As Bushaway notes, it was the work of architects like Baker, Blomfield and Lutyens, together with men such as Kipling and Adrian Hill, which established, on behalf of the Imperial War Graves Commission, the language, architecture and landscape of remembrance which were to become ubiquitous symbols for post-War British society: the Cross of Sacrifice, the Stone of Remembrance and the landscaped gardens.29 Winter observes that war memorials were placed where, individually and collectively, people grieved, and anyone in Europe has only to look around to find these 'documents' to the First World War, they are everywhere part of the landscape.30

The cemeteries, as gardens, demonstrate the ways in which architecture and horticulture were mobilised in the transformation of landscapes, as Morris indicates.31 The war cemeteries, observes Morris, are 'visual frames of reference for the war', they were mapped onto Belgian and French territories as enclosures of national grief and identity becoming, in the process, powerfully 'symbolic spaces' of Britain and her Empire.32

Morris believes that gardening can be seen as a form of land reclamation, recovering the scarred landscapes of No Man's Land, adding meaning, identity, form and shape.33 One of the major features of life on the Western Front was the 'torn landscape' in which the combatants lived, surrounded not only by wire, mud and water, but also by the bodies of their dead comrades. In the immediate post-War period the Graves Registration Unit (the forerunner of the Imperial War Graves Commission) attempted to locate graves and, where they still existed, to consolidate them into permanent cemeteries, thus giving some meaning to the landscapes. Morris notes that the post-War landscape was just as full of mud, mine-craters, broken bridges, barbed wire, smashed plank roads and live shells as it was during the War.34 The completed cemeteries were described as 'oases within a still devastated landscape'.35

Morris describes the cemeteries as an attempt to soothe, heal and smooth.36 In part they feminised what was an intensely masculine landscape, a No Man's Land full of the bodies of dead men. As the field parties, horticulturists and designers surveyed and crossed the War's landscapes, prepared the ground and laid out initial boundaries they were setting the outlines of the real, as well as the imagined, landscapes.37

Heffernan notes that since 1918 official commemoration of the War has more directly focused on the fate of the ordinary soldier, as symbolised by the unveiling of Lutyens' Cenotaph (see Figure 4) and the interment of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey.38 Whilst the commemoration ceremony of the present recalls the dead of all Britain's wars, the fallen of 1914-18, in whose honour these ceremonies and memorials were first devised, remain the symbolic focus of Remembrance in Britain. Heffernan points out that one of the striking features of Remembrance ceremonies in Britain is the absence of any physical remains of the dead, making the British commemoration process entirely symbolic.39 The official commemoration of the War dead is, as Heffernan goes on to observe, articulated around a complex geography, combined of a vast network of memorials and cemeteries overseas where individual soldiers are recalled and their actual remains interred, and domestic ceremonies from which the bodies of the dead are necessarily excluded.40 One of the most extraordinary periods of the creation of symbolic landscape in modern history is represented by the memorialisation of the Western Front.

More than 80 years after the Armistice of 1918, war memorials retain a great deal of their extraordinary power of the British psyche, becoming 'defining symbols of national identity'.41 The power of the Western Front landscapes is self-evident in one sense: they are the final resting-place of the loved ones - fathers and grandfathers, uncles and great-uncles - of modern-day visitors. Paying silent homage at the grave of a family relative is natural, but these landscapes are also 'extremely complex cultural constructions' which, according to Heffernan, may be read in various ways.42 For example, it would be hard to argue that the war memorials and cemeteries are overtly patriotic structures which were designed to celebrate a major national triumph and mask the War's horrors. The sheer scale of the loss commemorated means that to lionise the dead and glorify war was both distasteful and inappropriate. The commemorative landscapes of the First World War were invoked frequently by Britain's inter-war peace movement, but these landscapes were not unequivocally anti-war statements consciously designed to indicate modern war's futility and waste.43

From the administrative decisions which led to the Graves Registration Unit in March 1915 there followed what Laqueur describes as the 'historically unprecedented planting of names on the landscapes of battle'.44 Along the Western Front on specially built Memorials to the Missing are listed thousands of names of the dead; in the cemeteries are tens of thousands of graves. By comparison with the sheer scale of British - not to mention French, German, Belgian or Portuguese - 'commemorative imposition on the landscape, the pyramids' notes Laqueur, 'pale into insignificance'.45

Laqueur believes that specific places of memory do not arise simply from lived experience in the way that landscape features or churchyards do for a people more rooted in their geography; they have to be created instead.46 A difficulty faced by people for whom culture and history no longer define what is meaningful, is that what were previously resonant symbols, at least for the elite, became what the majority of the post-War generation called the 'lies of the old men'. In a semiotically arid world, observes Laqueur, one solution is to avoid representation and production of meaning as far as possible, and to resort, instead, to a sort of 'commemorative hyper-nominalism'.47

On the battlefields of the past great monuments were always comparatively rare; as Borg observes, the Roman standard for a victory monument was the triumphal arch.48 This type lives on into the present century in the Western artistic tradition - most notably in the Memorial to the Missing at Thiepval although, as Borg remarks, Lutyens' design goes beyond the ordinary triumphal arch.49 By the nineteenth century, few cities of any importance in Europe lacked at least one triumphal arch, with the most famous example being Napoleon's victory monument in Paris, the Arc de Triomphe. Within its arches are inscribed the names of hundreds of Napoleon's generals, with the names of those who died in battle underlined.50 It was thus, notes Borg, that the status of the arch as a specifically war memorial was established.51

Borg describes Lutyens' Thiepval Memorial as the most imaginative and daring use of the arch form.52 He goes on to say that close analysis of the Thiepval Memorial reveals it to be a highly complex concept in which the essentially flat form of the traditional triumphal arch is extended into three dimensions so that pavilions of minor arches are built up towards the central main arch. (see Figure 5)53 Borg believes that the resulting memorial is more than a merely impressive and original variation on the arch theme, rather it is an assertion of three dimensional values which suggests a link to the ancient concept of a burial mound.54 It is Borg's opinion that Lutyens, as a student of his architectural heritage, was aware of the significance of both burial mounds and triumphal arches, and in Borg's mind there is no doubt that Lutyens intended all the various different strands of meaning which exist in the Thiepval Memorial.55 Its complexity of meaning and form, says Borg, derive from Lutyens' own understanding of the ancient memorial forms, and it is important, Borg feels, for modern viewers of the Thiepval Memorial to understand some of Lutyens' intent.56

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(This essay has been written by Michèle Fry, 2000 and it is copyright.)

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