Go to Paddington station to platform one and you’ll see a man reading a letter. Stare at him for a bit. And if you don’t feel a pricking in the corner of your eye, or a nut of emotion in your gullet, you’re made of sterner stuff than me, though not him.
On the fourth anniversary of the end of the Great War, Soldier Reading a Letter was unveiled by the board of the Great Western Railway in remembrance of the 3,312 men and women of the company who gave their lives for king, country and that complicated and spectral coalition of politics and emotion that was the enigmatic motivation for the war that began the modern age.
The soldier was sculpted by Charles Sargeant Jagger, who produced two of the greatest war memorials made. This is one of them. The soldier stands waiting for a train, his helmet set at an angle, his greatcoat slung over his shoulder, the collar turned up. He’s wearing the muffler his mother knitted for him, and he’s looking down at a letter. He holds it gently, saving the envelope — it will have to sustain many readings. His face shows no outward emotion, it has that concentrated calm we use for letters and hymn sheets, and standing for the two minutes’ silence.
The letters of war are great symbols of national empathy, particularly for the English, who like to think of themselves as, if not people of letters then the children of people of letters. And as a nation that’s chronically incapable of expressing emotion, and even proud of this constipated inability, the letter is a stiff-lipped device for imparting something that you really wanted to say, but hadn’t managed to. Except that not being able to say it in letters is also a particularly English trait.
“Hoping this finds you as it leaves me”, “Chin up”, “No sense in grumbling”, “All the best”, “Remember me to . . . remember me”. As you stare at the young man reading his letter, you realise that actually, of course, it’s from you. You’re composing it as you look at him, at this bronze boy who reads the thing you wanted to say but were never able to. How England went on without him, how the station has changed, he’d not recognise half the stuff in the coffee shop, the tea’s still dreadful but hot and sweet, that his country still thinks about him.
War memorials are the great blessing of the English. Culturally they are their finest creation. In every village stands the Mons cross with the sword, the white stone and the list of names: the repetition of brothers, the bucolic-whispered rhythm of the long-disbanded regiments, the salty names of upended ships, the litany of extinct counties, the dedication of brick village halls, the familiar phrases: “Known only to God”, “Men of this village — this town, this county”. There are the marble lists on shop stairwells, in stations, drapers and haberdashers, the names of tweenies and skivvies and draymen, and then the later additions from the second world war, the same names back again.
The war memorials of the English are one of the half dozen single greatest national collections of cultural artefacts from the last explosively creative century. Imagine Jagger’s soldier on a French plinth. He would have been clutching his heart, looking at heaven. French war memorials reek of music-hall sentimentality. German war memorials have all the doublespeak problems of being memorials to both the victims and the accused. The Russians went for corporate gigantism — the size is impressive, but they lack emotion and are purposefully impersonal.
The English worked very, very hard at getting war memorials right. Almost as soon as the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month had chimed, they were setting up committees, working parties and advisory boards to find fitting images. If they couldn’t quite make a land fit for heroes, then they’d do their damnedest to make memorials fit for the dead.
No country, no artist, had ever been confronted with a commission like the Great War. It’s almost inconceivable to encompass the freshness of the sorrow, the vastness of the death and the exhausted relief. But England was lucky to have a group of artists — and in particular architects — who rose to a moment with a collective vision.
Edwin Lutyens, the architect who designed the viceroy’s palace in Delhi and made beautiful solicitors’ country houses, created the Cenotaph in Whitehall with its simple inscription: “The glorious dead” written by Kipling, who had lost his only son at the battle of Loos. He was almost entombed in grief and guilt at his role in recruiting young men for what he grew to believe was a corrupt waste of so many lives. Whatever his private feelings, he came up with exactly the correct understatement for the Cenotaph.
With its simple lines, it is a perfect evocation of grief and pride. Its proportions are deeply pleasing. There is no extraneous decoration to snag your eye, no gratuitous outburst, no protestations of hereafter or eternity, no false promise of immortality nor hint of triumphalism. It is a faultless piece of design. How daunting the task of finding a silent thing that can eloquently imply the unsayable.
Lutyens was also asked to design a memorial for the Royal Artillery at Hyde Park Corner, but the committee was not happy with his proposals and asked Jagger for one. He envisaged a howitzer on a plinth, like a gun emplacement with four bronze gunners on each face. After much disagreement and modification, including the queries of the king who would have to ride past it every morning on his constitutional, the design was agreed. Jagger set to work on what would be the most evocatively emotive and terribly beautiful war memorial, and one of the best public statues anywhere.
Jagger had just returned from serving in the war. He had served at Gallipoli, where he was wounded in the shoulder, and then in France where, in 1918, he defended an exposed position with 50 men and little ammunition until relief came. He continued to fight until he was shot through the lung by a machinegun and for this he was awarded the Military Cross.
He was also working class and straight talking from the north, and that must have helped. But what helped most was that he knew first-hand what it was he was sculpting and what it meant. Rarely for a war artist, he knew what war felt like.
His soldiers aren’t immortal heroes, personifications of sacrifice and bravery draped in human clothing like fancy dress or chiffon — their clothes and accoutrements cover them like armour. They pull their coats on against the weather and their pockets bulge; there is weight and texture to this stuff of war. Everything works; the buckles, the buttons, the straps and badges all mean something practical.
The soldiers on the south, east and west of the monument are defined by the tools of their calling: the shell carrier has heavy panniers slung from his shoulders; the officer carries his greatcoat and is slung with binoculars, gas mask and Sam Browne; the driver from the Royal Horse Artillery leans back against the emplacement in his rain cape, whip in hand, the leather gaiter on his right leg because he rides the left-hand horse on the gun team.
Their faces are square-jawed, tough and resolute. They would like to put aside the heavy load of shells, capes, tin hats and Sam Brownes and put on other clothes as mechanics, ploughmen and dockers, miners and teachers. They’d like to have looked determined and purposeful doing something else, but for now they’ll see to this.
These aren’t Englishmen offering their lives as sacrifice, these are blokes sent to do a nasty job as best they can, whose heroism comes from their hands, not from Latin tags and snippets of Horace in their heads.
The figure on the north side is quite different. He’s dead. Covered by a greatcoat. There was a great deal of committee discussion about this figure, objections that it was distressing, too low and might suffer indignity. But what is really disturbing is that it breaks a convention of war memorials, whose implication is that the dead live again, in a better place, a Valhalla, Elysian Fields or at least the cricket pitch at Eton. Here is a dead man unrisen; he hasn’t stepped over to the pantheon of the immortal.
When the memorial was finally unveiled by the Duke of Connaught it provoked vicious criticism for its size, its realism, its dead body and its gun. The 9.2 howitzer is life-size, realised in stone, raised above the classical metaphor and harmony of Hyde Park. “A hideous fire-spitting toad”, it was called. The anger was directed at the depiction of the machines of war.
The gun had committed such carnage. This was the mincing machine that churned up the gallant and the coward alike, that reduced glory to mathematics, engineering and chemistry. The howitzer is a masterful and brilliant image to place on this catafalque of the first modern war. The Royal Artillery loved it.
Now, 90 years after the first war and 60 years after the second, there has been another slew of war memorials erected by people who need to memorialise in a contemporary and nostalgic way. There’s a bland gate erected to the dead of the Empire and the Commonwealth that’s a meek imitation of Lutyens. It patronises countries that have long since shrugged off the nannying of colonialism and are quite capable of remembering their own dead.
There is a new memorial to women who served in the second world war — it’s a cube with hats and coats hanging off it. Apparently this symbolises jobs done by women, but with its leaden literalism it misses the point of memorials and just reminds you of housework and faceless drudgery.
Most speechlessly, jaw-droppingly awful of all, there is the memorial for animals who died in all conflicts. A huge installation in the central reservation of Park Lane, it’s a great curved wall through which bronze animals pass — a camel, a dog, a horse, a pigeon. It is the final anthropomorphism, the Disneyfication of war.
It was relentlessly lobbied for by big-hearted committees of people, and I suppose in the end nobody could come up with a good enough reason not to let them get on with it, or perhaps not a reason as good as the most obvious one, that not all suffering is relatively equivalent, that only humans fight wars, win them, lose them and mourn the loss of those who die in them.
It’s not that this thing insults the dead or sullies their memory — they are safe from that. You can’t touch the dead, only offend the living, and the tears and loss that are spent on war memorials grow less each year, and that’s a good thing. In a short time the Great War will cease to be held in the cradle of living memory, and will become like past wars, a thing of interest, of minute textual argument and intellectual pleasure for specialists. And that’s no bad thing either.
Maybe the one thing better than a marvellous war memorial is a really dreadful one. While the gunners and the Cenotaph say something profound about the English, so too does the wall for dead dogs.
© AA Gill 2005
Extracted from The Angry Island by AA Gill published by Orion at £18.99. Copies can be ordered for £17.19 with free delivery from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
