by David Crane
Craig, Crawford, Cresswell, Cripps, Cross – try as you will, concentrate as hard as you like, it is impossible to scan those columns of the missing without losing all meaning or individuality in a hypnotic repetition of names that, when rank, initials and regiment have rendered their all, have only their numbers to differentiate them. ‘For instance,’ a harassed Chettle wrote in a minute that might stand as a kind of clerical metaphor for the industrialisation of death on the Western Front,
the name of 192 Pte H. Robertson, 6/ Royal West Kents, would appear on the ‘Missing’ memorial at Bethune, and exactly the same particulars (in respect of 1576 Pte H. Robertson, 7/ Royal West Kents) would appear on a grave at Chauny on the Aisne. Pts 14193 H. Robertson, of the 12/East Yorks, might read his own name, initials, rank and regiment on the grave of 733 Pte H. Robertson, 5/East Yorks … Pte. H. Robertson, 21st Northumberland Fusiliers, who survived the war, would be equally [surprised to find himself] commemorated on the headstone of Pte. H. Robertson of the same Battalion, at Dozinghem British Cemetery.
‘He is not missing, he is here,’ Field Marshal Lord Plumer famously told a great crowd and a still vaster radio audience at the unveiling of the gate in July 1927. But for Ware there was one significant omission clouding its success. In the early stages of planning for the memorial, the Dominions had been reluctant to participate in a joint imperial monument, and although Ware had managed to bring round the Australians, New Zealand’s High Commissioner, Sir James Allen, had stood firm, refusing to budge on either the original principle of commemoration in the nearest cemetery to the place of death or the strict separation of memorial and battle monument.
If in one sense New Zealand was the only country that could ‘afford’ to take this approach – its soldiers had fought as a cohesive entity throughout the war and its units knew where their missing were lost – Sir James Allen’s austere adherence to principle was a reminder that something had been lost as well as gained when the War Graves Commission and the Midleton committee joined forces. In the end the Menin Gate had only room for the names of those killed in the Salient up until August 1917, but the separate New Zealand memorials at Messines Ridge, Buttes New British Cemetery and – 1,176 names among another 34,887 British and Empire missing – at Baker’s Tyne Cot, remain haunting reminders of a road the Commission did not take and of early cracks in Ware’s imperial edifice.fn15
For all the dilution of the original ambitions, however, not to mention other important Commission memorials on the Western Front, like Soissons, La Ferté, Truelove’s curiously academic cloisters at Le Touret, there is only one monument that can rival and outdo Blomfield’s Menin Gate in its impact, and that is the great masterpiece that Lutyens raised to the Missing of the Somme above the River Ancre at Thiepval. In one sense, of course, the difference between the two is simply the difference between competence and genius, and yet it still beggars belief that two memorials, so different in their architectural language, emotional feel, and in what they say about war, could have sprung from the same brief and been conceived at more or less the same time.
If there was not the evidence of Lutyens’s first sketch, in fact, drawn in 1923, it would be tempting to think that one memorial stands at the end of one phase of remembrance and the other at the beginning of a second. In the years while Blomfield was overseeing his gateway it was still possible to see and think of Haig as the Architect of Victory, but within a year of the dedication of the Menin Gate in 1927, Haig and his reputation were dead and a spate of revisionist texts – All Quiet on the Western Front, Journey’s End, Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man, Undertones of War – had created a permanent sea-change in the way the war would be remembered that Lutyens had in some way already anticipated.fn16
In some respects Lutyens was fortunate with his timing, lucky that Thiepval would be almost the last of the great Commission ‘Memorials to the Missing’, but it was still a long and fraught passage before his first ideas could be realised. The design had originally been intended for a monument straddling a road at St Quentin, but when a growing disquiet about the number and size of foreign monuments on French soil led to a scaling down of Commission plans, St Quentin was scrapped and Lutyens’s design transferred to the ridge over the Ancre and dedicated to the Missing of the Somme.
It was an inspired choice of site, because for the army of France, the Somme had the same significance that Ypres had for the army of Belgium, and Thiepval the same resonance as Passchendaele. The British Army had opened its attack there on the morning of 1 July 1916, and more than three months of heat and rain and blood and mud and shells and untold casualties later it was still in enemy hands, and the long, shattered, corpse-strewn slopes leading up to the heavily fortified German positions had become a landscape that would haunt the imagination of a whole generation.
‘One only has to glance at the hill on which they stand,’ John Masefield wrote a year after the Schwaben Redoubt had finally fallen into British hands after a last spasm of vicious close fighting,
to see that it has been more burnt and shell-smitten than most parts of the line. It is as though the fight here had been more than to the death, to beyond death, to the bones and skeleton of the corpse which was as yet unkillable … Blasted, dead, pitted stumps of trees, with their bark in rags, grow here and there in a collection of vast holes, ten feet deep and fifteen feet across, with filthy water in them. There is nothing left of the church; a long reddish mound of brick, that seems mainly powder round a core of cement still marks where the chateau stood.
It was here, on a spur of high ground above the Ancre at the northern end of the old British lines, that Lutyens created his masterpiece. He had initially chosen a site on the brow of the hill, but for reasons of economy he was forced to compromise, and his monument rises from a platform near the summit of the hill, a towering ‘pyramid’ of interrelated arches, with each ascending arch, opening on alternate axes, springing from the keystone height of the arch below to create a structure of massive, lowering solidity and improbable, airy mobility.
In terms of its utilitarian function – a structure that on its outer walls and along its interconnecting catacombs of arched tunnels has to carry the names of 72,085 missing men – it is a brilliant solution, but here, unlike the Menin Gate, it is the monument and not the names that resonate in the imagination. In the development of Lutyens’s work, Thiepval clearly stands as a stepping stone towards the designs for Liverpool cathedral, but as an abstract expression of the pity and horror of war, of emptiness and hope, of the triumph of the spirit and the crushing of all humanity – of all the polar opposites of emotion and interpretation that people have brought to it – it is this or any other war’s ultimate indictment and commemoration.
For a generation that had gone through the physical and mental degradation of the trenches – for a soldier like the artist and writer Herbert Read – the appeal of abstraction is obvious, but there was nothing escapist about Lutyens’s abstract design for Thiepval. In the years after the Boer War he had happily adapted the forms of classicism for his Rand war memorial, but here on the Thiepval ridge, faced by the unimaginable tragedy of the Somme, he stripped them down to their bare bones, paring away all the language and associations of their imperial heritage that Sassoon had so hated on the Menin Gate to leave a structure of pure form, intimidating in its size, admonitory in its grandeur and implacable in its intelligence.
From one aspect it is all air and emptiness, from another solid mass. If no two people see it the same or see it precisely the same way twice that is in part because it is so ambiguous in its message. As one approaches from the east along the main axis, the immense central arch opens out on to the Picardy sky, and then as one moves around towards the diagonal the whole structure closes in on itself, receding in ascending planes and spiralling upwards with its 70,000 dead, in a kind of architectural ‘rapture’, before opening out again on to what in 1932, was still the bare, desolate ridge of Blunden’s nightmares. ‘Its high arch screams
… [he is] an enormous monster … the open mouth of death,’ the American historian Vincent Scully wrote of it. ‘He is emptiness, meaninglessness, insatiable war and death. There is no victory for the dead. All that courage wasted … It is not to be borne.’
This might be no more than anthropomorphising ‘histrionics’, as Gavin Stamp insisted, but there was something about the memorial that disturbed even Ware. From the earliest days of the Commission he had got on far better with Lutyens than with either Baker or Blomfield, and so it is all the more curious that he should be so reticent about the one monument of genius that the Commission built. ‘Many preferred to look forward rather than back,’ Stamp wrote of the puzzling conspiracy of silence that met the memorial when it was finally unveiled by the Prince of Wales on 1 August 1932, sixteen years and one month to the day after the greatest single disaster in British military history,
Even so it is hard to understand why even in The Immortal Heritage, Fabian Ware’s own account of the work and policy of the Imperial War Graves Commission published in 1937, while there are photographs of the Menin Gate, Vimy Ridge, the Ulster tower and many other memorials (including a perspective of Lutyens’s as yet unfinished Australian memorial) there is no illustration depicting the sublime grandeur of the Thiepval arch.
With anyone but Ware one might hazard compassion fatigue – the Chatham, Plymouth and Portsmouth dedications in 1924, the Menin Gate, Tyne Cot and Neuve-Chapelle in ’27, the Merchant Navy, Nieuport, Soissons and La Ferté-sous-Jouarre all in ’28, Le Touret in ’30, he had been at them all – but in the simple fact that Thiepval can no more be adequately photographed than described lies perhaps the key to his silence. In the early years of the Commission’s history, modesty and restraint had been the ambition and hallmarks of all their work, but whatever else might be said of Lutyens’s vast, overpowering memorial to the Missing of the Somme no one could ever call it either restrained or modest or square it with the terms of reference Kenyon had mapped out for the Commission in 1918.
It is not simply a matter of size or position – though at 150 feet high and 185 feet wide by 135 feet deep and visible across the length of the Somme battlefields, that has a lot to do with it – but that it says something about war and commemoration that directly challenges everything that the Commission had done up until this point. There are certainly days in winter, during the brief post-Armistice Day hiatus in the battlefield tourists’ year, when the cemeteries of the Ypres Salient or the urban sprawl of northern France can be grim places, but the overwhelming impression of all those Commission cemeteries constructed in the 1920s is one of pride and gratitude without mawkishness that is exactly what Kenyon and Ware had aimed for when they set out their guidelines.
‘I wanted a massive lion,’ Blomfield wrote of Reid Dick’s recumbent creature surmounting the Menin Gate, ‘not fierce and truculent, but patient and enduring, looking outward as a symbol of the latent strength and heroism of our race’, and the cemeteries insist on the same reading of national character and history. The great fear of the anti-Commission lobby in those early debates was that they would be too ‘militarist’ in their uniformity, but if this is militarism, the cemeteries proclaim, it is a very British kind of militarism, a militarism of knapped flints and Jekyll-inspired borders and poignant inscriptions and regimental crests and modest neo-classical pavilions that is as far away from ‘Prussian-ism’ and Prussian aggression as it is from the desperate rows of French crosses or fascist grandiloquence.
There is nothing more British than grass lawns and herbaceous borders, the Commission’s horticultural advisor, Arthur Hill, volunteered, and even in the care and beauty of the planting of the war cemeteries Ware saw a moral and cultural significance. ‘Let us pass on to the west of the town’ – he was speaking of Lorimer’s cemetery outside Damascus in an Armistice Day address to the Empire that perfectly encapsulates this sense of ‘Britishness’,
and there amidst a grove of trees, half concealed, not vaunting itself, we find a British War Cemetery with its six hundred graves – and two smaller Indian cemeteries near it. Rows of simple white headstones bearing the badges of historic British regiments, or the newer heraldry of the Dominions, flowers and shrubs and trees – a peaceful garden, the architectural design purely British … solid and foursquare and yet gentle, proclaiming the equality of all beneath the Cross which is graven on the monument facing the gateway. Could the strength and grandeur of the British Commonwealth be displayed to these people of the East in any way more in harmony with the spirit of our heroic dead, and could its character be more nobly expressed than by the constant loving care of those simple graves, thousands of miles from their homes and yet watched over as sacred possessions of the common crown?
The ‘typical’ Commission cemetery does not exist – on the one hand there are small, hidden ‘extension cemeteries’ like Oulchy-le-Château, red roses ablaze in mid-June, or pastoral cemeteries like Vendresse set in sloping fields of poppies, and on the other great base cemeteries such as Etaples – but they virtually all share this same unmistakable identity. ‘From the great wall or by the cross on the pyramid on a clear day,’ wrote John Dove, the editor of the imperialist The Round Table, when he visited Baker’s Tyne Cot near Passchendaele – in name, power of association, and organic growth, perhaps the most quintessentially English of the cemeteries,
and looking out, as the Germans used to do, westwards, a faint gleam will catch your eye far away to the north. It is the narrow sea, which, thanks to the men who lie there, the Germans never reached; and beyond lies England … If there are tears in things, it is here.
Nothing made a ‘deeper impression on old soldiers’ than Tyne Cot, P. B. Clayton of Toc H told Baker, and that was because England was not just the other side of that far away gleam to the north, but right there beneath the slopes of Passchendaele. ‘It was laid out around the graves of those buried on the field of battle, around one of the biggest of the German blockhouses that the Northumberland Regiments had called Tyne Cot,’ Baker explained,
I was told that the King, when he was there, said that this blockhouse should remain … On the pyramid [built over with stone to hide the concrete] we set up on high the War Cross; thus from the higher ground … the cross can be seen against the historic battlefields of the Salient, Ypres, and far and wide beyond … Tynecot, when the trees have grown, should have the appearance of a huge, well-ordered English churchyard with its yews and cedars behind the great flint wall, reminiscent of the walls of the precinct at Winchester, and its oak and poplars bordering the cemetery framing the distant view.
Churchyard, yews, oaks, flint walls, cloisters, Winchester – the ancient capital of England – it might be a checklist for a certain, deeply evocative kind of Englishness, but the most telling detail lies in Baker’s treatment of the blockhouse. The structure was only left there in the first place because George V had said that it had to stay, but it is characteristic of Baker’s whole treatment of the cemeteries that the one relic in the landscape that might bring home the brute ugliness of war – the one thing, too, that because of its ugliness had reminded the North-East troops of home and the ugliness of their lives and their England – had to be discreetly disguised. ‘[The King] expressed a natural sentiment,’ Baker explained, architect and devoted imperialist momentarily at odds with each other,
but in order to avoid the repellent sight of a mass of concrete in the midst of hallowed peace, which we wished to emphasize, a pyramid of stepped stone was built above it, leaving a small square of the concrete exposed in the stonework; and on this we inscribed in large bronze letters these words, suggested by Kipling, ‘This was the Tynecot Blockhouse.’
That ‘was’ says it all, but in spite of the evasions, Tyne Cot is deeply moving in precisely the way Baker wanted and with his memorials to the Indian missing at Neuve-Chapelle and to the South Africans at Delville Wood he works the same magic of dissolving harsh realities in the romance of his architecture. In the hands of anyone else
there could feel something saccharine or even fake in these memorials of Baker’s, but the quality that invariably keeps them on the right side of pastiche or sentimentality is the utter sincerity and lack of cynicism that he brought to the great imperial project of commemoration.
No one but Baker could have crowned his South African monument with statues of Castor and Pollux to symbolise the peaceful union of the English and Afrikaner races and got away with it, and no one but Baker, in the decade of Amritsar, could have so promiscuously appropriated the symbolism and architecture of India to the cause of Empire. ‘It consists of a circular space of green turf,’ he wrote of the Neuve-Chapelle memorial, a hallowed space of ‘reverence and eternal peace’ enclosed at one end by a solid screen inscribed with the names of the Indian dead, and at the other by a pierced wall,
carved with symbols like the railings of Buddha’s Shrine at Budh Guaya and those surrounding the great Sanchi topes – low domes preserving the sacred relics of Buddha. In the centre … is an Asoka Column raised on high and guarded on either side by sculptured tigers. The entrance is through a small domed chattri with pierced red-stone grilles or jaalis … another similar chattri opposite forms a shelter.
In the mean, flat, north French countryside in which it is set, Neuve-Chapelle is about as congruous as the Prince Regent’s Pavilion at Brighton, but a man who could build Greek and Romanesque in South Africa and Cape Dutch summer houses on the Somme was perfectly at ease with that. ‘Oaks were planted in two rows on either side of the avenue,’ he wrote of the Delville Wood memorial, unthinkingly certain of the permanence of what he was doing and of the Empire he was serving,
