In Holborn, by contrast — or, more quietly, in the French village of Flers, where there is an almost identical figure — an infantryman mounts a pedestal of land, rifle in hand, encircled by the vast radius of air that extends from head to bayonet-tip to trailing foot. This framing circle renders the sculpture (by Albert Toft) both more powerful and more vulnerable, extending his command of space and fixing our attention, as if through a sniper’s sights, on the soldier at its dead centre.
Near Huddersfield, in Elland, the light has called it a day. Twilight is falling through the bare trees. November here can last ten months of the year. The damp grass is covered in damp leaves. On a granite plinth a bronze soldier keeps watch in a drizzle of mist, looking out at the damp road. The collar of his greatcoat is turned up against the coming cold. Old rain drips from the rim of his helmet. Except for the verdigris streaking his shoulders, all colour is a shade of grey. Brodsky:
Leaning on his rifle,
the Unknown Soldier grows even more unknown.
At Stalybridge a soldier slumps into death. His body crumples beneath him but an angel is there; she has been waiting, it seems, for exactly this moment. Berger has described another almost identical memorial in a village in France:
The angel does not save him, but appears somehow to lighten the soldier’s fall. Yet the hand which holds the wrist takes no weight, and is no firmer than a nurse’s hand taking a pulse. If his fall appears to be lightened, it is only because both figures have been carved out of the same piece of stone.
They are all over the country, these Tommies: taking leave of their loved ones (in Newcastle), standing to, resting, reading letters, attacking (in Kelvingrove Park in Glasgow), binding their wounds (in Croydon), helping injured comrades (in Argyll), dying, returning home (to Cambridge). Representing and preserving a sample of the multitudinous gestures of the British soldier at war, these frequently duplicated poses put me in mind of the Airfix soldiers which moulded my taste in memorial art.
They are all over the country, these Tommies..
Elland Memorial
Age may not weary them but the years have condemned. Sundozed and snow-dazed, they sweat in greatcoats in the summer or freeze in shirtsleeves through the long winter months. Sprayed by feminists — ‘Dead Men Don’t Rape’ — and damaged by vandals, all are rotted by pollution. Powerless to protect themselves, their only defence, like that of the blind, is our respect.
The self-contained ideal of remembrance
Sometimes they are the only old things in the new No Man’s Land of bankrupt businesses and boarded offices, broken lifts and derelict estates. They have been around so long they seem part of the landscape: it is impossible to imagine a time when they were not here. For years now, children who watched the statues being unveiled have been dying of old age. Perhaps what they commemorate, then, is their own survival, the enduring idea of remembrance. The most common form of sculpture — a soldier, head bowed, leaning on his downward-pointed rifle — actually represents the self-contained ideal of remembrance: the soldier being remembered and the soldier remembering. Sculptures like this appeal to — and are about — the act of remembrance itself: a depiction of the ideal form of the emotion which looking at them elicits.
Throughout the 1920s, and especially in the early thirties, attempts were made to ally the rituals of Remembrance with the cause of peace: war memorials, it was argued, should be termed peace memorials; white ‘peace’ poppies were sold by the Peace Pledge Union as an alternative to the red poppies of the British Legion. Already, by 1928, however, the public was beginning to cease thinking of itself as ‘Post-War’ and was beginning, in the words of a contemporary commentator, ‘to feel that it was living in the epoch “preceding the next Great War”’. But this was exactly the period when the Great War was being remembered — in novels and memoirs — most intensely. Again there is a strange temporal elision as the idea of Remembrance merges into a notion of Preparedness. Accordingly, sculptures erected in memory of the First World War come also to look forward to the Second. As war with Germany looms again, the memorial sculptures come to represent a form of symbolic rearming whose job is not simply to protect the past but to guard against possible futures.
On the Croydon memorial P. J. Montford’s figure bandages a wound as if in readiness for further exertions; in Port Sunlight two fit men — sculpted by William Goscombe John — prepare to defend a third who is wounded; John Angel’s figure in Exeter and Walter Marsden’s in St Anne’s on Sea show soldiers weary but ready (if necessary the rifle that was broken in victory in one sculpture will be wielded as a club in this one).
Jagger’s figures lent themselves particularly well to the new conditions in which remembrance merged into resolve. Resisting suggestions that any peace symbolism be included in the Royal Artillery Memorial, he had emphasized that the ‘terrific power’ of the artillery represented the ‘last word in force’. This, he had insisted, was a war memorial.
On the south coast, in Portsmouth, Jagger’s machine-gunners were already in place. As plans were made to entrench ourselves in our island stronghold, the weary Tommies became sculptural equivalents of the Home Guard: men from an earlier war whose effectiveness was largely symbolic. This time it was not gallant Belgium but Britain itself that had to be protected — and these figures became everyday reminders of Britain’s resolve to stand firm. Battered but resilient, they were visible prefigurements of Churchill’s determination to fight invaders at every street corner.
In 1944 the Guards Division Memorial in St James’s Park was badly damaged by a German bomb. The sculptor Gilbert Ledward thought this improved it because ‘it looked as though the monument itself had been in action’. When the Ministry of Works got round to repairing it, Ledward suggested that some ‘honourable scars of war’ be allowed to remain — a way of registering how, in memorializing one war, his monument had participated in another.
Sculpted by Philip Lindsey Clark, the Southwark War Memorial in Borough High Street shows a soldier striding forward. Soon after it was unveiled, this photograph was taken. Few other images contain so much time.
Time
The statue preserves or freezes a moment from the war. This record itself ages, very slowly. Since it was taken, both the statue and the photograph itself have aged. Looking at it now, what we see is an old photograph of a new statue. In the background, gazing at the camera, are four men and a boy. The long exposure time has caused these figures — who moved slightly — to ghost, especially the two on the right whom we can see right through. Any figures walking past will have vanished completely. Because it is utterly still, the statue itself is substantial and perfectly defined — all the more strikingly so given that it shows an infantryman moving purposefully forward. The photograph is therefore a record of time passing: both in relation to the statue (which, relative to the people looking at it, is fixed in time) and through it (because the statue itself no longer looks quite as it does in the photograph). Compared with the solid permanence of the memorial, even the buildings in the background seem liable to fade. What we see, then, is the sculpture’s own progress through time; or, more accurately, time as experienced by the sculpture. Simultaneously, the old time of the onlookers, this moment of vanishing time, is preserved in the picture which records its passing.