From the Cenotaph the carriage bearing the Unknown Warrior made its way to Westminster Abbey. Inside, the same intensity of emotion was reinforced by numerical arrangement: a thousand bereaved widows and mothers; a hundred nurses wounded or blinded in the war; a guard of honour made up of a hundred men who had won the Victoria Cross, fifty on each side of the nave. The highest-ranking commanders from the war were among the pallbearers: Haig, French and Trenchard. The king scattered earth from the soil of France on to the coffin. ‘All this,’ commented one observer, ‘was to stir such memories and emotions as might have made the very stones cry out.’
A similarly ironic palaver surrounds the choosing of the French Unknown Soldier in Bertrand Tavernier’s 1989 film La Vie et rien d’autre (Life and Nothing But).
A photograph of the temporary Cenotaph of 1919: soldiers marching past, huge crowds looking on. There is nothing triumphant about the parade. The role of the army is not to celebrate victory but to represent the dead. This is an inevitable side-effect of the language of Remembrance being permeated so thoroughly by the idea of sacrifice. In honouring the dead, survivors testified to their exclusion from the war’s ultimate meaning — sacrifice — except vicariously as witnesses. The role of the living is to offer tribute, not to receive it. The soldiers marching past the Cenotaph, in other words, comprise an army of the surrogate dead.
In an effort to give some sense of the scale of the loss, Fabian Ware, head of the Imperial War Graves Commission, pointed out that if the Empire’s dead marched four abreast down Whitehall, it would take them three and a half days to pass the Cenotaph.5 Over a million of the living passed by between its unveiling on 11 November and the sealing of the Unknown Warrior’s tomb a week later. The correspondence between Ware’s image and what actually took place in 1920 is such that to anyone looking at this photo the soldiers seem like the dead themselves, marching back to receive the tribute of the living. Ware’s hypothetical idea was made flesh. ‘The dead lived again,’ wrote a reporter in The Times.
The surrogate dead
‘A crowd flowed over Westminster Bridge. So many, / I had not thought death had undone so many,’ wrote T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land.
The line of soldiers marching past the Cenotaph stretches out of sight, out of time. If we followed the line, it would take us back to another photograph, of men marching away to war. These two images are really simply two segments of a single picture of the long march through the war. There is a single column of men, so long that by the time those at the back are marching off from the recruiting stations, heading to trains, those at the front — the dead — are marching past the Cenotaph.
An early draft of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Apologia Pro Poemate Meo’ is entitled ‘The Unsaid’. In an accidental echo of Owen, John Berger has written that the two minutes’ silence
was a silence before the untellable. The sculptured war memorials are like no other public monuments ever constructed. They are numb: monuments to an inexpressible calamity.
The Cenotaph is the starkest embodiment of Berger’s claim. It is a representation in three dimensions of the silence that surrounded it for two minutes on Armistice Day. The public wanted a permanent version of the Cenotaph to record — to hold — the silence that was gathered within it and which, thereafter, would emanate from it. During the silence it had seemed, according to The Times, as if ‘the very pulse of Time stood still’. In recording that silence, the Cenotaph would also be an emblem of timelessness. A temporary version of the Cenotaph was an impossible contradiction: it had to be permanent.
For two minutes in each of the years that followed, the silence of the monument was recharged. Since the Second World War and the diminished power of the Sunday Silence, that silence has drained from the Cenotaph. The clamour of London encroaches on it annually; its silence is becoming inaudible, fading.
In the 1920s neither the permanent Cenotaph nor the Unknown Warrior could satisfy the passion for remembrance. In many ways the means of remembrance, like the war itself, were selfgenerating. In 1921 the British Legion instituted the sale of Flanders poppies — eight million of them — which has continued, in manufactured form, to the present day. Two years after its inauguration in 1927, the British Legion Festival of Remembrance introduced its most distinctive and moving feature whereby a million poppies, each one representing a life, flutter down on to the servicemen assembled below.
Monuments, meanwhile, were being unveiled throughout Britain; cemeteries were being built in France and Belgium; the names of the dead appeared on regimental memorials and rolls of honour in places of work and trade associations, cities and villages, universities and schools.6
While this made the human cost of the war more apparent, the scale of the loss, it turned out, could actually be comforting. The pain of mothers, wives and fathers was subsumed in a list of names whose sheer scale was numbing. In the course of the war the casualties had been played down. Then, realizing that grief could be rendered more manageable if simultaneously divided and shared by a million, the scale of sacrifice was emphasized. Publicizing the scale of the loss was the best way to make it bearable.
And was there not, amidst all this grief, a faint shudder or shiver of excitement at the unimaginable vastness of it all? The war had set all kinds of records in terms of scale: the greatest bombardments ever seen, the biggest guns, shells and mines, the biggest mobilization, the greatest loss of life (‘the million dead’). Was there not a faint glow of pride, an unavoidable undertow of semantic approval, in terming the war ‘Great’?
Covered by a patina of sorrow though it may be, something of this quality perhaps endures to this day, perpetuated by writers who, myself included, prefer this appellation with all its elegiac resonance to that stark numerical designation, ‘The First World War’.
The construction of memory
‘Horrible beastliness of war’
‘Great’ or ‘First World’, any book about the war, or commentary on the literature or art it produced, will stress its horror. The largest entry in the latent index of any such book will always be: ‘War, horror of’. Before we have even settled down to read the first stanza of Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, we are already murmuring to ourselves the old mantra, ‘the horror of war’.
War may be horrible, but that should not distract us from acknowledging what a horrible cliché this has become. The coinage has been worn so thin that its value seems only marginally greater than ‘Glory’, ‘Sacrifice’ or ‘Pro Patria’, which ‘horror’ condemns as counterfeit. The phrase ‘horror of war’ has become so automatic a conjunction that it conveys none of the horror it is meant to express.
Partly this over-use is a product of decorum. One cannot, in good taste, dwell on death, mutilation and injury without stressing their horror. Horror, consequently, becomes a mere formality, a form of words. One is reminded, also, of washing-powder commercials, which have relied for so long on prefixing brand names with ‘new improved’ that the expression has actually come to mean ‘same old’. The words have bleached themselves out, become an unnoticed part of the brand name. To convey the new and improved nature of the product you have to add a prefix to the prefix: New Improved New Improved Ariel.