Re-Thinking Remembrance

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 London, 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, Glasgow 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 battlefields 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 commemorate. 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 Tower of London moat. Photo: Loop Images/UIG via Getty Images.

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