With
the sub-title “The Great War, Ritual, Memory and God” this seemed
like a book that would speak to my particular interest the process of
“Remembrance”, and with a glowing foreword from Rowan Williams my
expectations were high. All this only intensified the resulting
frustration of reading it.
This
is wide and freely ranging book, and part of my complaint is that
there were large parts of it that seems to be reflecting on neither
Ritual nor Memory, and God barely puts in an appearance.
For
example there could have been an interesting theme of exploring the
relationship of the Church and the inter-war Remembrance, the
discomfort of the Established Church that felt over this mass
movement (of women)
beyond their control and the attempts to move the focus to
Remembrance Sunday. Ffor
the Church it was a happy coincience that November 11 fell on a
Sunday 1945 and they then made
the Sunday rather than the 11th
the focus for much of the post-war period. But we got none of that.
Looking at the Bibliography there seems to be very few soruces that
actual address the memorial process – there has been plenty written
about the ritual and memory assoicated with the Great War, and a book
that attended to that liturature and brought “God”, “the
Church”, and/or theology into diologue with it would have been
really interesting – this is not that book.
Rachel
reflects on her disappointment, after a childhood of watching the
Whitehall Remembrance ceremonies on TV to finally visit the Cenotaph
and find is 'lost' in the busyness of the city – but for me that
closeness of the current life and the token of the Fallen is
powerful. It is something I reflected on while in Hong Kong, where
they have an exact copy of the Whitehall Cenotaph, but set in
a small fenced square of lawns – this creates an ‘oasis’ around
it, so that it is detached from the bussle of the city. This of
course points to the fluidity of meaning – we have encountered the
same memorial but our experiences have be distinct, possibly even
polar opposites.
These differences should not be a problem, expect that Rachel often
puts her views forward as the views of the majority. I think there
is very little evidence that the tensions around the Remembrance of
our past wars she wrestles with troubles many people. The annual
outrage when someone appears on TV in mid-October without a Poppy
suggests that there is a sizable part of the nation that take
Remembrance un-critically. We have also seen that our contempory
conflicts, while their justification is contested, seem to have
reinforced the desire to give honour to the “sacrifice” of the
ordinary solider.
At one point she writes that “I'm worried. My grandfathers'
presence in this book is in danger of going missing for the sake of
some fancy philosophing” - well she was probably right to be
worried, but it is not fancy philosophing but lazy pontificating that
is the danger.
Rachel
makes much of the Cenotaph as a deliberate expression of an “imperial
ideology”, but we have to note that is some ways, of all the
memorials, it is accidental – recreating in stone the temporary
structure of the Victory parade. I suspect its simple form has as
much do with the limitations of the original wooden structure as it
does to Lutyens' design preferences. When compared to Lutyens'
earlier Cenotaph in Southampton it is stripped of the trappings of
power. I would argue that the Whitehall Cenotaph says very little,
and in saying very little it has been able to speak back to us
whatever we have projected onto it over the long and changeable
century since it was erected.
That
is not to deny that there are a lot of mixed motivations around the
process of Remembrance. I have been thinking about the way that the
Royal Family is able to at one with the people during the act of
Remembrance at the Cenotaph, given they have been on active service
in recent conflicts, such as Prince Harry's deployment to
Afghanistan. Meanwhile Prime Minister's role is more awkward –
honouring the fallen is an act validating their decision to send
troops into the conflict zone. This tension acts at all levels,
mixed motives at the national level have been explored at length, but
even at the local level there would often have been a significant
overlap between the local councillors who sat on Military Service
Tribunals and those that sat on the committees that planned the
memorials – can we blame them for wanting to reassure themselves,
in stone, that the deaths they sent their town's boys to were
honourable ones?
But
I think we can over play our hand here – seeing grand schemes to
blind “the people” from “the truth” - but when we look across
the great arch of human cultures, across both time and place, the
creation of a fitting memorial to those who have died is one of the
few near universals (even if what counted as fitting has been very
fluid). The memorial makers were not as cynical or calculating as we
might suggest.
A
personal memoir about how the Great War continues to touch a family 3
generations later, without the hyperbole, would have been a much
better book.
