The War, chronotopia and commemoration

Many people deny the existence of a ‘national mood’ and ‘national consciousness’. I certainly don’t believe in the latter, any more than I accept the idea of a collective soul (the ‘Russian Soul’ etc). But I think there is a preponderant national mood at any given moment, and personally I strive to attune myself to it in order to apprehend where the country is going. Unfortunately, this national mood is tremulous, fitful, liable to change as you blink. It’s difficult to feel and dangerous to extrapolate from.

Thus I’ve been at a total loss this year to say what the national mood about the commemoration of World War 1 has been, whereas in the previous four years I’ve felt clearly where it was at and where it was going. Numerous people, including followers of this blog, have told me that they feel people have ‘had enough’ of the War, are sated with its horror, bored with the repetitiveness of the commemorative ceremonies, no longer interested in following its course, tired with its details.

There are plenty of symptoms of this. Coverage of the battles is far lower in the national media than before. In March I was shocked by how little the nation seemed to know about, or was interested in, the Germans’ offensive of that month a hundred years ago when they broke through the British lines and advanced forty miles on a fifty-mile front. I find it mystifying that the millions who placed lighted candles in their windows on the night of 4 August 2014 and deeply mourned the centenary of the first day of the Somme on 1 July 2016 appear not to appreciate how close Germany came to winning in the summer of 1918 — that we very nearly became a vassal state of the Kaiserreich! — and that the Germans fought absolutely to the death. Nor do these millions seem to know what obstacles the Americans had to overcome before their contribution really made a difference. This month it was widely commented in the media how few people had heard of the Battle of Amiens, yet it was a vital part of the beginning of the end.

An aspect that particularly intrigues me is what I have called chronotopia, i.e. the confusion or interference of different time modes. The centenary of the declaration of war set off an intense day-by-day national narrative. We ‘relived’ (I would say ‘lived’) the War as its agony unfolded. This was my own approach, posting about what George was doing exactly one hundred years earlier — when that was known. Personally, I find an empathetic leap like that the best way to understand the past (I do not mean ‘history’), so I have continued following the War week by week since 4 June 1915. But whereas for about three years the media were full of the centennial On This Day (OTD) approach, I noticed that last year OTD Tweets from the Imperial War Museum, Commonwealth War Graves Commission, or Dan Snow, ceased to be literally a hundred years ago: there are now plenty of them that are OTD for any year between 1914 and 1918. It’s disorienting, I find, to read in August 2018 that ‘on this day war was declared’ (I was uncomfortable therefore with the dating of my last post). Of course, there are also plenty of Tweets and media reports that are OTD 1918, but I’m tempted to say that this confusion of the timelines epitomises the current loss of direction in our national mood.

And yet we must distinguish between the media/chattering classes and what I called in my post of 28 June ‘ordinary’ people. As Laurence Brockliss wrote in his Comment to that post, ‘at the local level there has been a tremendous interest in commemorating the Great War and many local communities intend to mark the centenary of the Armistice with a special event’. Hardly a day passes without one hearing of such events. My own home town has a superb programme lined up, from observing the silence at the war memorial at eleven o’clock and laying wreaths, through a Remembrance Sunday service, mayoral reception, evening of poetry and music, to ringing of church bells and lighting of a final community beacon. In the neighbouring town a friend is organising a Peace Vigil. In truth, the local newspapers that I see are as full of personal stories about the War as ever, and Twitter still pulsates with images of families visiting the graves of their fallen. How does all this relate to the question of the national mood?

An attractive thesis, which several people have put to me, is that the commemoration has not lost its way, has not fallen into chronotopia, because our deep fatigue with the War precisely replicates the national mood of a hundred years ago, i.e. we are actually still reliving the War as we did 2014-17.  Like our ancestors, we just want it to be ‘over’.

However, one of the many benefits of a holiday on Shetland is that one gains distance from a problem and can think about it in a fresh and bracing air. I think it’s helped me to a perception that although, like our forebears, we are now ‘warred out’, the yearning for the Armistice celebration is greater than the fatigue or boredom.  Everyone knows that the end of the centenary is in sight. The evidence, I think, is that at local level that is what most occupies our minds, not the grinding war and the day-to-day details of how a hundred years ago, by the skin of our teeth, the Allies won it.

It is perhaps crashingly obvious, but I now feel that the national mood is one of subdued emotional preparation for a proper, uplifting, cathartic, ritually endorsed closure on the Commemoration. The magnificent exhibition running at Tate Britain until 24 September is entitled ‘Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One’, as though the War were already over. When Andrew Tatham and I offered institutions a multi-media evening around Armistice Day of presentations and discussion entitled The War Is Over: How Did We Commemorate It and What Have We Learned? none could guarantee us an audience of a hundred people; so it isn’t happening. People’s minds are fixed on the coming commemorative closure. Closure is the natural ritual next thing and it’s what they want. They don’t want to look back and ‘analyse’.

However, I am sorry to disappoint those who think the Armistice celebrations will be closure on World War 1 itself. Just as a recent German president said there could never be moral closure for the German nation on two world wars, I believe that as long as people respect and connect with their ancestors, as long as poetry exists, as long as books like Andrew Tatham’s A Group Photograph exist, there will never be emotional or historical closure for us as a nation on WW1. These things are not closed, but open to the future.

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When I began this blog, I never for one moment thought that it would draw me into discussing Commemoration and the whole emotional roller coaster that Commemoration and the War have taken us on. It has been an enriching bonus, though, and I am extremely grateful to all who have contributed to the dialogue.

Several followers had visited the National Memorial Arboretum at Alrewas (OE ‘the land growing with alders’) in Staffordshire and told me how satisfying they felt it was as commemoration, so last month we went there. Unfortunately we had only a few hours, whereas you could easily spend a day viewing the 150-acre site.

What immediately struck me was the diversity around me. The exterior is slightly reminiscent of a crematorium, but inside all is bustle: there were bemedalled veterans of the services and their families, very smartly dressed, sometimes carrying wreaths and clearly there with their own agenda, there were school parties and groups of cadets, and there was a large contingent of people like myself who behaved as tourists, very interested, slightly detached, even bemused. All the exhibitions, shops, cafes, loos and tours are exemplarily run and the volunteers are brilliant.

Yet when we entered the ‘Arboretum’ (in the intense drought this seemed something of a misnomer, but in any case the trees are nearly outweighed by brown field sites, some still under development), I felt this diversity turned into disorientation. Andrew Tatham has told me that he felt the Arboretum lacks ‘a vision’, and I can see what he means.

It is divided into nine Zones and frankly quite a few of the plots within those are simply dedicated to specific regiments, naval divisions and squadrons. Some of these large memorials seemed to be made of gun metal and to my taste are too imperial, almost fascistic. But then there are plenty of very different memorials to individual military actions and I thought the one to Gallipoli was particularly successful:

The Gallipoli Memorial at the National Memorial Arboretum

It looks simple, it verges appropriately on the stark, but each element has been chosen with great care. The bare burnt earth, of course, is exactly right. The carefully shaped bushes outside the chain are of an Aegean shrub and instantly reminded me of George and his men picking leaves from one before they went over the top. The quasi-religious triptych has, as you can see, a vibrant map of Gallipoli in the centre; the other two leaves present pieces of truly deathless prose about Gallipoli by the official historian Aspinall-Oglander (who was there) and Atatürk (who was too). But it is all upstaged by the dead trees, so reminiscent of Lone Pine, Fir Tree Wood, Twelve Tree Copse…

The work was created by a Turk and dedicated to the memory of his mother. ‘What?’ you may ask, ‘Surely it’s dedicated to those killed at Gallipoli?’ Well, of course, but the artist was right: if there is one single message that comes out of the Arboretum, it is that it’s a place for memorialisation; inclusive memorialisation; the memorialisation of everybody.

Authorship and sponsorship of the Gallipoli Memorial

Thus there is a SANDS (Stillborn and Neonatal Death Society) memorial garden. It has a lushness and greenness lacking at that moment in the Arboretum itself, and it is beautifully done. However, the sight of hundreds of brightly painted stones touching each other in the borders, put there with their children’s names on by grieving parents, was too much for me. Similarly, I could see the ‘Shot at Dawn Memorial’ coming, it has been deservedly praised, but I know too much about the subject: I couldn’t face it.

For me, at least, the disparateness of the Arboretum was bewildering. The gigantism of some of the memorials, e.g. the central Armed Forces Memorial and Basra Wall, I found unsettling. Nor could I really get the point of the trees. I mean, trees have since time immemorial been emblematic of growth, of life continuing beyond our deaths, of the future of the planet. But, quite apart from the fact that a lot of them here looked scruffy because of the drought, many of them have the names of people attached to them, and again sometimes scruffily. I had assumed that the point of the Arboretum was that the trees brought a contemplative calm and serenity, a secular consolation, a humanist hope, but that was all dispelled by name tags and rabbit fencing.

Whatever else, visiting the National Memorial Arboretum evoked a very wide range of emotions. It was a very intense experience. With all such experiences, you return to them to try to make sense of them ‘with distance’, and that is what I am doing here.

The Arboretum is disparate, even disorienting, but is it incoherent and unsatisfying? Major General Patrick Cordingley, who chairs the appeal for a new visitor centre, agrees that it is eccentric: ‘It’s very British because in many ways it’s a muddle. You would never get anything like this in America.’ Quite. It is disparate, but it is diverse; it is a free-for-all, but it is inclusive; all-inclusive. It is, if you like, the epitome of pluralism, and it’s certainly democratic. At the end of the day, the freedom of it is what I find satisfying about the Arboretum. The widow who writes her husband’s name on a piece of paper and pins it to a tree can do that, and the platoon of immaculately turned out policemen who march perfectly in step and present their wreath can do that. The acts of memorialisation that the Arboretum invites surely satisfy all these people. The coherence of it is simply in the leaving of a personal memorial. It makes people happier. Which is a great thing.