Returned here after my previous visit 5.9.91.
PS: The rubbish has returned too.
The pages of these visitors’ books are clipped in a green ringhooped binder. When there are no pages left, new ones are clipped in. What happens to the old ones? Burned? Filed away in archives? If the latter, then perhaps an academic will one day salvage all these pages and use this hoard of raw data as the basis of a comprehensive survey of attitudes to the war, the ways in which it is remembered and misremembered. There is certainly enough material to fill a book: people who come here are moved and want to record their feelings, explain themselves.
And this book, really, is just an extended entry, jotted on pages ripped from the visitors’ book of a cemetery on the Somme.
What with the weather and the escalating cost of the trip, we decide to abandon our plan to be at Thiepval for Armistice Day. I am all for continuing with the big push to Ors, where Owen is buried, but by now serious questions are being raised about my leadership. Paul and Mark are refusing to budge.
‘You’ll damn well go where I order you,’ I say at last.
‘What are you going to do? Court-martial us?’ says Mark.
‘Yeah. Fuck off, Hitler,’ says Paul.
‘Wrong war, mate,’ chant Mark and I.
We decide to head back to Vimy Ridge (missed on the way down due to a navigational error) before beating a retreat to Boulogne.
Since Armistice Day has been incorporated into Remembrance Day, there is little point remaining here until the eleventh, but, as we drive towards Vimy, I ponder the significance of dates — 4 August 1914, 1 July 1916, 11 November 1918 — and the extent to which the ebbing and flowing of the memory of the Great War are determined by the gravitational pull of the calendar.
In his study of Holocaust memorials, James Young points out how
when events are commemoratively linked to a day on the calendar, a day whose figure inevitably recurs, both memory of events and the meanings engendered in memory seem ordained by nothing less than time itself.
The actual date of the event to be commemorated often falls as arbitrarily as a person’s birthday. In the case of the Great War, which ended punctually at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the temporal significance of the moment and day on which hostilities ceased was consciously pre-determined. If the intention was to bring the future memory of the war into the sharpest possible focus, it could hardly have been better arranged: the various ceremonies of Remembrace could not have worked so powerfully without this precise temporal anchoring. Since the Second World War, this anchoring has been lost. Remembrance Day can now drift three days clear of the eleventh of November. Hence the sense noted earlier that at the Cenotaph it is the act of remembering together that is being remembered. Past and present are only imperfectly aligned.
In other ways they are being pulled into closer proximity. This was felt especially strongly in 1993, the centenary of Owen’s birth and the seventy-fifth anniversary of his death: another example of the way in which the war has become memorialized in the poet’s image. The same year also saw the seventy-fifth anniversary of the armistice. 4 August 1994 marked the eightieth anniversary of the outbreak of war. All of these dates are signposts pointing to one of the ways in which the memory of the Great War exerts itself more powerfully as it recedes in time. This has less to do with recent events in Sarajevo than the simple sense that we are drawing gradually closer to the time when the war took place exactly a hundred years ago. In terms of remembrance the years 2014–2018 will represent the temporal equivalent of a total eclipse. By then no one who fought in the war will be alive to remember it.
‘The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer. .’
Like the Newfoundland Memorial, the other major Canadian memorial, at Vimy Ridge, is located in an expanse of parkland in which the original trenches have been neatly maintained. A road winds up to the park through thick woods. Then, suddenly, the monument looms into view: two white pylons, each with a sculpted figure perched precariously near the top. Sunlight knifes through the clouds.
Twin white paths stretch across the grass. The steps to the monument are flanked by two figures, a naked man and a naked woman. The stone is dazzling white. It is difficult to estimate the height of the pylons. A hundred feet? Two hundred? Impossible to say: there is nothing around to stand comparison with the monument. It generates its own scale, dwarfing the idea of measurement. At its base, between the two pylons, is a group of figures thrusting a torch upwards towards the figures perched high above. The distance between them is measureless.
Carved on the walls are the names of Canada’s missing: 11,285 men with no known graves. I walk round to the east side of the monument where a group of figures are breaking a sword. Far off, in the other corner, is another similar group whose details I cannot make out at this distance. Between them, brooding over a vast sea of grass, is the shrouded form of a woman, her stone robes flowing over the ground. The figure spans millennia of grieving women, from pietàs showing the weeping Virgin to photos of widowed peasant women wrapped in shawls against the cold. Below her, resting on a tomb, are a sword and steel helmet, the shadows of the twin pylons stretching out across the grass.
Vimy Ridge: the Canadian war memorial
The Memorial took eleven years to construct. Unveiled, finally, in 1936, it was the last of the great war memorials to be completed. Walter Allward, the sculptor and designer, explained its symbolism in the following terms. The grieving woman represents Canada, a young nation mourning her dead; the figures to her left show the sympathy of Canada for the helpless; to her right the Defenders are breaking the sword of war. Between the pillars, Sacrifice throws the torch to his comrades; high up on the pylons are allegorical figures of Honour, Faith, Justice, Hope, Peace. . This string of virtues recalls a speech made by Lloyd George in September 1914 in which he itemized
Grief. .
the great everlasting things that matter for a nation — the great peaks we had forgotten, of Honour, Duty, Patriotism and, clad in glittering white, the great pinnacle of Sacrifice pointing like a rugged finger to Heaven.
In its glittering whiteness Allward’s monument seems the shorn embodiment of Lloyd George’s words. Duty and Patriotism have fallen away; Honour takes its place alongside Hope and peace as allegorical decoration; Sacrifice remains undiminished: unmeasurable, sheer — but its meaning, too, has been transformed by the war. It is here confronted with the consequence of its meaning.
Discounting the allegorical ‘Defenders’ there are no military figures on the monument. The steel helmet on the tomb is the only clear symbolic link with the war it commemorates. The figures at the base of the pylons strain upward, straining to rise above their grief, to surmount it until, like the figures nestling in the sky above them, they can overcome it. This vertiginous transcendence is counterpoised by the earthward gaze of the woman. Mute with sorrow she makes no appeal to the heavens but fixes her eyes on the ground, making an accommodation with grief, residing in loss.
Owen, wrote C. Day Lewis, ‘had no pity to spare for the suffering of bereaved women’. Vimy Ridge, by contrast, seems less a memorial to the dead, to the abstract ideal of Sacrifice, than to the reality of grief: a memorial not to the Unknown Soldier but to Unknown Mothers.