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This essay will consider the real and imagined landscapes of the Western Front, and the symbolism and meaning attaching to the memorials and cemeteries which are located within these landscapes. Geertz notes that meanings can only be 'stored' in symbols such as a cross or some other object, whilst King observes that frequently it is suggested that symbols and rituals affect people's behaviour or outlook by propagating fundamental ideas about the world.1 King goes on to suggest that in order to make adequate sense of First World War memorials, an approach to symbolism is needed which does not purport to reveal the underlying meaning of symbols, but rather describes the process by which people see meaning in them.
Quinn says that a symbol acts as a focus around which people assemble their thoughts, which enables them to draw together diverse ideas which otherwise would not be readily associated with each other, but can be associated with the symbol because it lacks specific meaning. He notes that the symbol 'focuses and channels our construction of sense and meaning without itself being "meaningful".'2 It is clear that contemporaries thought that war memorials did, and should, have explicit meanings, and they devoted a great deal of both paper and time to meaningful interpretations. However, it is useful to regard these interpretations as elaborations of the symbols rather than as revelations of their already encoded meanings. Symbols were given relevance to a particular topic by these elaborations, making them appear both meaningful and important. In other words, as King points out, meaning was attributed to memorials, making them into valued symbols rather than the process of interpretation spelling out the meanings contained in the memorials.3
Lowenthal notes that memory's most serviceable reminder was landscape, and memorials and monuments locate the imagined or remembered past in the present landscape.4 Their function is to recall and celebrate the past, rather than preserve it; seldom, therefore, do they point the way to historic structures or localities, instead they stand as evocative reminders of some epoch's splendour, some person's genius or power, some unique historical event. Thus memorials occupy a place in the landscape which is wholly unlike that occupied by other signposts or embellishments to historic sites. Enhancements add to, or alter, history on the site, whereas memorials adorn localities that often may have no connection with the event or person celebrated or commemorated. Memorials are often no more tied to date than to place, since few monuments are of the same vintage as the person or event they commemorate - however, as Lowenthal points out, First World War memorials are often inextricably tied to both place and date.5 Whilst old memorials may in time become historical landmarks in their own right, as First World War memorials almost immediately did, seldom are they initially intended as such.
Memorials designed to impress the viewer frequently dominate their environs - the Thiepval Memorial on the Somme (see Figure 1) and the Canadian Memorial at Vimy Ridge (see Figure 2) are both a major element in their landscape, neither of which serve any purpose except to remind the viewer of the tragedy of the First World War.6 The majority of overseas memorials to the First World War are in cemeteries; cemeteries matter far more as fields of remembrance for the living than as repositories for the dead. Cemeteries, in terms of landscape features, are assemblages of personal memorials. Often the collective quality of memorialisation stands out: the massed and uniform headstones (see Figure 3), the anonymity of the graves in the military cemeteries evoke not the individual soldiers, but the Great War in which they died.7
Winter and Sivan believe that spatial memory (as distinguished from visual memory) transforms latent (fleeting or implicit) memory into active ('flash-bulbs lighting up') memory when an individual occupies a site associated with a ritual or event.8 Accounts by survivors of the First World War of their visits to the battlefields of the Western Front confirm this belief.9
Winter and Sivan explain that warfare, particularly in the twentieth century, is a time of dramatic and unique experiences, which lave dense memory traces, both social and individual.10 Witnesses of warfare, whether surviving soldiers, family members of those wounded or killed, surviving civilian victims or their relatives, were all involved in memory work - that is, in a public rehearsal of memories. They acted in order to fill in silence, to struggle with grief, to offer something symbolically to the dead.11 In most of these immediate concerns they failed and the dead were forgotten; the memorials faded into the landscape. However, the memorials did not disappear altogether, later generations took up these concerns and the memorials gained new significance and took on new meanings. Memorials, as artefacts, matter as 'memory aids' for the later trajectory of the process of remembrance.12 In the absence of such artefacts, the work of memory is more arduous since the retrieval of dense memory traces is enabled by artefacts which relate to place as they create 'extrinsic context dependency'.13 According to experimental psychology, say Winter and Sivan, such 'extrinsic contexts' help 'recall/access' in terms of memory.14 Spatial memory operates through the tangible nature of war memorials - those in mourning used them both for ceremony and for a ritual of separation, wherein touching a name indicates not only the one who has been lost, but also the one who has not been lost.15 Visitors to such memorials frequently leave notes, objects and flowers, which serve as a focus in a ritual exchange: the dead have given everything, including their lives; the living, tangibly or symbolically, offer something in return. As Winter and Sivan point out, the dead are not present, therefore the living need to re-present them and they do this through such objects.16 Both the names on the memorials and the survivors at the memorials are there, but these acts of exchange remain symbolic at best. However, the power of objects, and the power of place, for those engaged in the process of remembrance cannot be denied.
Lloyd observes that the number of visitors to the Western Front varied during the inter-war years and that during that time both the imagined and actual landscapes of the battlefields altered.17 The Western Front's landscape dominated the memories and thoughts of the servicemen who had participated in the fighting there, and the imaginations of people on the Home Front. In 1935 when Christopher Sidgwick visited Ypres he found the battlefields were 'at once as familiar and mythical as one's own picture of a fairytale'.18 Largely the landscape which drew travellers to the battlefields was an imaginary one. It was less the sites themselves, as Lloyd notes, than their associations which attracted travellers and pilgrims.19 Beckles Willson confirms this from his own observation: many travellers confused 'the eminence on the other side of the railway ("The Dump") with the immortal Hill 60' because the latter had been undermined by the fighting during the war - such a mistake appeared not to matter, however.20
Over the years the landscape of the Western Front and the imagined landscape of sites that attracted travellers altered. The scenes of death and destruction to be found on the battlefields were, as Lloyd remarks, initially the centre of attraction for many travellers. When much of the devastation and most of the wartime aspect of the battlefields was removed by reconstruction, the travel objective shifted to the cemeteries and memorials built by the Allies, and the few remaining battlefield sites.21 Lloyd observes that increasingly for travellers the imagined landscape was perceived within the context of the war's wider meaning.22 This meaning shifted between concern that the horrors of war needed to be remembered and avoided on the one hand, and an appreciation of the heroism of, and sacrifice made by, the men on the other. Lloyd notes that the dichotomy between these two approaches to the meaning of the landscape led to debate: did it sanitise, glorify even, war, or was it a lesson in peace ? 23 After the War, the first travellers to the Western Front were confronted by a landscape which denied not only order, but civilisation. Lloyd points out that an important theme of battlefield travel in the 1920s was sacrifice.24 In particular this was associated with the memorials and cemeteries which came to dominate both the actual and the imagined landscape during the 1920s and 1930s. Beatrice Brice wrote that the 'great cemetery and memorial holds the imminent meaning of Ypres' at Tyne Cot.25
Lloyd describes how the cemeteries relied upon three images of sacrifice: firstly, the creation of an English landscape as immortalised by Brooke in his poem 'The Soldier'; secondly, they were symbols of 'the common purpose, the common devotion, the common sacrifice of all ranks in the Empire' - this was achieved through the uniform use of rectangular headstones for all the dead whatever their rank or social class; finally, the unmistakably Christian nature of the sacrifice.26 The Stone of Remembrance and the Cross of Sacrifice were designed by Lutyens and Blomfield as abstract symbols evoking the infinite; in practice, however, both were generally regarded as Christian.27
The construction of the war cemeteries and memorials, and the reconstruction of the battlefields in the late 1920s led a number of writers to wonder if now the landscape emphasised the sacrifice of the soldiers without containing any warning about war's horrors. Some writers, such as Vera Brittain, believed that the landscape now operated to sanitise, and even glorify, the War. In Testament of Friendship surveying the monuments erected on the Somme, she asks:
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(This essay has been written by Michèle Fry, 2000 and it is copyright.)
http://www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/symb-lscape1.htm
