Classical Monuments of the First World War

GENDERING DEATH AND RENEWAL: CLASSICAL MONUMENTS OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR

ANA CARDEN-COYNE

lassical motifs have a long and coalition between the classical and C triumphant heritage in war modern in war monuments is pertinent monuments and memorials. In the to understanding the impact of war and aftermath of the First World War, the ongoing search for healing through memorial designers appeared to return cultural practices. In contrast to the to the tropes and symbols of classicism catharsis of much war art and literature, in their search for appropriate forms to what Jay Winter refers to as ‘the commemorate the war dead. On the one apocalyptic imagination’, classical hand, classicism reflected the language memorials attempted to act as an antidote and ideals of imperialist imagination, so to the trauma of war.2 I use this phrase deeply enmeshed within Victorian and not just to recall the reciprocity between Edwardian thinking. Conversely, the monuments, bereaved and damaged utopic potential of classical harmony and individuals, and mourning communities, simplicity lent a different kind of but in order to suggest the role of ritualised significance to the personal, commemorative architecture as an social and political process that is alternative body to that killed, injured or commemoration. Arguably, this latter disabled by war, and thus also to suggest shift was an outcome of the scale and type the ‘performative’ aspect of gender in its of injuries that human bodies incurred in use of figuration. Although this idea of this first global, mechanised and mass gender as performed is usually reserved form of warfare. Investigating the for real people, if we consider embodied meaning of memorial embodiment an underlying principle in architecture, this essay considers the war monuments then this analytical gendered meaning of war and recovery structure may also be useful.3 as it appeared in some key war Classicism convened a powerful monuments of the postwar period. language of the noble, ideal and spiritual, Classical monuments of the First but most of all the supremely corporeal. World War narrated war and peace. In Circumventing the horrors of the recent doing so, classicism was not revived in past, the body was reinvented through purely literal or mimetic ways. Executed architectural forms. These memorials with a range of traditional and innovative enacted a form of rehabilitation in the approaches, postwar classicism projected corporeal sense, providing a vision of something of the experience of mass wholeness and restoration that displaced warfare and its entanglement with the body violated by war. The cor- modernity.1 This essay argues that the poreality of classical war monuments lent

40 ANA CARDEN-COYNE Gendering Death and Renewal itself to a profoundly gendered passage to heroic immortality occurs representation of death as masculine and when he ‘dies young and stays pretty’. beautiful, and the renewal of life in What the ancients referred to as ‘beautiful peacetime, as feminine and maternal. The death’ (kalos thanatos), invoked the ideals relationship between war and peace, of noble sacrifice bound up with the death and renewal, was comparable to beauty of youthful masculinity, which the gendering of space. The notion of a was mythologised into a culture of the partnership was crucial here. The warrior hero.5 Given that the love architectural body was set as a between men is the highest in the companion to bodily memories of war. Homeric warrior tradition, it is not too Since classicism performed a technique surprising that men experience the beauty of distancing, by evoking timelessness, of death because it binds them together, universality, longevity, it presented an it affirms the gender of death and the alternative version of time to that of the beauty of a masculinity cut short in its immediate traumatic past. It helped to prime, in the pursuit of fame, glory and create an alternative memory of war, eternal youth. which, as Pierre Nora has powerfully There are some remarkable argued, encouraged collective amnesia or convergences with the way the dead were a displacement of memory.4 It should not, heroised after the First World War. however, be reduced to a mere political Ambrose Pratt, for instance, replayed process of reconstruction, or a collusion Homeric heroism in his interpretation of to forget. Rather, classical symbolism the Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance became an associate to war, providing an and the role of the Anzacs in the war. Like image of peace that was a partner to war. the ‘gallant hosts of Troy’, he wrote, the War, then, was not diminished, but rather Anzacs went to war ‘not in lust of naturalised as part of a universal cycle, conquest or in hope of gain, but to rectify sitting comfortably alongside the image a wrong, to vindicate outraged justice, to and political meaning of peace. The sustain liberty and to safeguard the basic classical metaphor was highly useful in principles of civilisation’.6 Such the production of a companionate memory heroisation far exceeded acknow- that accompanied the embodied ledgement of the survivors, except structures of monuments. I want to perhaps in Australia where returned suggest that this production of both war soldiers often received recognition along and peace was something of a social, with the dead. 7 The recording of political and aesthetic marriage, and as individuals’ names upon war memorials such was profoundly gendered. The was an ancient Greek practice of attribut- gendering of this embodiment occurs in ing fame in a permanent object of the image of War as masculine and the demarcation. This was not just a image of Peace as feminine. First, in democratic gesture, but also a way of numerous images of the male body as a aggrandising the individual soldier’s sleeping model of the ‘beautiful death’ commitment to the collective, through his accomplished in by war heroes. Second, own death. Modern war memorials, in the use of an ideal and allegorical body, however, described every soldier’s name especially in the form of a Nike or Winged reflecting the nature of mass warfare and Victory. mass death, but also the democratizing In the Homeric songs a warrior’s of the very concept of noble heroism. The

41 Humanities Research Vol. 10 No. 2, 2003 postwar importance, then, of the material dead’ which was placed on many object in contributing to the soldier’s memorials. His respect for the classical renown was a significant development of tradition reflected older visions of war the warrior myth and the Homeric and death. Classical monuments replaced principle of fame accorded to those who the brutalised and mutilated with a heroic achieved a ‘beautiful death’. treatment of bodily beauty, and tied it to The idea of the ‘beautiful death’ was a myth of serenity so important for expressed in modern images of dead peacetime and recovery. soldiers, whom appeared to be sleeping. In his design for the original London The restful repose was designed to cenotaph, Lutyens was said to have cushion the reality of death for mourning synthesized ‘classical virtues’ with the families. George Lambert’s sculpture for ‘local idiom’. Whilst he ‘took pure form, the St Mary’s Cathedral Memorial in Syd- moulded it in the subtlest proportion and ney, for example, is no dead young set in geometrical relation’, the perfect soldier, as the title Recumbent Figure (1930) formulation of this approach appeared in implies.8 Rather he lies sleeping, silent the war monument as none other.10 The and noble. Adapted to Christian modern cenotaph was an empty tomb. It purposes, the ‘beautiful death’ is pro- did not contain bodies. At the same time, jected from polished bronze surfaces, and it represented the male body by the hero literally shines in demonstration resonating closely with the corporeal of his warrior status. In other effigies of context that produced it. A cenotaph, in the ‘beautiful death’, such as the one sense, attempts to avoid any ‘recumbent figure’ on the Southampton relationship to the very human flesh it Memorial (1920, by Edwin Lutyens), the memorialises.11 When cenotaphs dead body is perched high above so that incorporated coffins or dead bodies, as the sleeping soldier is obscured. His face Lutyens did at Southampton or and body may never be seen, but his fame Manchester, they were perched at the (and those of the eighteen hundred names very top, well out of reach of human gaze. inscribed onto the pylon) shall be the Even then, the cloth of the greatcoat reward for the ‘beautiful death’. Similarly carved from stone usually covered their at Rochdale, Lutyens’ recumbent figure bodies and tin hats often covered men’s served the purpose of allowing the viewer faces. That men’s bodies were killed in to ‘appreciate the beauty of the upper war was not a visual reality that the portion on which it rests’. In other words, architect or sculptor wished to remember the figure was not an end in itself, but in stone. However, on many levels, rather a device to connect the beauty of especially the ceremonial, the relationship the structure to the memory of the male between bodies and war was impossible body. This proved a powerful device to to erase. Soldiers referred to ‘resting mourning communities. When Lutyens places’ with an irony that noted the was thinking about appropriate discrepancy between the reality and architectural forms, his mind turned to representation of death. As one German ‘the abstract shape and intrinsic beauty’ soldier remarked: of classicism.9 Men who ‘fell’ in war should be memorialized for their beauty The battlefield is really a huge cemetery and glory, summed up in Lutyens … [with] innumerable little white crosses invention of the phrase ‘the glorious everywhere … And then you can read in

42 ANA CARDEN-COYNE Gendering Death and Renewal

the paper ‘Peacefully they rest’ … And appeared to be much less glamorous. nobody says that the enemy keeps There were, however, other important shooting and the shells hit the heroes’ exceptions that delivered ambiguous grave, that the bones are squirted away messages about the gendered nature of with the mud … where the heroes resting death and the rebirth of civilisation. place was ….12 Inside the Anzac Memorial in Sydney, the tragedy and reality of death were The notion of dying restfully or portrayed in Rayner Hoff’s centrepiece, peacefully is the exact opposite of what The Sacrifice (1931–34). The three females occurs in violent conflict. This critical figures (caryatids of wife, mother, sister) observation reflected Siegried Sassoon’s holding the shield above their heads with feelings about the Menin Gate and its a dead, emaciated soldier across it, ref- appeasing classicism. In his poem, On erence the Spartan mothers recorded by Passing the New Menin Gate, he decried Plutarch. Hoff’s supporters saw the its classicism as a ‘pile of peace- sorrowful women as the ‘emotional- complacent stone’.13 Far from giving him isation of form’.14 This aspect of comfort, classicism made him angry. commemorative architecture was a key Abhorring the rhetoric of reconstruction reason for his use of classicism. Just as that seemed to appease many people, he the Greeks had developed symbolism and saw the grief of the bereaved being myth in the representation of war, Hoff exploited in order to alleviate the used classicism as an allegorical government of moral guilt for the war. construct. Although they are standard For Sassoon, programs of classical classical female types, they reference the architecture anaesthetised people from myth of the Spartan mothers bidding their the scars of war. The beauty and grandeur sons not to return without victory, unless of classicism toyed with memory, lying dead upon their shields. Hoff’s especially the memory of the body’s figures could be construed as a chilling demise. Beautiful structures of civilised reminder of women’s ‘support’ for the reconstruction and geometric cemeteries war, such as in the Anzac Fellowship of with ordered gardens combined to create Women and in the campaign for the spatial evocation of the ‘beautiful conscription. If one is aware of Plutarch’s death’. It was a classical mythology that alarm at the power Spartan citizen could alternatively comfort and offend in women had within its polis, the classical its highly modern insistence upon symbolism takes on a rather critical view transformation from the horrible and of women’s incitement to heroic degraded to the heroic and perfect. mythology. Indeed, as Ken Inglis points Against the mythology of the out, Australian women were more likely ‘beautiful dead’ were the monstrous to join the imperially patriotic National living. Mutilated soldiers certainly did Council of Women, than peace groups, not feel comfortable wearing their and a majority of Australian women deformities like badges of honour. The voters supported conscription in the classical body exuded a perfection that referenda of 1916 and 1917.15 real soldiers could not necessarily live up Furthermore, the voluntary nature of to. In comparison to the masculine beauty the Australian citizen soldier added to the of death, then, the evocation of Peace, pathos of The Sacrifice. Even in his although feminine and recuperative, vulnerable state, the masculinity of his

43 Humanities Research Vol. 10 No. 2, 2003 sacrifice was still asserted. The architect, war was memorialised through the male Bruce Dellit, thought the emaciated body, and Death was largely a masculine soldier was appropriately masculine. He event in monuments.23 Allied to this, also only wanted women represented in however, was the accompanying image support roles, showing that war was of Peace as symbolically feminine.24 really the business of men.16 Perhaps for Female figures, derived from ancient Dellit only a truly masculine man could Greek Nikes, were regularly selected as make such a sacrifice.17 Contrasting with literal figures of Peace. In the Thornton the male figure’s passivity, however, is Memorial (1922, Yorkshire) by Harold the strength that the women possess in Brownsword, the figure in ancient Greek order to carry him above their heads.18 dress holds up two wreaths, and is herself The official program of the memorial a personification of Peace. She is not a praises the ‘Women of the State’ for their Nike, has no wings, but is classicised in support of the Memorial and their efforts her costume and contraposto limb, which during the war. It is clear that the is slightly revealed through the drapery. caryatids are a tribute to women’s Although most women were involved in sacrifices as well.19 Women’s capacity for war work, nursing or voluntarism, and sacrifice is described as ‘the beautiful many women did not join pacifist quality of womanhood’. At the same time, organisations, the continued belief in women were praised for their de facto role women’s natural peacefulness imbued only. By association, and in passive roles, the representation of classical figuration women ‘with quiet courage and noble in war memorials.25 resignation bore their burdens, the loss Nikes were poignant figures in war of sons, husbands and lovers.’20 And yet memorials.26 The traditional use of the the support of the female figures shows a Nike was as a literal emblem of victory partnership of male and female sacrifices. and triumph. Warriors were her protégés, This partnership inflects wider debates whom she guided to realise their noble about the status of the returned soldier, desires for military success. The Nike was as well as women’s claims to citizenship a goddess with little connection to the in postwar societies.21 If we compare this cycle of human life and frailty.27 In figure of dilapidated masculinity with the contrast, First World War memorials colossal male figures on the exterior, we more often incorporated the figure as a find a different picture again. The symbol of the concept of peace, columns that rise around the outside of appropriating contemporary beliefs about the Anzac Memorial hold up these women’s biological characteristics.28 The colossal square figures.22 Interestingly, modern Nike, was characterised, person- the columns alleviated C.E.W. Bean from alised and individualised by virtue of worrying about the overtly geometric giving her the capacity to feel emotions, nature of Rayner Hoff’s sculptural to suffer, to empathise and to grieve. The figures. In his view, the columns’ monumentalised Nike reflected the reference to classicism was more fitting bodily services of women – she was now for the sacred nature of the memorial, and procreator, incubator, with her colossal the representation of the warrior’s robust and spacious womb, and her exposed masculinity. breast ready for suckling. The trans- Typically, then, the masculinity of formation of the Nike reflected the

44 ANA CARDEN-COYNE Gendering Death and Renewal population politics of postwar recon- peers, their mass presence did make a struction.29 No longer a vengeful goddess, cultural impact. Nurses are a major then, the Nike became a figure of Peace, subject of paintings and war literature, made more human by her essentialised and indeed many nurses became writers womanhood. This linked femininity and themselves. Given the continued maternity to women’s roles in the future reference to their natural qualities as reconstructed society. Often crowning nurturers of the nation’s (male) children, pylons, Nike figures appeared in wind- for example, this might be seen as an swept Greek dress, striding steadily accomplishment. Nurses’ memoirs, forward, not so much in boastful victory poetry, and novels form a genre of but with confidence in the future. In one literature in much the same way as Flanders memorial, she was embraced as soldiers’ and surgeons’ writings. They too an effigy of the martyred nurse, Edith created their own traditions and Cavill, whilst others imagined her as an mythologies through the written word. ‘Angel of Victory’.30 Much of their focus reflected their This was no coincidence, as classical struggle for professional recognition, female figures could be interpreted as rather than being treated as carers in uni- nurses. Typically, the role of nurses was form, which women were apparently conflated with motherhood and the more naturally disposed to.34 feminine functions of comforting and One aspect of nurses’ writing that grieving, as Margaret Darrow’s study of requires more scholarly attention is their French volunteer nursing points out.31 A knowledge of, and attitudes toward, the French monument such as Henri Jean male body, and to different kinds of Moreau’s Libourne (Gironde) memorial has disabilities and their gendered meanings. a Nike attending a dead poilu wrapped Suffice to say for the purposes of this in a blanket. In France it seems that essay, that their observations of the male nurturing Nikes were more commonly body reflect a cultural preoccupation that represented than nurses.32 Why an was unprecedented in Western history. allegorical rather than literal reference to It is significant, then, that modern the role of nurses was more acceptable depictions of a warring figure such as the was part of a general disregard of nurses’ ancient Nike, depict her as a nurse or, in roles in war, which was bound up with keeping with the gendered assumptions the masculinity of French national about nursing, a mother. In England, the identity. Most nurses experienced a Folkestone Memorial has a female in ancient diminished status, which was reflected in Greek dress holding a colossal wreath of war memorials. In Australia, the Anzac peace and a Union Jack at half-mast. The Memorial did not even attempt to distin- designer, Ferdinand Blundstone, guish between mothers and nurses. The intended it to be a representation of Army Medical bas relief was described Motherhood, but the figure also embod- as depicting ‘one of the noblest phases of ied the nation and thus the national the war – weary and wounded men sacrifice. It is not a homage to women’s tended with loving care by the Mothers sacrifices in particular, but a gendered of the race – here is to be seen a Matron, representation of the national meaning of and two of her charges’.33 While nurses war and a symbol of the importance of struggled for the respect of their medical women in reproducing children that

45 Humanities Research Vol. 10 No. 2, 2003 would be the hope of the future. Similarly, and therefore with defined roles based on Blundstone’s Stalybridge Memorial, gendered identities. (Cheshire, 1921) presents a Nike or Angel There were, however, some powerful of Peace attending a collapsed Tommy. contradictions to the masculine enterprise Bare and youthful breasts portray an of war, and the view that women need to inescapably erotic relationship. be protected. For the Nike, as symbolic Appropriating the bare breast of the Nike mother of history and the future, was of Paionios (Olympia), such monuments sometimes produced with a muscularity do not represent the ecstasy of flight, but that betrayed her as a physical force, a rather the natural connection between sex protector of men. In the Blois War and life, succour and rebirth. Bare- Memorial (Loir-et-Cher, 1923), two stone breasted nurturing returned sexuality to winged Nikes hold above their heads a procreation. The mother figure combined coffin that symbolically contains within with the Nike became an image of it the bodies of all the men who are named military assistance as well as societal on its pylon. Their strength is revealed in replenishment. The overt maternalism is bare arms and their wings, which help to further revealed in the fact that the support the coffin. In his dedication surplus raised in donations was put in a speech at the inauguration of the fund for the children of the dead. memorial, the symbolic importance of the Gendered perceptions informed the wings of the Nike was not lost on the local deployment of the Nike in war mayor. Questioning the very process of memorials, transforming her from a commemoration, and fearing the perfunctory military symbol to a feminine evaporation of war’s meaning, he asked, one. More than that, though, she was no ‘Are all the words we have just uttered longer a benign figure representing a only words, will they fly away forever?’35 grand tradition, but came closer to her The Nike as an emblem of flight, then, meaning in ancient Greek civic religion – symbolised the fear of memory’s she was returning to her former status as disappearance. The fleeting temporality a socialised personality. Although that of the mourning process is evoked personality was not understood in terms through the Nike, and yet her stony of religious privilege, as gods and construction in the form of the monument goddesses were in ancient times, she was helps to ground her, to enforce her instead imbued with the personality of a permanence and endurance in the earthly mortal. The grieving, nursing, maternal realm. The flight of the Nike is dualistic. Nike of commemorative architecture in Wings imply the passing of time, the the 1920s and 1930s is a modern healing of wounds, the forgetting of pain phenomenon that reflects the and the recovery of society, and yet her ‘emotionalisation’ of the war monument, material form makes her anything but and the transition from effigy of imperial light and temporal. Despite her wings, the victory to ‘site of mourning’. This was modern Nike cannot escape the past. instead of females being seen as active With the heavy burden of history, then, participants in war. The female embodi- she embraces the future, a future in which ment of Peace, and the male embodiment her role as ‘mother protector’ is placed of War, in memorials reflected ideas as a central component in the continuance about men and women as partners in life, of Western civilisation.

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There were also some radical roles, this metaphor of partnership was attempts to invert the gendered ordering politically useful.37 Officially rejected, of memorialisation. Rayner Hoff’s Civilisation lost the power of represen- sculptural group entitled The Crucifixion tation to the importantly male figure of of Civilisation 1914 (1932) was rebuked for Sacrifice that continues to stand in the its explicit evocation of the bloody horror Anzac Memorial today. Hoff still of the war. Rather than a grieving or managed to be subversive, however, and nurturing Nike, Hoff’s central figure was it is fascinating to consider that an a naked crucified woman. No discrete emaciated soldier was, in comparison, folds of classical chemise, this female is more appealing. The authority of woman stripped and tortured, classicism in the Sacrifice was preferable contradicting the mythology of masculine to a figure of a naked woman brutalised and Christian heroism in war. Her on the Christian cross. Arguably, hygienic sexualised and morbid body was an classicism wiped away all the messy affront to the gendered construction of sexual and biological connotations bound war as a male domain involving male up with the naked female body. courage and sacrifice. This female Jesus To conclude, then, the gendering of positioned woman as a central figure, and death as masculine and peace as feminine therefore both an active participant and in war monuments was complex. On the an active sufferer of pain. She was no one hand, it affirmed gendered codes of support act to the main masculine event. behaviour and stereotypical roles. On the As I have already noted, the idea that other hand, some architects and sculptors ‘woman’ was the embodiment of ‘peace’, engaged with the themes of war and ‘civilisation’ or ‘humanity’ drew upon death in an exciting, ambiguous and popular maternalist ideas.36 The problem unconventional manner. The flexibility of with Hoff’s sculpture was that if the modern interpretation of classical Civilisation was female, then the aesthetics enabled these ambiguities. The responsibility for its reconstruction might classical motif channelled social be seen as women’s. Representation had commentary and personal politics powerful meanings beyond the realm of without seriously offending commis- the symbolic, but linked the imagined sioners of public works. Whether a allegorical world with the bodies, lives sleeping warrior, a Nike or Angel of and sex roles of real women. Biological Peace, classical beauty was employed to duty was in danger of being misconstrued diffuse the traumatic memory of war, as a sacrifice. Surely sacrifice was the providing instead highly gendered preserve of Christ and the warrior heroes evocations of death and renewal as a of the war? Moreover, if women were partnership. War and Peace were represented as the rebuilders of Western naturalised as a marriage of classical civilisation, a subversive representation figures, as visions of wholeness and res- of female power and leadership would toration, and therefore proposing a have contradicted the need for women to traditional gender order in a time of social leave their employment and return to and bodily fragmentation. more or less domestic pursuits. Given postwar debates over female citizenship, indirect rights rather than representative

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ENDNOTES 7 K.S. Inglis and Jock Phillips, ‘War Memorials in Australia and New Zealand: A Comparative Survey’, in 1 Alan Borg, War Memorials From John Rickard and Peter Spearritt (eds), Antiquity to the Present, Leo Cooper, Packaging the Past? Public Histories, London, 1991, p. 15. Special Issue of Australian Historical Studies, Vol. 24, No. 96, April 1991, 2 Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, Mourning: The Great War in European p. 186. Cultural History, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 233. 8 Originally Lambert titled it Dead Soldier, and aimed at combining a vision of 3 The idea is Judith Butler’s, who argues sainthood with an Australian digger. that gender may be considered as a However, the use of the term ‘corporeal style’ or an ‘act’ which is both ‘Recumbent’ superseded this. See Ken intentional and performative. This Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the ‘suggests a dramatic and contingent Australian Landscape, Melbourne construction of meaning’. Then the University Press, 1998, p. 169. See also relationship between objects, discursive J.C. Waters in his 1932 survey of AIF and individual practices is allowed a life, burials, poignantly subtitled ‘Where an embodiment, a staging. War They Sleep’, in part three of his book, monuments interact with ideas about Crosses of Sacrifice: The Story of the embodiment and are also highly staged Empire’s Million War Dead and Australia’s in ceremonial practices of inauguration, 60,000, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, dedication and remembrance activities. 1932, p. 113. In Judith Butler, ‘Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversion’, Gender 9 Lutyen’s words cited in Christopher Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Hussey, Life of Sir Edwin Lutyens, Identity, Routledge, London, 1990, p. 33. London, 1950, p. 375. See also her essay ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in 10 A.S.G. Butler, The Lutyens Memorial: The the Phenomenology of Feminist Theory’, Architecture of Sir Edwin Lutyens, Vol. 3, in Katie Conboy (ed.), Writing on the Country Life and Scribners, London and Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist New York, 1950, p. 37. Theory, Columbia University Press, New York, 1997. 11 There are notable exceptions, such as the Croydon Memorial, where two bronze 4 Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: The figures attached at the base, one of Construction of the French Past, 1, which is a wounded soldier bandaging ‘Conflicts and Divisions’, Translated by his own arm. The other figure is a young Arthur Goldhammer, Columbia woman with a child who seems to be University Press, 1996. desperately reaching out to the soldier on the opposite side of the cenotaph. It is 5 Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘A “Beautiful inscribed as ‘A tribute to the men and Death” and the Disfigured Corpse in women of Croydon who died and Homeric Epic’, in Froma I. Zeitlin (ed.), suffered’. Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 12 Philip Witkopp (ed.), Kriegsbriefe gefallener 1991, pp. 50–51. Studenten, Munich, 1928, p. 129; Bernd Huppauf, ‘War and Death: the experience of 6 In Ambrose Pratt, The National War the First World War’, in Mira Crouch and Memorial of Victoria: An Interpretative Bernd Huppauf (eds), Essays on Mortality, Appreciation of the Shrine of Remembrance, University of New South Wales, W.D. Joynt, Melbourne, 1934, p. 9. Kensington, 1985, p. 70.

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13 Unveiled in 1927, Sassoon wrote of the 22 Deborah Edwards, This Vital Flesh’: The Menin Gate, that is was ‘ a pile of peace- Sculpture of Rayner Hoff and His School, complacent stone...well might the dead Art Gallery of New South Wales who struggled in the slime/ Rise and exhibition catalogue, Sydney, 1999, deride this sepulchre of crime’. In Gavin p. 55. Stamp, Silent Cities: An Exhibition of the Memorial and Cemetery Architecture of the 23 See Nancy Huston, ‘The Matrix of War: Great War, Royal Institute of British Mothers and Heroes’, in Susan Suleiman Architects, London, 1977, p. 4. (ed.), The Female Body in Western Culture, Cambridge University Press, 14 Earl Beauchamp, Howard Ashton, E.C. Cambridge, 1986, pp. 119–136. Temple Smith and W.Bede Dalley, Rayner Hoff, Sunnybrook Press, Sydney, 24 A notable exception is in the Welsh 1934, p. 2. National War Memorial (1928), which has a naked youthful male bronze 15 Ken Inglis, ‘Men, Women and War personified as Messenger of Peace. See Memorials: Anzac Australia’, Daedalus, Derek Boorman, At the Going Down of the (Learning About Women: Gender, Sun: British First World War Memorials, Politics and Power), Fall 1987, Vol. 116, Ebor Press, York, 1988, p. 160. No. 4, p. 55. 25 Joyce Berkman, ‘Feminism, War and 16 Cited in Inglis, ‘Men, Women and War Peace Politics: The Case of World War I’, Memorials’, p. 45. in Jean Bethke Elshtain and Sheila Tobias (eds), Women, Militarism and War: 17 Waters, Crosses of Sacrifice, pp. 9–10. Essays in History, Politics and Social Theory, Rowman and Littlefield, Savage, 18 The German artist Kathe Kollwitz Maryland, 1990, pp. 141–160. repeated a similar gesture in the memorial to her son. See Regina Schulte, 26 They appear to be more common in ‘Kathe Kollwitz’ Sacrifice’, (transl. by Europe than Australia. See Inglis, Sacred Pamela Selwyn), History Workshop Places, p. 172ff. Journal, 41, Spring 1996, pp. 195–196. Kollwitz’ emphasis on the raising of the 27 Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: dead son to show that the sacrifice was The Allegory of the Female Form, London, as much the parents’ as his own, recalls 1985, p. 131. Rayner Hoff’s Sacrifice which honours the sacrifice that women made by giving 28 Notable exceptions include York and sons, lovers, brothers and husbands in Lancaster Regiment Memorial, Sheffield, service of the State and the ‘Mother which has a tall bronze Nike with two Country’. soldiers. One holds a revolver, the other a rifle. The paraphernalia of war is also 19 S. Elliott Napier (ed.), The Book of the depicted, such as weapons, ammunition Anzac Memorial, Beacon Press, Sydney, box, helmet and drum. See also the 1934, p. 37. representation of Patriotism as Athena Parthenos in the Calverley Memorial, 20 The Anzac Memorial, Hyde Park, Sydney, Yorkshire, 1922. The giant Nike at Le NSW, no date, official publication, p. 7. Havre (Seine-Maritime), by M. Poisson, 1921, is represented along with combat, 21 See Susan Grayzel, Women’s Identities at the vanquished soldier and the family. War: Gender, Motherhood and Politics in In Australia, the Winged Victory Britain and France During the First World (Marrickville, New South Wales, 1919, War, University of Northern Carolina by Gilbert Doble) holds a wreath of Press, Chapel Hill, 1999. peace in one hand but raises a sword in the other.

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29 Susan Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: British Women as Military Nurses, 1854– Gender, Motherhood and Politics in Britain 1914, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, and France During the First World War, 1988; Julia Hallam, Nursing the Image: University of North Carolina Press, Media, Culture and Professional Identity, 1999. See also Mary Louise Roberts, Routledge, London, 2000. Civilisation Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927, 35 Marcel Bernard, 1923, cited in Sherman, University of Chicago Press, Chicago Construction of Memory, p. 308. and London, 1994. 36 See for example, Charles Jagger’s 30 Rose E.B. Coombs, Before Endeavours ‘Humanity’ in the Hoylake and West Fade: A Guide to the Battlefields of the First Kirby Memorial. World War, Battle of Britain Prints International, London, 1976, p. 18. In 37 See Ilene Rose Feinman, Citizenship Rites: contrast to Mont Noir, the memorial to Feminist Soldiers and Feminist Edith Cavell near Trafalgar Square Antimilitarists, New York University combines modernist simplicity, Press, New York and London, 2000. nineteenth century feminine morality (Cavell’s dress and posture) and medieval Christianity (figure of the Madonna and child seated atop the Christian cross). It describes the characteristics of a dutiful nurse in the genre of Christian servant and religious martyr. Inscribed on the monument are the words ‘Humanity, Sacrifice, Fortitude and Devotion’. Dualistically, there is the inscription, ‘For King and Country’, which was later added along with Cavell’s own words, almost in contradiction of that statement; ‘Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone’. Arguably, it was a statement of forgiveness and healing over nationalist rhetoric. It is interesting that this memorial directly refers to Cavell by providing an effigy of her, whereas the Mont Noir memorial uses the Nike as an allegory of peace, and there is no reference to her execution at all. Cited in Boorman, Before Endeavours, p. 6.

31 Margaret H. Darrow, ‘French Volunteer Nursing and the Myth of the War Experience’, American Historical Review, Vol. 101, No. 1, February 1996, pp. 80– 106.

32 Darrow, ‘French Volunteer’, p. 83.

33 The Anzac Memorial, p. 13.

34 See Anne Summers, Angels and Citizens: