British Academy Review Autumn 2018 Re-thinking remembrance

Hew Strachan reflects on four years of commemorating the First World War

When on 11 October 2012 David Cameron still a national hero at his death in 1928. announced the government’s plans for (Ferdinand Foch, whose appointment as the centenary of the First World War, he allied commander on 26 March 1918 was stated his determination ‘to build an en- honoured by an event in , is the during cultural and educational legacy, to only general the government has formally put young people front and centre in our recognised.) However, the biggest chal- commemoration and to ensure that the lenge always lay ahead: how to approach sacrifice and service of a hundred years 11 November 2018, simultaneously Armi- ago is still remembered in a hundred stice Day and Remembrance Sunday, a © The British Academy years’ time’. Some responded with cyn- day of celebration in 1918 and a day of re- icism. For Scots, facing a referendum on flection and solemnity ever since. All in- Sir Hew Strachan is Wardlaw independence, this was the Westminster volved in the programme of the last four Professor of International Relations government draping itself in the Union years have been determined to avoid any at the University of St Andrews, and flag; for socialists, where were the refer- note of triumphalism, but the risk seemed Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, ences to Red Clydeside or to the growth to be particularly great at its culmination. Oxford. He is on the UK, Scottish and of the trades unions, rent control and Part of the answer was in part to sep- French advisory committees for the progressive taxation which the war had arate victory from remembrance. During centenary of the First World War. He promoted? Some, including originally the the hot summer of 2018 I accompanied was elected a Fellow of the British government itself, had doubted the public an international group of school pupils Academy in 2017. stamina for a four-year commemoration. on a battlefield tour organised by UCL’s They thought it wiser to postpone nation- Institute of Education, the body respon- al involvement until 2018, to mark the sible for the Westminster government’s war’s end and not its beginning. Six years package of English school visits to the on, at the centenary of the armistice with western front. The trip’s high point was Germany, it is time to take stock, both of the event in Amiens Cathedral on 8 Au- the last four years and of how Cameron’s gust 2018 to commemorate the allied aims have been fulfilled. victory a hundred years before. Here the At the outset, the government was clear threat of national tub-thumping was con- that its role was not to engage with the spicuous only by its absence: the occasion controversies around the war’s causation, was conciliatory, international and reso- conduct or conclusion. Although fine in lutely secular, although staged in a great theory, that is much harder to achieve in house of worship. Nobody asked whose practice. How events are popularly in- side God was on. On the return I asked terpreted today does more to shape their the pupils what they had drawn from commemoration than do the perceptions the previous four years. Their answers, and preoccupations of those who expe- which echo those given at other events rienced them at the time. In 2014 Britain for schools, spoke of the need for ‘more had to allay German worries that the cen- remembrance’. Rather than feeling sati- tenary of the outbreak might lead it to re- ated by such a protracted programme of prise the issue of war guilt. In 2016 the na- events, they were still hungry. tional commemoration of the battle of the This was random sampling among the Somme did not mention Douglas Haig, already committed, not a scientific anal-

45 Viewpoint ysis, but it may surprise some. Today’s sounds of the war because we have no re- What we call ‘remembrance’ is there- students do not even remember the Cold cordings of artillery fire at Verdun or on fore the single most effective and affect- War, let alone the First World War. The the Somme. The odours of cordite, gas ing cultural artefact left from the First prevailing assumption in 2012, both in or urine are absent from the surviving World War. In 2014, given the sedate pace government and in organisations like the and sanitised trenches of today’s western of a four-year commemoration, it threat- BBC, was that the centenary of the First front. Even the visual stimuli lack a direct ened to turn the centenary into a cycle World War would appeal not to youth, connection. The war’s film and photogra- of successive Remembrance Sundays, connected by the internet and social me- phy, although abundant, are overwhelm- and it seemed more sensible – at least to dia, and both ethnically and culturally ingly monochrome: the luminescence historians – to approach the war chrono- more diverse than British society in 1914, of the Autochrome colour prints taken logically. In 1914, nobody knew what lay but to older, white males of a middle-class by French army photographers are stun- ahead. But in 2014 the public – and the background. However, to the more reflec- ning exceptions. When today’s students state – did what was familiar. It rushed to tive, that too could look counter-intuitive. visit the western front, they see not so ‘remember’, so taking the narrative from Today’s 70-year-olds were the students of much the battlefields as cemeteries. The the beginning to the end of the war and 1968. In France at least they had refused prompt to ‘remember’ is the built land- inverting the experience of those whose to honour the sufferings and sacrifices scape created in the aftermath of the war lives we were memorialising. On 4 Au- of their grandfathers, and by the 1970s by the Imperial (now Commonwealth) gust 2014, the Commonwealth service at the rituals of remembrance were losing War Graves Commission. Back in Britain, Cathedral to mark Britain’s en- support, not least in Australia and New what we experience collectively are the try to the First World War was followed, Zealand where they were linked to the rituals of mourning, the Cenotaph, the at the behest of Glasgow City Council, Vietnam War. For reasons that are not two minutes’ silence, the Unknown War- with a service in George Square at the self-evident, the trend went into reverse rior, and the wearing of poppies, all estab- Cenotaph. Designed by John James Bur- from the mid-1980s, and today the com- lished amidst deep controversy after the net and unveiled in 1924, none of those it memoration of the First World War is not war, in the early 1920s. They have lasted memorialised was dead on 4 August 1914. the monopoly of any one group, and cer- and, because they have been extended to It had nothing to say of the uncertainties tainly not the exclusive preserve of the all subsequent wars, they are annually re- and apprehensions of the war’s outbreak. state and its armed forces. Its power lies newed. They are now vehicles for remem- It replaced the open-endedness of igno- in its capacity to unite more than divide. brance for those who have lost relatives rance with the finality of certitude. The original energy in the ‘remem- in more recent wars; what they do for the That point applied with equal force brance’ of the Great War came from bot- First World War is not remembrance, but to Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, an tom- up, not top-down. The government’s memorialisation, and they venerate those installation designed by Paul Cummins national programme responded to local who died (12 per cent of those who served and Tom Piper, which culminated in No- groups, based around villages, towns and in the British armed forces) over the ma- vember 2014, when the last of 888,246 churches, which were determined to mark jority who fought and who may have been ceramic poppies, one for each service- the centenary, and which used local war wounded, but survived. man from the British empire killed in the memorials as their departure points. They embraced schools, many of which also have war memorials. Although the First World War is not a mandatory element of the national curriculum in England or Scotland (unlike France), school-age children read the books of Michael Mor- purgo and have been visiting the battle- fields with their teachers since the open- ing of the Channel Tunnel. Nonetheless, the point remains: what do school pupils mean by ‘more remembrance’? What is it that they are remembering, and what will they achieve if they do more of it? Nobody now alive remembers the First World War; what we remember is how we remember, or rather how we commem- orate. Remembrance is individual and reflexive (in French ‘je me souviens’), rarely collective, and certainly (as Jay Winter has pointed out) not national. It is prompted in each of us by such asso- ciations as sight, sound and especially smell. Even if we were all surviving veter- ans of the First World War, we might find those cues elusive today. We have lost the

In 2014, the public queued to view the ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’ installation by ceramic artist Paul Cummins and theatre stage designer Tom Piper in the moat. Photo: Loop Images/UIG via Getty Images. 46 British Academy Review Autumn 2018 war, was placed in the moat of the Tower established their authority as witnesses dren returning from trips to France have of London. It ignited the public imagina- to events which others could not under- challenged the knowledge of their par- tion as did no other centenary moment, stand because they had not directly ex- ents; analyses of the names of local war and it both confounded the historical perienced them. They claimed to speak memorials have raised awareness of other purists and silenced those who doubted the truth, but sometimes they chose to theatres. The notion of a single ‘memory’ the appetite for a four-year programme. be selective and at others they glossed of the war has been replaced by the reali- The prime minister reacted to the mood their reminiscences with the wisdom of sation that there were many memories be- by opposing the original intention that it hindsight. Knowledge of these inadequa- cause the war contained multiple events, be dismantled after Remembrance Sun- cies has not dimmed the power of their experienced in divergent ways. day 2014. Over the next four years parts testimony, but they present a challenge ‘More remembrance’ has also achieved of it toured the country, from Kirkwall to which the centenary has had continuous- something more significant than greater Plymouth, and it has been given a perma- ly to confront. The voice of Britain’s last historical understanding. The memory of nent home in the Imperial War Museum. surviving veteran of the war, Harry Patch, war can be used to perpetuate and deep- The poppies at the Tower demonstrat- was projected onto the wall of the Cloth en enmities, as it is in the Middle East. ed that ‘remembrance’, not history, was Hall at Ypres at the national commemora- Neither the Sykes-Picot agreement nor the path into mass public engagement. tion of Passchendaele in 2017. He said that the Balfour declaration is responsible for Memory can be an unreliable source, this was the worst experience of the war; all the current ills of the region, whatever as historians know only too well. In the what he meant was that it was his worst ISIS and others may say. In Europe, how- 1920s the veterans of the First World War experience since he had no other, as he ever, the memory of the First World War was only in the front line for six weeks. has become a vehicle for international The distinction between memory and reconciliation. France and Germany have history, while clear, should not lead histo- seen Verdun as a focus for joint ‘remem- The poppies at the rians to dismiss the cult of ‘remembrance’. brance’ since 1984; not until the cente- Not only has it become the route by which nary was Anglo-German commemoration Tower demonstrated many enter the study of history, but it is of the Great War formalised, most mov- also a powerful educational tool in its ingly at the service for the battle of Jut- that ‘remembrance’, own right. The questioning of received land in 2016. In Ireland, where the mem- wisdom or of an imagined past can be- ories of the Easter Rising and the battle of not history, was come the path to deeper understanding. the Somme were appropriated for sectari- the path into mass In its ideal form, remembrance leads to an purposes, the decade of conflicts from engagement and then to enlightenment. 1912 to 1923 has today been reworked to public engagement. As a result of the four-year centenary, the create a joint ‘remembrance’. We may be public has acquired a deeper and more right to remember in ways which meet nuanced knowledge of the First World our own needs more than they honour War than it possessed in 2014. School chil- those who have gone before.

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