9. This contrasts sharply with the American Civil War; T. H. O’Sullivan’s 1863 photograph, ‘A Harvest of Death’, for example, showed the fields of Gettysburg strewn with dead.
10. In an early visit to the Imperial War Museum photographic department I began to suspect that this ‘cover-up’ was continuing into the present day. Photos from the Great War are catalogued by subject and, despite extensive filings under ‘Destruction’, there was no classification for ‘Dead’ or ‘Injured’ or any other heading I could think of. By chance I came across a photo of a dead soldier. Beneath it was typed, ‘Transferred to Casualty Album’. In red handwriting another note read: ‘Not for sale or reproduction’. Having established the correct generic term I moved back to the subject catalogues, but — as I thought — there was no Casualty Album. Feeling certain that I had stumbled upon a classic example of the missing-file conspiracy I explained to one of the assistants, in tones of baffled innocence, that I couldn’t seem to find the so-called Casualty Album.
‘Ah, the Casualty Album,’ he said. ‘It’s next door. I’ll get it for you right away, Mr Dyer.’ The injunction in red, it turns out, dated from the twenties so that relatives of the dead would not come across photographs of mutilated loved ones in the morning paper. It had long since been waived; stored separately as a gesture of decorum the file itself was on my desk within minutes of asking for it.
11. The contrary view is put forward in Cormac McCarthy’s novel All the Pretty Horses: ‘He spoke of his campaigns in the deserts of Mexico and he told them of horses killed under him and he said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war. Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.’
12. The last equestrian statue to be erected in London was of Earl Haig, in 1934.
13. On 15 May 1994 a memorial inscribed ‘To all those who have established and are maintaining the right to refuse to kill’ was unveiled in Tavistock Square, London. The inscription continues: ‘Their foresight and courage give us hope.’
14. In another evocative phrase a few pages later Jones writes of ‘fog-walkers’.
15. Eventually, perhaps, the experience of the war did find expression in the most representative work of a sculptor whose distinguishing characteristic was, precisely, the elision of the figurative and the abstract. Henry Moore joined the army in 1916, when he was eighteen. He served as a machine-gunner and was gassed at Cambrai in November 1917. After being hospitalized for two months, he became an instructor in bayonet drill. Anthony Barnett has hinted at the significance of this experience for the ‘sculptor who discovered the hole’. More generally, Barnett suggests that it is Moore’s experience of the war that ‘vividly explains, and is expressed by, the terrible stare and the crippled posture shared by his reclining figures’. If Moore’s reclining men were scattered over a landscape, we would be ‘at the site of a massacre’. Barnett’s argument is subtle and provocative rather than trenchant or definitive. He is at pains to point out that while Moore’s characteristic work ‘must be seen as in some way incorporating [his war] experience’ it cannot be ‘reduced to a response to the war’. Moore’s work should be contrasted with memorials which, typically, view the war as ‘a tragic eruption into an otherwise pleasant society’. As noted, war, for working-class soldiers, was a continuation of labour by other means, an amplification and intensification of the misery inflicted by mine and factory. Moore was a miner’s son and he responded to the war not with protest but as ‘a witness to a way of life that at one moment found expression in masswarfare’. The condition of his figures is one of resignation to forces that overwhelm but can never crush them.
16. Many of these books only attracted the attention they did in the wake of the renewed interest in the war generated by the phenomenal success of All Quiet. In May 1929 Richard Aldington sent a telegram to his American agent: ‘Referring great success Journey’s End and German war novels urge earliest fall publication Death of a Hero to take advantage of public mood. Large scale English war novel might go big now.’
17. The rubbish-tip controversy has obvious echoes with the fuss in 1981 over the then Labour leader Michael Foot turning up for the Remembrance Day Service at the Cenotaph wearing a donkey jacket. According to the Daily Telegraph, Foot laid his wreath ‘with all the reverent dignity of a tramp bending down to inspect a cigarette end’.
18. A monument to ‘the untellable’, it is also, strangely and appropriately, unphotographable. No photograph can convey its scale, its balance, its overwhelming effect on the senses.