-hand corner seems exhausted, injured or wounded. Only the slightest addition of detail would be necessary to render the scene suitable for use as a relief on Jagger’s best-known work, the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner.
We stopped there one night in August. Obscured by trees, isolated for most of the day by a moat of traffic, no one else in the car even knew the memorial was there. There were four of us, all drunk. It was two in the morning and still warm. Moonlight glanced off the black figures. We looked up at the figure lugging shells, his gaze fixed blankly into the future or the past or whatever it is that the present eventually becomes.
The weight of the past
‘Men became reminiscent and talkative as they looked at the figure carrying four 18-pound shells in the long pockets of his coat,’ reported the Manchester Guardian the morning after the memorial was unveiled on 18 October 1925.
He would perhaps carry them a long distance, they said, if the gun was camouflaged, and like as not he would have two more under his arms. It meant a great weight added to the 96 pounds of an artillery man’s equipment.
Dead weight
Even in rest the weight of their equipment drags down on the men. We walked around the memorial, sheltered from the noise of the traffic. At the side of the memorial a figure lay covered by a greatcoat, part of his face — an ear, the line of his jaw — just visible. He is simply dead weight.
Jagger’s distinctive style combines this almost hulking heaviness of stone and equipment with the most delicate of details: you can almost see the hairs on the shell-carrier’s forearms, hear the rustle of the letter read by the soldier waiting at Paddington station. A scarf wrapped around his neck, a greatcoat draped around his shoulders, absorbed in the act of reading. The promise and dread of letters. Propped against the bar of the Café de l’Industrie, I open an envelope with my name in your writing. The second paragraph wonders, in your latest flourish of colloquial English, how I am ‘bearing up’.
Charles Sargeant Jagger: memorial at Paddington station
The scale and strength of Jagger’s figures recall the heroes of classical sculpture, but they are utterly ordinary. His sculptures are of average men whose heroism lies in their endurance. Jagger himself was shot through the left shoulder in Gallipoli in November 1915; in April 1918 he was again badly wounded at the Battle of Neuve Eglise. On both occasions he made a speedy recovery: ‘I heal,’ he wrote in May 1918, ‘almost before I’ve been hit.’ What he emphasizes in his sculpture is not the body’s vulnerability but its resilience, its capacity for bearing up. His figures — most obviously in the Hoylake and West Kirby Memorial, or in the identical maquette ‘Wipers’ at the Imperial War Museum — stand their ground, guarding their own memory. Their backs are, typically and literally, against the wall.
Public sculpture aims to display itself to maximum effect. There is an inherent difficulty, therefore, in using as the basis for such sculpture figures whose main aim was the exact opposite: maximum concealment. During the day, front-line troops stayed below ground level; only under cover of darkness or during a major offensive did they venture out into the open. Rather than revealing itself on a plinth, then, an authentic figure should, except on rare occasions, seek cover behind or — ideally — beneath it.
Like almost all of Jagger’s figures the Artillery officers are sheltered and protected by their own Memorial. Only the hunched machine-gunners of Jagger’s Portsmouth Memorial are framed by open air.
Jagger may have been the best but he was not the only sculptor to benefit from the needs of Remembrance. Commissions for most of the British memorials in France were given to architects but at home the post-war period represented a boom period for sculptors. For French sculptors times were even better. Thirty thousand war memorials — or fifty a day — were raised in France between 1920 and 1925. ‘There hasn’t been a golden age like this since the Greeks, since the cathedrals,’ says a memorial sculptor in Tavernier’s film Life and Nothing But. ‘Even the most ham-fisted sculptor is inundated with commissions. It’s like a factory production line. Talk of the Renaissance, this is the Resurrection.’