Whilst most traditional forms of memorial have survived into the twentieth century in some way, the burial mound remains an exception.57 Mounds of burial and triumph on the battlefield are primarily associated with ancient civilisations and the mound on the battlefield at Waterloo is probably the last of its kind. However, as Borg observes, natural mounds, ridges and places of eminence were selected as sites for contemporary memorials, thus allowing the tradition to survive in slightly different form into the twentieth century.58 The obelisk memorial (itself a traditional memorial form from ancient times) to the 5th Australian Division which forms a backdrop to Buttes New British Cemetery near Ypres, is particularly striking since it is set on top of Hill 60, a much contested artificial mound which was formed from the spoil of a nearby railway cutting. However, the largely flat or gently undulating nature of the Western Front's terrain made it difficult to site all memorials in a prominent position. A surprising number, therefore, are raised above the plain - the clearest examples of which are the Australian National Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux (see Figure 6), the Canadian National Memorial at Vimy Ridge (see Figure 7) and the previously discussed Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval.59 Borg believes it is not entirely fanciful to suggest that this tendency to build battlefield memorials on hills is connected, in a general way, to the ancient tradition of mound building on the field of battle.60

Another common architectural device which was much used on the great battlefield memorials was the curved wall forming a precinct, as seen as Delville Wood. Such precinct walls are, explains Borg, an antique device for marking an area as sacred or special; its particular origins can be found in Roman tomb enclosures as at Regio Emilia in the Concordii.61 Such enclosures on First World War memorials serve to give a frame to the central feature of a monument and to make it separate from its immediate surroundings, thus providing a form of sanctity. A striking example, notes Borg, is Blomfield's Belgian Memorial which was presented by the grateful people of Belgium to the British nation.62 Occasionally the precinct walls are straight, forming a rectangular enclosure. The most impressive examples, Borg feels, are the Tyne Cot cemetery by Herbert Baker and J. R. Truelove, which has a curving wall (see Figure 8); and Lutyens' Australian Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux, where the walls are straight. A sacred precinct in antiquity often enclosed an altar and a number of memorials consciously adopt an altar-like form: Lutyens' Stone of Remembrance clearly makes reference, in Borg's opinion, to the concept of a sacrificial altar.63

Another ancient form adopted for twentieth century memorials is the obelisk; it is derived from the Romans in its specifically military form, and it is from Rome that it entered the vocabulary of Western memorial motifs, although the Egyptians were the first to use them in this manner.64 Linked to the obelisk, and equally ancient, is the memorial column; although visually related, columns differ from obelisks in being built from separate pieces. One of the most popular memorials to use such a device, according to Lloyd, is the Canadian memorial at St Julien.65 Unveiled by the Canadian Government in 1923, it marks the spot where 2000 Canadians are buried; they had been among the 18000 Canadians on the British left who had withstood the April 1915 German gas attacks. The memorial consists of a 35-foot truncated column, its point replaced by the head and shoulders of a mourning soldier with reversed rifle, which merges into the pillar (see Figure 9).66 It is the work of Frederick Chapman Clemesha, an architect who was wounded in France whilst serving with the Canadian Corps.67 Will Bird claimed that the sight of the memorial 'rising from the fog . . . fills the watcher with awe', whilst one English newspaper found a 'mysterious power in this brooding figure, drawing you from the things that are to the things that were'.68 Henry Williamson attempted to convey the genius of this memorial, believing that its genius lay in 'the gravity and strength of grief coming from full knowledge of old wrongs done to men by men. It mourns, but it mourns for all mankind. The viewer is silent before it, as s/he is before the stone figures of the Greeks.69

Lloyd believes that the most important features of the memorials which drew travellers to the battlefields in the mid 1920s and in the 1930s are captured by the St Julien memorial: the message is to the imagination.70 The memorials to the Missing, says Lloyd, especially at Thiepval and the Menin Gate, inscribed with the names of thousands of soldiers whose remains were not recovered, encouraged travellers to look beyond the veil of death and to accept the implications of the sacrifice made by so many young men in the War.71 Winter describes the Thiepval Memorial as 'an extraordinary statement in abstract language about mass death and the impossibility of triumphalism.72 A large majority of the Memorials along the Western Front speak to the viewer, even today, in an abstract language, but their power to speak remains, making the landscape a moving document of the history of the First World War.

Winter goes on to say that the work of remembrance entails the creation of a space in which the story of a group's war, in its local, familial, particular and parochial forms, can be told over and over again.73 The construction of such a narrative - in stone, in ceremony, and in other symbols and works - is itself the remembrance process. Hayden observes that war disrupts and reconfigures attachments to cultural landscapes as much as it disrupts and reconfigures the actual landscape, and it does both on an unprecedented scale.74 The process of mourning for war losses frequently involves memories of special places, and human connections to those places. Places trigger memories for those who share a common past, such as surviving soldiers, and simultaneously can frequently represent these shared pasts to those who might be interested in knowing about them in the present, such as historians. Commemorations of war, notes Hayden, frequently attempt to solidify place memory through architectural designs, such as war memorials, and whilst there is no guarantee that the expenditure of large sums of money on architecture will create an evocative place, it appears from the accounts considered here, that the memorials and cemeteries of the Western Front have achieved this aim.75 The cemeteries of the dead and memorials to the fallen on the Western Front have helped to create an evocative place in which survivors memories were triggered and the remembrance process occurred. The cemeteries and memorials continue to be evocative places, and although the vast majority of visitors today have no personal memories of the events they symbolise, the cemeteries and memorials evoke 'collective memory', bringing the past closer to the present, and helping historians and others to understand that past.76

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Bibliography

Books

Bird, W. R. Thirteen Years After: The Story of the Old Front Revisited (Toronto, 1932)

Blomfield, Reginald Memoirs of an Architect (London, 1932)

Borg, Alan War Memorials from Antiquity to the Present (Leo Cooper: London, 1991)

Brice, Beatrice Ypres - Outpost of the Channel Ports: A Concise Historical Guide to the Salient of Ypres (London, 1929)

Brittain, Vera Testament of Friendship: The Story of Winifred Holtby (London, 1940)

Bushaway, Bob 'Name upon Name: The Great War and Remembrance' in Porter, Roy (ed.) Myths of the English (Polity Press: Cambridge, 1992)

Canadian Battlefields Commission, Canadian Battlefield Memorials (Ottawa, 1929)

Dyer, Geoff The Missing of the Somme (Penguin: London, 1995)

Fawcett, Jane (ed.) Seven Victorian Architects (Thames and Hudson Ltd.: London, 1976)

Geertz, Clifford The Interpretation of Cultures (Fontana Press: London, 1993)

Gillis, John R. (ed.) Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton University Press: Princeton, New Jersey, 1994)

Gradidge, Roderick Edwin Lutyens: Architect Laureate (George Allen & Unwin Ltd.: London, 1981)

Hayden, Dolores 'Landscapes of loss and remembrance: the case of Little Tokyo in Los Angeles' in Winter, Jay and Sivan, (eds.) Emmanuel War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999)

Hussey, Christopher Life of Lutyens (Country Life: London, 1950)

Kenyon, Frederick War Graves, How the Cemeteries Abroad will be Designed (London, 1918)

King, Alex Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance (Berg: Oxford & New York, 1998)

Laqueur, Thomas W. 'Memory and Naming in the Great War' in Gillis, John R. (ed.) Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton University Press: Princeton, New Jersey, 1994)

Lloyd, David Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and Commemoration of the Great War in Britain, Australia and Canada, 1919-1939 (Berg: Oxford and New York, 1998)

Longworth, Philip The Unending Vigil: A History of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission 1917-1967 (Constable: London, 1967)

Lowenthal, 'Age and Artefact: Dilemmas of Appreciation' in Meinig, D. W. The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes (O. U. P.: Oxford and New York, 1979)

Meinig, D. W. The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes (O. U. P.: Oxford and New York, 1979)

Mosse, George Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (O.U.P.: Oxford & New York, 1990)

Nicholson, G. We Will Remember Them . . . Overseas Memorials to Canada's War Dead (Ottawa, 1973)

Porter, Roy (ed.) Myths of the English (Polity Press: Cambridge, 1992

Quinn, Malcolm The Swastika: Constructing the Symbol (London, 1994)

Sidgwick, Christopher The Feast of Locusts: Being a Soldier's Retrospective in Time of War, of a Europe Known in Peace (London, n. d.)

Williamson, H. The Wet Flanders Plain (London, 1929)

Willson, Beckles Ypres: The Holy Ground of British Arms (Bruges, 1920)

Wilkinson, Alan The Church of England and the First World War (SCM Press Ltd.: London, 1996)

Winter, Jay 'Forms of Kinship and Remembrance in the Aftermath of the Great War' in Winter, Jay and Sivan, (eds.) Emmanuel War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999)

Winter, Jay Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Canto: Cambridge, 1993)

Winter, Jay and Sivan, (eds.) Emmanuel War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999)

Journals

Greenberg, Allan 'Lutyens' Cenotaph', Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 1989, Vol. XLVIII, No. 1, pp. 5-23

Heffernan, Michael 'For Ever England: The Western Front and the Politics of Remembrance in Britain', Ecumene, 1995, Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 293-323

King, Alex 'Monuments with no Fixed Meaning', The Independent, March 23, 1999

King, Alex 'The Iconography of War Memorials', The Independent, February 18, 1999

Morris, Mandy S. 'Gardens 'For Ever England': Landscape, Identity and the First World War British Cemeteries on the Western Front' Ecumene, 1997, Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 410-434

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

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