Paul Gough

Loci Memoriae Vortex Productions ISBN 1 86043 321 9 Paul Gough Loci Memoriae

Front cover This catalogue is published jointly by Watershed, The Architecture Centre, Bristol Unknown (no.1) and the Centre for Contextual, Public and Commemorative Art at UWE, Bristol. 2000 chalks on paper It accompanies two exhibitions: 155 cm x 102 cm STONE Back cover Red Tree Watershed Media Centre, Bristol UK 2000 Tuesday 25 September - Sunday 11 November 2001 chalks on paper 155 cm x 102 cm DUST The Architecture Centre, Bristol UK Monday 1 October - Sunday 11 November 2001

These exhibitions were developed in collaboration with Watershed, The Architecture Centre, and Westminster Abbey, London. Research funding was provided in part by the Canadian High Commission, London.

Further information www.whiteflags.org.uk

Author Photographs Paintings Design Paul Gough is a painter, Paul Gough, Paul Gough CSø2 broadcaster and author. Clive Hughes, www.csø2.com Tel: (0117) 965 6261 Colin Somerset [email protected] It’s difficult with the weight of the rifle. Leave it – under the oak. Leave it for a salvage-bloke let it lie bruised for a monument dispense the authenticated fragments to the faithful.

... but leave it – under the oak. Leave it for a Cook’s tourist to the Devastated areas and crawl as far as you can and wait for the bearers.

From part 7, In Parenthesis, David Jones, (Faber, London, 1937) p. 183 – 186 Loci Memoriae How should we difficult of all wars to A traditional memorial encountering official Most of all it is cinema Philippe Noiret has to comedy rather than the space left by a together both memorials remember honestly the remember. Most survivors is that of the entombment war memorials: only for me. Memorials play identify 350,000 dead combat. Opening on soldier’s amputated leg. and art in his moving dead of war at the same wanted to forget quickly, of the Unknown Soldier in the arts can I find small but influential roles and deranged victims armistice day, 1919, it Nothing can say more work, ensuring that time as warning against and were soon forgotten as the symbol of all the the understanding, in films about the war: of the war. He has to shows a distraught than this. a new generation, long future war? For Phillip themselves, as the song dead. The suffering of the education and the white crosses, statues, find also a corpse to French veteran seeking In truth, I have nothing removed from the war, Larkin, memorably, the says. Yet eight million those who fought in that emotion. A sentence the Unknown Soldier be placed under the forgiveness for having against war memorials. can remember and learn. traditional tribute was died, and the suffering unjust war (not really by Remarque, a poem (strange that this should Arc de Triomphe as the killed a German boy. More than most, I guess, His work joins recent ‘solemn-sinister Wreath did not end in 1918: a Great War) has always by Sassoon, a picture always be capitalised Unknown Soldier. The opening sequence I stay silent for two books and films that rubbish.’ Recent much of the rest of moved me, even haunts by Nash, and a film like when lower case would He must be French is the most powerful minutes every November symbolise the hold, controversy over the twentieth century history me, as does the All Quiet on the Western be more universal). and not British or of all war films. Bells and try to remember, and perhaps also the American Second World was affected by what experience and bravery Frontbring home to In Bertrand Tavernier’s a Hun he is told. ringing and soldiers though in reality I can fear, that this disaster War memorial shows happened in the four of those who fought me the suffering and 1989Rien d’Autre,Film, La Vie et Tavernier’s film is marching in an Armistice only imagine the horror. of nearly ninety years how potent the issue short years after 1914. Nazism in the only just the waste, more than one of powerful. But I remember Day parade up the Anything that exists to ago still has on remains. The pointless So, both remembrance war of the twentieth the bricks, mortar and many great French more one released in Champs-Elysees are warn against a repeat the contemporary slaughter of the First and warning were and century. Yet I experience bronze of the official contributions to world 1932, made by Ernst filmed, though we do of this is justified. imagination. World War is the most remain essential. little emotion when tributes can ever do. cinema about the war, Lubitsch, known for not know it yet, through Paul Gough brings Andrew Kelly 2001

Andrew Kelly is the author of Cinema and the Great War (1997) and Filming All Quiet on the Western Front (1998). HOLY Plates 1 & 2 RELICS: venerated detritus

LikeLike David David Jones, Jones, many many old old soldiers soldiers suspected suspected that that the the withered withered landscape landscape of closest most Canadians would come to partaking of northernnorthern France France and and Belgian Belgian Flanders Flanders would would swarm swarm with with tourists tourists once once the the High Wood in the ‘Great Crusade’. FirstFirst World World War War had had ended. ended. Another Another war war poet, poet, Philip Philip Johnstone, Johnstone, wrote wrote Ladies and gentlemen, this is High Wood, You are requested kindly not to touch So little of any substance survived on the worst tracts of French battlefield that considerable efforts 1 1 Called by the French, Bois des Fourneaux, Or take away the Company’s property a sardonica sardonic poem poemaboutabout the sightseers the sightseers who wouldwho would be drawn be drawn to the to killing the killing fields were made to shore up and preserve symbolic The famous spot which in Nineteen-Sixteen, As souvenirs; you’ll find we have on sale fields outout ofof dreaddread fascinationfascination andand morbidmorbid curiositycuriosity: features. At Beaumont Hamel, on the old Somme July, August and September was the scene A large variety, all guaranteed. battlefield, the government of Newfoundland Of long and bitterly contested strife, As I was saying, all is as it was. purchased for a memorial park a large stretch of pock- But Johnstone could not have predicted the obsessive By reason of its High commanding site. This is an unknown British officer, marked ground which was criss-crossed by deep and habit of post-war battlefield tourists to claim a Observe the effect of shell-fire in the trees The tunic having lately rotted off. distinctive trenches. Here the Newfoundland Regiment 1 Philip Johnstone, High segment of the land blooded by their kinsmen. During Standing and fallen; here is wire; this trench Please follow me – this way ... had suffered appalling losses in an ill-timed attack on Wood, cited in Paul Fussell, the period of mass pilgrimage in the early 1920s tracts the first day of the Somme battle in 1916. Some yards The Bloody Game For months inhabited, twelve times changed the path, sir, please, of the battlefields were scoured for evidence of wars’ in front of the Newfoundlander’s trenches is the (Scribners, London, 1991) hands; pp. 197 – 98. realities: stone, soil, seeds, shards of glass, became petrified remains of a tree, preserved – a little (They soon fall in), used later as a grave. The ground which was secured at great expense the coinage of remembrance, a currency that crossed inelegantly – in a sunken barrel full of cement. all borders. It has been said on good authority The Company keeps absolutely untouched, (Plate 1) It served as a gathering point during the That in the fighting for this patch of wood And in that dug-out (genuine) we provide Coloured glass was highly valued as evidence attack,la guerre, providing little shelter from the withering rain of pilgrimage, especially by those who had travelled Were killed somewhere above eight thousand men, Refreshments at a reasonable rate. of bullets and high explosives. Perhaps for that reason considerable distances. In Carmichael United Church Of whom the greater part were buried here, You are requested not to leave about it is known variously as the Danger Tree, l’arbre de in Regina, Canada, for example, a memorial window This mound on which you stand being ... Paper, or ginger-beer bottles, or orange-peel, the Tree of Death. Now encircled by paper incorporates a single piece of glass bought back by Madame, please. There are waste-paper baskets at the gate. poppies and wreaths – the paraphernalia of a pilgrim from the Great War battlefields around Ypres. remembrance – it has always reminded me of the Another memorial window, in St Paul’s Church, Toronto fable of the Upas Tree, a mythical plant that was said comprises over 600 fragments of glass gathered from who could not make the long journey across the these battlefield relics as playing a fundamental to have grown on the isle of Java in the midst of seventy European buildings damaged during the war, Atlantic. With heightened status came an increase part in Canada’s memorialisation of the war. a desert formed by its own ‘pestiferous exhalations’ as well as an altar rail from Arras cathedral, and in the scale of the spoil: the Canadian General 2 Jonathanso Noble: Memory,F. Vance, MeaningDeath He argues that these bits of rubble, shards of glass which destroyed all vegetable and animal life that and the First World War shards of glass and exfoliant stonework from various Arthur Currie has a grave marker in Mount Royal and bags of dirt became endowed with a spiritual came near it. Derived from accounts of the poisonous ecclesiastical buildings on the former battlefield. Cemetery which includes a stone from the chateau (UBC Press, Vancouver, significance. As artifacts taken from the new Holy anchar tree discovered by the 18th century botanist Such fragments were held in great reverence and at Camblain l’Abbe and bags of soil from Vimy, 1997). Land they were transformed into objects of veneration. Erasmus Darwin, the Upas Tree was reputed to were highly valued as material proof by those Ypres and the Somme. Jonathan Vance2 has described Touching a lump of stone from France was the contain a precious poison which could be obtained Plates 3 & 4

by piercing the bark. ‘So hopeless, and so perilous was sight-seer will probably be disappointed with On these sacred sites little is left to chance; the endeavour to obtain it’, wrote Richard Redgrave the devastated zones of France and Belgium. arboreal symbolism is a powerful means 3 Richard and Samuel in 1866, that only criminals sentenced to death could But combined with ‘atmosphere’ and imagination of perpetuating memory, allowing a fluidity Redgrave,Painters A Century of be induced to make the attempt, and as numbers of they will draw the tourists like magnets and he will of commemoration that could not always be (London, 1866) 5 pp. 438 – 9; see also Francis them perished, the place became a valley of the probably return to them again and again. conveyed in stone and bronze. This was especially Greenacre,1793 – 1861Francis Danby, shadow of death, a charnel-field of bones.’3 true in the First World War because, in the interests (Tate Gallery, London 1988) pp. 89 – 91, Five miles along the old battle-line there is another In its desolated and noisome state, littered with war of standardisation, an Army General Routine p. 112. preserved tree – an one hundred year old hornbeam, refuse and unspent ordnance, the emptied land was Order of May 1916 banned permanent personalised

4 DavidTourism Lloyd, Battlefield which is the positive to the Danger Tree’s negative devoid of identifying landmarks except for painted memorials in any military cemetery. Uniform (Oxford,1998). (Plate 2). Despite being riddled with shrapnel, annually signposts indicating the site of former villages, headstones were agreed in Parliament during a highly adorned with paper poppies and regularly caressed churches or farmsteads. Yet these were the very charged debate in May 1920. Such a rigid system 5 T.Battlefields: A. Lowe, The A GuideWestern to the British Line by pilgrims, it survives as the sole pre-war plant in the sites of memory that would assume an inestimable occasionally resulted in acts of arboreal transgression, (London, 1920) once-flattened Delville (Devil’s) Wood. significance in national, regional and local memory. such as the occasion in 1922 when the father of p. 9. In the aftermath of the Great War, while the native Over the next decade governments, remembrance Lt. Eric Duckworth (killed in action in August 1915) 6 PhilipUnending Longworth, Vigil: A The History of Belgian and French people toiled to reconstruct the groups, and bereaved families bought small tracts landmark during the battles of mid-1915 it lent its name travelled from Dunsterville near Rochdale to Cape the Commonwealth War Graves Commission 1917 – regions devastees, individuals and groups from as far of foreign land as permanent memorials and sacred to the surrounding land – Lone Pine Ridge, Lone Pine Helles on the Gallipoli Peninsula bearing a young 1984 afield as Australia and Canada came to locate spaces. On such sites of memory, planting was 7 Paul Gough, ‘Conifers and Plateau. However, the night before one attack, Turkish sapling. Surreptitiously planted to one side of Redoubt (London, Secker and particular places which might still contain the memory a carefully considered act. The double avenue Commemoration: the Politics soldiers cut the tree down to avoid it being used Military Cemetery it is now a mature English oak Warburg, 1967 / 1985) and Protocol of Planting‘ pp. 20. of significant events. For most visitors there was little of apparently ancient oaks either side of the South Landscape Research, (1996) as a registration point. Long after the war its remains which upsets the customary symmetry of the graveyard to see. As David Lloyd has observed, the landscape African Brigade’s museum on the Somme battlefield, 21, 1, pp. 73 – 87. were discovered crammed into a dug-out on the old regime. (Plate 4) There are few acts of such ‘guerilla which drew them was largely an imaginary one: for example, were grown from acorns harvested and front-line. Inspired by its significance in their national gardening’ other than paper wreaths and imitation silk sent over from Cape Colony. Maple trees were grown memory, several Australian pilgrims took seeds from poppies. Though always well scrubbed, the military ‘It was not the sites themselves which attracted around Canadian cemeteries, wattle was imported its pine cones and planted them in the grounds cemeteries seem less abundant in flowers and shrubs travellers, but their associations.’4 from New Zealand sites. The Imperial War Graves of the Canberra War Memorial. In time, a tree grew than they appear to be in photographs taken during Commission recruited experts from Kew Gardens there and when mature, its seeds were flown the pilgrimage phase of the 1920s. Transgressive One guidebook assured pilgrims that: to advise on appropriate funerary plantings for back to Gallipoli and planted near the spot of the gardening occurs in Julian Barnes’ short story the graves of Indian and Chinese troops.6 Mother Tree, now in the centre of a war cemetery. Evermore when the protagonist, Miss Moss, attempts touring the battlefields is a different thing In Turkey, on the notorious Gallipoli Peninsula, (Plate 3) The idea of the lonesome pine also to reclaim the private memory of her fallen brother altogether to touring for the purpose of sight a solitary dwarf pine had long dominated the skyline survives in the title of a song made famous by from the administrative anonymity and foreign soil of seeing, in fact I can safely say that the mere on the slopes above Anzac beach. An obvious Laurel and Hardy.7 the French cemetery which she visits every year: Plate 5

There had been problems with the planting. of Flanders: the Our-Lady’s-thistle, Silybum Marianum add a stone to a pile, each survivor removing one period of commemoration since pharonic Egypt.11 The grass at the cemetery was French grass, had been bought from Scotland in the horses’ oats; afterwards; the remaining stones representing At the foot of each headstone relatives could 8 Julian Barnes, Evermore and it seemed to her of the coarser type, solid, lumpy turnips were carried there from Germany, 10 Martin and Mary the number of casualties. The cairn in France choose their own inscription, but were charged (London, 1996) pp. 39 – 41. inappropriate for British soldiers to lie beneath. and everywhere grew the wind-blown native poppies, Middlebrook,A Battlefield GuideThe Somme: is made up of 192 stones hand-picked from the threepence halfpenny for each letter and for 9 9 Marc Derez, ‘A Belgian Her campaign over this with the Commission led Papaver Rhoeas. In 1927, the trans-Atlantic solo pilot (London, 1991). fields around Culloden and is exactly 5 feet 7 inches each space between words, to a maximum of Salient for Reconstruction: nowhere. So one spring she took out a small spade Charles Lindbergh scattered thousands of poppy high – the minimum height for recruitment to that 66 characters. At that rate the popular epitaph People and Patrie, 11 Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: the Great 10 Landscape and Memory’ and a square yard of English turf, patting it into seeds from his ‘plane over the American cemetery War in European Cultural battalion. – ‘At the going down of the sun we will remember Passchendaele in place, then stamping it in. She was pleased in Waregem. History Compare these subtleties with the scale of them’ – cost a bereaved family fourteen shillings, Perspective (London, 1997) (Cambridge, 1994). p. 456. with her work, and the next year, as she There was also a thriving exchange in rocks quarrying during the ‘monumental phase’ in the years seven pence halfpenny. approached the grave, saw no indication of her and stones. On the edge of High Wood in France that followed the war. Every week between 1920 and In 1920 the tomb of Unknown Warrior was mending. But when she knelt, she realised that – possibly near the path taken by Johnstone’s 1924 thousands of tonnes of white stone were sealed with a slab of granite excavated from her work had been undone: the French grass prospective tourists – is a cairn memorial quarried from Portland and shipped across the Belgium, and the body packed in by battlefield soil was back again.8 that commemorates the 192 Glasgow Highlanders continent to be further carved and inscribed as bought across to London in six sealed barrels. killed here in 1916. (Plate 5) Built in 1972 its form headstones for the cemeteries of Flanders. We can see a reprise of these sentiments in the Because British and Allied military cemeteries is derived from a Scottish Highland custom By 1927 more than 400,000 headstones have been opening sequence to Stephen Spielberg ‘s film of have been sealed against arboreal intervention, that required each warrior going into battle to erected. This monumental effort was the greatest the 1944 Normandy landings, Saving Private Ryan remembrance organisations, such as the Western when the hardened platoon sergeant, having Front Association have had to look elsewhere. scrambled through the enemy defences, pauses In the mid 1990s a group from Bristol sought out and to cram handfuls of soil into a tin marked ‘France’. planted a sapling on the site of the notorious ‘Lone It is thrust back into his knapsack alongside Tree’ that once stood half-way across no-man’s land cans from other campaigns marked ‘Italy’ and on the Loos Battlefield and formed the right hand ‘North Africa’. marker for the 1st Division of the British Expeditionary Walking across the boneyards of northern Force in 1915. On the slate-flat fields of northern France, Belgium and Turkey is simultaneously France the tree was a distinctive feature, noted by the sobering and uplifting. The dead ground of the artillery as a reliable datum point for calibration Somme valleys and the Anzac creeks has deeply purposes. The trade in significant trees and memorial infused my studio and written work in the past plantings is matched by instances of a more decade and is evidenced in the images reproduced haphazard nature: in the aftermath of the war all sorts in this catalogue. of foreign flora were to be found in the ravaged soil Paul Gough Dialogue 1999 chalk, pastels on paper 40 cm x 76 cm

Sapling Petrified Tree 2000 2000 chalks, conté, ink on paper ink, oil pastels on paper 155 cm x 102 cm 75 cm x 42 cm Alliance Trees of Upas 1999 - 2000 1999 - 2000 pastel, chalks, ink and collage on paper chalks, conté, ink on paper 102 cm x 155 cm 102 cm x 155 cm Two studies for Land Mark Memorial sous terrain 2000 2000 pastel, chalks on paper pastel on paper 155 cm x 102 cm 75 cm x 41 cm Catafalque (for Brunel) Catafalque (for Max Aitken) 2000 2000 pastel, acrylic on paper chalk, conté on paper 155 cm x 102 cm 155 cm x 102 cm Centotaph (after Luytens) Unknown Warrior (no.2) 2000 1999 chalk, ink, acrylic on paper graphite, chalk, ink on paper 155 cm x 102 cm 160 cm x 120 cm Unknown Warrior (no. 3) 1999 - 2000 pastel, conté on paper 160 cm x 130 cm

Monument to an airman Unknown Warrior (no 4) 2000 1999 - 2000 pastel, acrylic on paper conté on paper 155 cm x 102 cm 160 cm x 130 cm Seedling 2000 chalk on paper 155 cm x 102 cm

horizontal man Let us honour if we can The vertical man Though we value none But the horizontal one

Inconnu Such was W.H. Auden’s2 sarcastic comment on the shown in London and the provinces. As one more HereHere sentimental fever that continued to surround the burial sympathetic reviewer noted they were little more than mixedmixed with with the the dust dust of of kings kings 1 This is an alternative of the Unknown Warrior in the decade after the Great ‘cubist monstrosities’. Railton’s letter, however, struck andand of of famous famous men men inscription for the stone War. His, and the few dissenting voices were, however, a more popular chord, and the Dean soon gained the covering the Tomb of the inin earth earth bought bought with with him him Unknown Warrior, smothered by the tens, and eventually hundreds of approval of the Prime Minister, who in turn convinced fromfrom thethe battlefieldsbattlefields ofof FranceFrance1 Westminster Abbey, London thousands who gathered to lay wreaths at the the War Office and (a rather reluctant) King. Cabinet written by D.S. MacColl, in 1921. Cenotaph in London’s Whitehall, and then to process established a Memorial Service Committee in October in pairs past the tomb in nearby Westminster Abbey and it was hoped that the entombment would take 2 W.H.Poems Auden, Collected (London, 1990) on Armistice Day, November 11th 1920. place at the unveiling of the permanent Cenotaph Many individuals have been credited for the idea in Whitehall that November. 3 Cited in Our Empire Volume VII, no. 8. of exhuming the body of an unknown soldier and Necessarily a sensitive act, the selection of a single entombing it in the sacred centre of the British State, British body was clouded in secrecy. Historians differ 4 See for example: Michael ‘the Parish Church of the Empire’.3 Most scholars4 as to the number of bodies actually exhumed, whether Gavagan,Unknown The Warrior, Story of the (Preston, agree, however, that the idea originated with a young four or six. Whichever, a number of unknown bodies 1995);Unknown Terry Warrior, Cave, The WFA Bulletin, army padre, the Reverend David Railton MC who were dug up from the areas of principle British military no. 17, wrote first to Sir Douglas Haig, and then to the involvement in France and Belgium – the Somme, October, 1986; Ken Inglis, Dean of Westminster, the Rt Rev Herbert Ryle5 in Aisne, Arras and Ypres. The digging parties had been Entombing Unknown Warriors: From London and August 1920. Our Empire later explained his motives: firmly instructed to select a grave marked ‘Unknown Paris to Baghdad, History British Soldier’, one who had been buried in the earlier and Memory,no. 5 (1993) He was worried that the great men of the part of the war so as to allow sufficient decomposition pp. 7 – 31. time might be too busy to be interested in the of the body. The party had to ensure the body was 5 Railton received no reply concerns of a mere padre. He had also thought clad, or at least wrapped, in British khaki material. from Haig; he wrote to Ryle in August 1920. of writing to the King but was concerned that Funeral cars delivered four bodies in sacks to his advisors might suggest some open space a temporary chapel at military headquarters at St Pol 6 Cited in Our Empire Volume VIII, no. 8. like Trafalgar Square, Hyde Park etc … Then where at midnight on 7th November, Brig. General artists would come and no one could tell what L.J. Wyatt, officer commanding British Forces in weird structure they might devise for a shrine!6 France and Flanders, selected one of the flag-draped figures (described later by Wyatt as ‘mere bones’) by A fear of ‘weird artists’ was common after the simply stepping forward and touching one of them. First World War; the popular press gaped aghast at Before this ultimate selection each sackload had been the exhibitions of official war art that were being carefully picked through to confirm that they were Burial Studies 1999 –2000 chalk on paper 75 cm x 45 cm

British (or at least British Empire) and that no name On board, the coffin lay on a specially designed bier pageant began at 9.40 am on 11th November 1920. They are remarkably evocative parallel images – the tags, regimental insignia or any other means of smothered in wreaths some so large that four soldiers The coffin, surmounted by union flag, steel helmet empty tomb and the unknown soldier. In a war that 7 So many conflicting stories identification remained.7 were needed to lift them. It was watched over by 8 Manchester Evening News, and side arms of a private soldier and a torn battle had killed so many millions it was perhaps the only emerged in the 1920s and While the selected body was made ready a naval guard of honour, who upon embarkation gave 11 November, 1920, p. 4. flag, was moved to a gun carriage and then, flanked way to signify the absent dead; emptiness and 1930s that Wyatt wrote to the Daily Telegraph in to embark on its highly ritualised journey, the others way to a single sentry. The entire process was 9 Ken Inglis, The either side by the twelve highest ranking officers in absence had, after all, become two of the most November 1939 to correct were quietly reburied. Other countries followed suit: orchestrated by no less a figure than Lt. General Homecoming: the War the country – Field Marshals, Admirals, Generals – familiar tropes of the Great War; its most familiar the record: ‘The Unknown Memorial Movement in of Contemporary History, Warriors of 1920: How one the Americans returned three bodies to the soil Sir George MacDonagh, the King’s emissary. Cambridge, England, Journal moved very slowly along the 4,000 yard route to contemporary icon had been the emptied landscape was selected for Abbey without ceremony; the seven unchosen by the To have achieved all this in a little over two weeks 27 the Cenotaph. of no-man’s-land. burial’. (1992) pp. 583 – 605. French government were re-interred under a cross beggars belief. Historians have traced the traffic It took exactly one hour to cover the distance. To many thousands of pilgrims making the in a Verdun war cemetery at precisely the same in telegrams, protocols and administrative niceties 10 Geoffthe Somme Dyer, The Missing of An estimated fifty thousand people were crammed harrowing voyage to the bleak Flanders countryside, time as the chosen body was being buried under that smoothed the way for this highly complex (London, 1994). into Trafalgar Square; those in reserved places along there was often little to see but missing woods, the Arc de Triomphe. choreography of ritual and display. Whitehall watched as the King received the procession, flattened villages and gaping holes that might connect Were it not for the recent example of national It must be remembered that exhumation and adding the sole wreath of red roses and bay leaves. them to the sites of memory and mourning. mourning that followed the death of Princess Diana, repatriation of war dead was a vexed political issue At 11 o’clock Big Ben sounded, and on the final stroke, Of course, the project of the Unknown Warrior we might be astonished at the intensity of symbolism which had riven the country when, in 1915, the the King pressed the button that released the giant (as Ken Inglis has pointed out) was in part the and ritual that accompanied the passage government had decided that war dead must not be flags draping the stone cenotaph. It is a quite startling outcome of ‘ecclesiastical misgivings’ about of the unknown soldier to London. After a multi- returned home. The Unknown Warrior had thus to moment, caught on film like some gesture of defeat the secular status of the Cenotaph in Whitehall.9 denominational service in the makeshift chapel, serve as the surrogate dead, a symbol of all those rather than mourning. A two-minute silence followed. The anonymous body in the Abbey was the Church the body, six barrels of foreign soil, and escort party left in foreign soil. All over the country everything stopped. A court case of England’s assurance that the war dead would be travelled to Boulogne. There, the body still in its From Dover, where the coffin was borne from the in Manchester was suspended mid-sentence: given the requisite Christian honour, and not left to original sack was transferred to a coffin, freshly destroyer by senior officers, it was transported to reside in a blank structure surrounded by the mere constructed by the British Undertaker’s Association London in the same railway luggage van that had … the accused – an ex-soldier who had served offices of state. from an oak tree that had stood in the parks of carried the remains of war martyr Nurse Edith Cavell. in France, Egypt and Mesopotamia and gained And finally, the funeral procession reached Hampton Court Palace. Amidst high ceremony, At each station it passed, great crowds of locals were the DCM and the Croix de Guerre – springing Westminster Abbey. Here, as Geoff Dyer has observed flanked by a division of French troops, surrounded gathered; ex-servicemen’s organisations, local smartly to attention between the warders ‘the intensity of emotion was reinforced by numerical by thousands of townsfolk and children released dignitaries and a military guard of honour crowded standing on either side of him. The recorder … arrangement’: one hundred winners of the Victoria early from school, and saluted by no lesser a figure onto the platforms. At Victoria Station, in London, Counsel, solicitors, prison officers and members Cross lined the route to the burial place; a thousand than Marshall Foch, the bearer party embarked on thousands stormed the barriers, clambering onto the of the Police all paid silent tribute. Prisoners in bereaved mothers and widows stood behind them.10 HMS Verdun, to be escorted part of the way by French engine and carriages in near panic. the cells, some of them awaiting removal to Lowered into a grave dug in the floor of the Abbey, torpedo boats and French aircraft and then across the Watched over by guardsmen – rifles reversed, Strangeways Gaol to serve sentences, rigidly the coffin was sprinkled with soil from Flanders. Channel by six British destroyers. heads bowed – all night, the final act in the funereal observed the silence.8 Later the earth in the six barrels would be added – Burial Studies 2000 chalk on paper 75 cm x 40 cm

‘making a part of the Abbey forever a part of a foreign writers when he suggested the corpse in the Abbey ‘It all seemed so unimportant somehow’, he told the There is a final coda to this strange tale. In 1928, field’ – and the grave sealed with a large slab of might actually be German. In 1921 D.S. MacColl openly Evening Standard; ‘I kept thinking of the soldiers who Orpen approached the War Museum offering to 11 Meirion and Susie Harries, Belgian marble. criticised the lengthy inscription on the tomb for 16 Evening Standard (7th May remain in France forever’16 repaint the canvas as a tribute to Earl Haig who The War Artists: British As the service concluded, the queue of pilgrims being ‘verbose without being sonorous’ adding, 1923). He obliterated the thirty-six figures, substituting had recently died. With permission, he painted out Official War Art of the Twentieth Century(Michael stood four deep stretching back to the Cenotaph. ‘it is cacophonous, it is pleonastic; in part it touches 17 Orpen to ffoulkes (19th ‘a coffin covered with the Union Jack and two the gaunt, insane soldiers, the cherubs and garlands, Joseph, in association with Over the next three days some 400,000 people the journalistic, in part it drops from prose into February 1922). semi-nude soldiers guarding it and two cherubs in leaving only the draped coffin and the marble halls. the Imperial War Museum 13 17 (IWM) and the Tate Gallery, marched solemnly past the grave, though – in keeping a jog-trot of verse’. 18 Cited in Harries, op.cit., theSoldier air above.’ in FranceExhibited at the Royal Academy in the ‘Nothing is left’ comments the historian Samuel Hynes, 1983) p. 146. with the Protestant spirit – no wreaths were permitted. One of the more eccentric artistic protests was p. 148. summer of 1923, with the title To the Unknown British ‘but a nameless dead soldier in a cold emptiness. It is 19 12 The Times (12th November These were piled like a blazing floral aneurysm around made by the Irish-born artist Sir William Orpen RA, 19 SamuelImagined: Hynes, The FirstA War World , it was voted ‘picture of the year’ by a disturbing picture.’ Disturbing indeed, but no longer 1920). the gaunt Cenotaph in Whitehall. Central London who had been employed as an official war artist by the War and English Culture public ballot. The left-wing press were enthusiastic: vitriolic, transformed into a tribute to the most vaunted would see nothing remotely like this until the funeral British government during the war. A master of rather ( the Daily Herald called it a: ‘magnificent allegorical and vilified British army commander, instead of the 13 Quoted in Arnold Whittick, London, 1990) p. 460. War Memorials (London, of Princess Diana some 80 years later. Yet even by the slick, painterly portraits of politicians, statesmen and tribute to the men who really won the war’, but lowly, unknown combatant. 1946) pp. 121-122. standards of post-Great War national grieving it was generals, as well as soldier-heroes and medal-winners, 20 KenUnknown Inglis, Warriors,Entombing op.cit., The Patriot thought it ‘a joke and a bad joke at that’. Eighty years on, the symbolic power of the 14 Williamin France Orpen, An Onlooker a quite unparalleled event. he was retained to paint several large group portraits p. 30. Nor was it liked by the Trustees of the Imperial War Tomb in the Abbey has faded. In the years after (London, 1928). There were, though, dissenters. Auden’s caustic of the solemn proceedings at the 1919 Versailles Museum, who rejected it for the collection, noting with the war the Cenotaph became the focus of Armistice

15 Orpen to ffoulkes 19th lines highlight the two arguments against the cult Peace talks. During his time as an official war artist untypical temperance that ‘ … it does not show what Day commemoration. In 1927 the British Legion February 1922, Orpen file, of the glorious unknown dead: it ignored the needs of Orpen had developed a passionate, if slightly we wished shown.’ introduced a Festival of Remembrance in London’s IWM, London Department of Art. the survivors, and it ‘forced a patriotic and belligerent sentimental, view of the frontline Tommy, ‘the unsung It is a curious picture, well intentioned but Royal Albert Hall: the event ended then, as it does ideology on the helpless dead’.11 A year earlier some hero whom he feared would be forgotten when the rather mawkish. The English did not produce now, with the poignant image of poppies falling of the surviving veterans had broken up the solemn war ended’.14 effective anti-war painting, though clearly there was from the dome of the hall, each poppy representing Armistice Day commemoration by shouting slogans By comparison, the petty disputes and capers a post-war groundswell of smouldering bitterness one of the absent war dead. After 1927 the Tomb and waving placards. Even The Times newspaper of the politicians at Versailles disgusted him as they that this huge ungainly painting seem to satisfy. took ‘third place’ in the hierarchy of remembrance; noted the mood: an editorial of 12th November 1920 bickered over the future shape of Europe: ‘All these The Liverpool Echo ridiculed the War Museum’s television coverage pays scant attention to the grave described the entombment of the Unknown Warrior ‘frocks’ seemed to me very small personalities in decision declaring: and its heavily inscribed black slab20. Millions of as ‘the most beautiful, the most touching and the most comparison with the fighting men, it was all like viewers would have noticed, however, how during impressive that in all its long, eventful story this island an opera bouffe.”15 The first two of his three Orpen declines to paint the floors of hell the funeral of Princess Diana in 1997 the Welsh has ever seen”, but added a warning: “A quarter of commissioned paintings were gigantic compositions of with the colours of paradise, to pander to guardsmen bearing her coffin carefully, if slightly a million of the comrades of the Unknown Warrior are politicians, presidents and statesmen arranged against the pompous heroics of the red tab brigade. precariously, pick their way around that black slab still seeking employment.”12 the sparkling backdrop of the palace. Nine months into The IWM may reject the picture, but the shadow in their otherwise undeviating line to the centre of In artistic circles, it became fashionable to mock the the third canvas – a formal portrait of thirty-six figures legions of the dead sleeping out and far the Abbey. A case, perhaps, of overknown Princess, cult: George Bernard Shaw was typical of many posed in the Hall of Peace – he stopped painting. will applaud it with Homeric hush.18 unknown soldier. Four Wreaths Commissioned by Paul Gough clockwise from top left Sonja Andrew John Pym Paul Gough Kathleen Herbert