The Missing of the Somme (10 page)

Even taking this absence into account, the realist memorials represent a great flowering of British public sculpture. That they may not have been the work of exceptional
individual talents illustrates how, at certain moments in the tradition of any art, the expressive potential of the average can exceed that of the outstanding at earlier or later dates. Nowadays
the human form cannot so readily be coaxed into such powerful attitudes; only an exceptional artist today could achieve the power routinely managed by the memorial sculptors, almost all of whom,
except Jagger, have been forgotten.

We drive through Keighley on our way to watch Leeds–Everton at Elland Road. Clouds hug the ground. The anorak, a foreigner would suppose, is the English national dress.
The most frequently heard noise is a sniff. Everything

that is not grey – clouds, road, pigeons – is brown: benches, buildings, leaves, bronze soldier and sailor, the figure of Victory perched on the memorial behind
them. Traffic and shoppers hurry past. The soldier stands erect, doing his best to ignore the fact that the bayonet on his rifle has long been broken off.

In Bradford, too, where we stop for a lunchtime curry, the bronze soldiers have met a similar fate. Once they must have strode aggressively forward, one each side of the memorial. Now they
advance gingerly, as if about to surprise each other in a harmless game of hide and seek. That the bayonet was already virtually obsolete as a weapon by 1914 – ‘No man in the Great War
was ever killed by a bayonet,’ claimed one soldier, ‘unless he had his hands up first’ – only enhances the lack. Then as now the bayonets’ function was symbolic and
ornamental: without them the sculptures’ internal dynamic is thrown irremediably out of kilter.

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:

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

In a few days we will be leaving for Flanders. Mark tells me he has been reading Trevor Wilson’s huge history,
The Myriad Faces of War
, as preparation. I am
impressed and a little shamed by his diligence. My own reading of general histories of the war is characterized by a headlong impatience. Basil Liddell Hart, A. J. P. Taylor, John Terraine, Keith
Robbins – I read them all in the same inadequate way. With a cloudless
conscience I skim the same parts of each: the war at sea, air raids on London, anything happening on
the Eastern Front, Gallipoli . . . Then there are the parts of these histories I try hard to concentrate on but whose details I can never
absorb
: the network of treaties, the flurry of
telegrams and diplomatic manoeuvres that lead up to the actual outbreak of war. Consequently everything between the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the lamps going out over Europe is a
blur.