I am hoping to attend the ceremony at Ors on 4 November this year to commemorate the death of Wilfred Owen a hundred years ago (see Damian Grant’s post of 4 November 2016), and thought we might go on from there to Ypres and Bruges. In this connection, I have been reminded that in a blog Comment of 1 November 2015 I wrote:
Another difficulty I have always had with memorials like Helles, Thiepval, or the daily ceremony at the Menin Gate, is their sheer scale. Certainly they create an awe-ful sense, but their size and architecture also seem uncomfortably ‘imperial’ — partaking even of the gigantism and marmoreal impersonality that made World War I possible. Many people have said to me that the scale of and the silence of these memorials are what has made the deepest impression on them. I can’t help feeling, though, that I wouldn’t be able to get that experience from them myself with so many hundreds of other people present. There is an undeniable element of tourism at these memorials, even at Auschwitz, which I have no ‘difficulty’ with but which I wouldn’t be able to stomach.
So how do I square that with visiting Ypres in 2018?
It is a good question and in the first instance I would refer new followers of Calderonia to the long dialogue we had about the commemoration of World War 1 following the centenary of George Calderon’s death, i.e. 4 June 2015. Please search on ‘Commemoration’ and you will find a good selection of arguments. You might particularly like to look at my posts dated 3 July 2015 and 22 November 2016, and Comments by Clare Hopkins, Archivist of Trinity College, Oxford, dated 20 July 2015, 2 November 2015, and 18 December 2015 (these Comments can be found dated at their end under ‘See All Comments’, series 3, and the dates are in the American style, i.e. 2015/07/20 etc). There is no doubt that the national conversation about commemoration will flare up again with the centenary of the Armistice.
My short answer to the present question is that I had not thought of a visit to Ypres in terms of the Menin Gate and the big cemeteries. I would like to see the town centre that George rode into with the Blues on 14 October 1914 (‘It seemed like history’), and I would like to find the field near Zillebeke ‘where Peety fell’ (i.e. where George was shot in the ankle on 29 October 1914 and invalided home). Thinking about it, though, if we were at Zillebeke I would feel duty bound to visit the small churchyard cemetery there, where George’s commanding officer Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Wilson is buried and the twenty-seven-old-old Alexis de Gunzberg, who was killed at his side after taking George’s place as Wilson’s interpreter. On closer consideration, I wouldn’t mind visiting the Menin Gate, because it is not gigantic, it was there for centuries before 1914, and it was familiar to Tommies during the War before it became a memorial. But I don’t know about attending the commemorative ceremony held there every day…
Yes, I stand by what I said about the sheer scale, ‘marmoreal impersonality’, gigantism, touristic voyeurism etc of the vast cemeteries and monuments like Thiepval, but at the most visceral level it comes down to this: Thiepval, Verdun, Sanctuary Wood, Helles, Auschwitz would render me incoherent with emotion. Since the age of fifteen I have had difficulty holding back tears whenever the Last Post struck up. Since my immersion in British and German World War 1 poetry, and researching and living (pardon the literary exaggeration) every day of Calderon’s war ‘career’ up to the moment of his death, I have become positively brinkish and potentially convulsive.
And this is why, at the moment, I can’t face watching the new film of Journey’s End. I already know, have had the experience of the Front (‘Their uniforms of shit/their lives of shit/their deaths of shit/we live./What means ‘forget’/THE GLORIOUS DEAD?’). Call me a coward, hand me the white feather, but I can’t take any more. Yet. I am also wary of indulging in ‘tragic pleasure’ and what Clare Hopkins has aptly termed ‘war porn’.
I therefore invite followers who have seen the film — which has already been described in the press as ‘the greatest film about World War 1 ever’ — to share their emotions and views about it on Calderonia as Comments or, indeed, a guest post. I know the play, of course. Are its humour and public school idiom irretrievably dated? Have the makers of the film changed the original ending, a direct hit that destroys the dugout? Do they show the blood and body parts that the theatre could not? Is it a national Commemoration comparable to the poppy installation ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’ and Andrew Tatham’s A Group Photograph?
If you deserve a white feather Patrick – which you most certainly do not! You get a gold star from me at any rate – but if you do, then so do I. For I saw a trailer for Journey’s End a couple of weeks ago and those three minutes were enough; I know I can’t face it either.
And while we’re in confessional mode, let me admit that I have also baulked at your invitation to re-read our past conversation about commemoration. My brief encounter with Journey’s End reminded me somewhat uncomfortably that I was annoyed – offended, truth be told! – by one post in which you opined that you felt sorry for archivists who have to spend so much time ‘doing’ commemoration. You said, I think, that you didn’t know how we can bear it. I’m afraid I found this rather facile at the time. (Anyone who has ever attended a meeting about GDPR, for instance, would know that it is the activities that offer emotional engagement which actually make the job bearable!) But now, alas, your remark has returned to haunt me. Killed in action… Died of wounds… Last seen going forward… Hit by a shell… Shot by a sniper… Presumed gassed… After three and a half years of drawing up monthly lists of the fallen of Trinity College (we display them alongside Laurence Binyon’s famous poem), I just feel sickened at the prospect of an evening spent listening to the sound of shellfire and watching actors made up with fake blood pretending to die in the trenches. It isn’t real, and I don’t have to watch it.
But Journey’s End has had excellent reviews. I hope my son will see it, and all his friends who love to play war games on their computers; they need to know what the First World War was really like. I said as much to him, and he was affronted. He knows a lot more about warfare than I do, he says. Some games are based on the experiences of real soldiers in past conflicts; and they are very ‘realistic’. Why do I think a film is more like the real thing?
That was a challenging question. Indeed, John knows a great deal about weapons; and tactics; and his skills are real enough. He has the confidence of youth, for he is 22, the same age as many of the young men who gave their lives in the First World War. Is his enthusiasm for war any different from his counterparts a century ago when [public] schoolboys and undergraduates played extensive war games in their OTCs, and territorial officers rushed to volunteer for service overseas? Even the middle-aged George Calderon couldn’t wait to gallop off to the Western Front!
Yes, yes, he went for the sake of his ideals, as you have regularly reminded us. And so do they who go today to fight in the Middle East. (Did you watch the Channel 4 drama series The State last year by the way? Superb tv.) What such men all seem/seemed to lack, then and now, is any awareness of what war might actually start to feel like when they can’t turn the screen off or take off their kit and go home for tea. You posted an excellent summary of the emotional impact of war on 31 October 2014 – there’s a link to it via my featured comment in your right hand column. You said:
‘The massed slaughter and mutilation, the material destruction, the relentless stupidity of it all, begin to depress you, then oppress you. Come last weekend, when we were working on the Battle of Gheluvelt, I literally wanted to shout with Siegfried Sassoon, “O Jesus, make it stop!”’
If Journey’s End engenders that feeling in viewers, then the more people who watch it the better! I see on Wikipedia that in 1928 George Bernard Shaw described the original play as a ‘useful [corrective] to the romantic conception of war’. And as a description of the trenches is it any less ‘real’ than, say, the selectivity of soldiers’ letters home, or, worse, the commanding officers’ letters to parents describing the beautiful deaths of their sons? My personal experience of commemorating the War has mostly been about memorialisation of the dead, but this film is commemoration as ‘history’. If it tells the viewer what the trenches were like, then, surely, it is real.
And so now I start to feel guilty as well as cowardly for my reluctance to go and see it…
But it also seems to me that the emotional course of commemorating the centenary of the War has closely followed that of the War itself. The ‘Blood Swept Lands and Sea of Red’ poppy installation in 2014 felt nationally significant, and engendered feelings of pride and admiration at its scale and scope. In Trinity College we installed a memorial to our fallen German and Austro-Hungarian members, and glowed with international peace and harmony. Commemoration was fun! Then came two years of hard slog – Gallipoli, Loos, the Somme, Arras, Passchendaele… – and this was a time of serious books, landmark exhibitions and growing understanding and knowledge; commemoration felt worthwhile, and important. But now it is the fourth year and we are emotionally drained; exhausted. Have we got the stamina to press on to the end? Will we have achieved anything meaningful at all?
The film I saw a fortnight ago was Darkest Hour. Gary Oldman was fantastic! I don’t know if Churchill ever used his famous maxim in World War One, but that, I think, is all you and I can hope to do now. KBO, Patrick! KBO…
Dear Clare,
Thank you so much for what is, in effect, the invited guest post! As always with your Comments, you have looked at the subject, in this fifth year of the war, from above, below, and unexpected angles, all of which stimulates us to fresh thinking. You have pushed the conversation on, which is exactly what is needed. In truth, I think this post and your Comment have provoked more feedback than even the riveting subject of Indexing, which seems to have held the previous record. The reason I say this is that I have had seventeen emails and other communications on the subject of Journey’s End and commemoration, all very different and most quite personal (the latter, I am sure, is why their authors would not commit themselves to a Comment).
Most people have said they are having difficulty continuing to empathise with the commemoration, and two have actually said they are ‘sick of the war’. One correspondent, of French origin, writes: ‘I avoid now completely anything to do with the war…the monuments are close to the art/architecture as seen by tribal families in the catholic-cathedral style, and the fields of crosses just make one furious and ill.’ Nearly everyone who mentioned the monuments felt uncomfortable at their scale and imperial style — which surprised me. One correspondent very aptly speculated on whether most people in Britain know of the National Memorial Arboretum near Lichfield; this contains hundreds of ‘specialist’ memorials, including to those shot for desertion, and personally I can well understand that the presence of trees exercises a balm that Thiepval, say, cannot. Several correspondents preferred the smaller WW1 memorial cemeteries. One pointed me to Siegfried Sassoon’s poem ‘On Passing the New Menin Gate’, which was previously unknown to me. It’s a distinctly ambivalent and unsettling poem that I sense may accurately mirror our unease today. I think the weariness of most commenters exemplifies what you say in your penultimate paragraph, but I don’t think most people have made that connection. On the other hand, one person, an historian who closely follows the war and writes about it every month in his parish magazine, was eloquent about both the strain and the necessity to continue: ‘The sheer horror of what the ordinary soldier and officer faced daily for weeks on end makes one wonder why they didn’t all desert. There was heroism in just staying put and obeying orders it seems to me.’ I would agree with that: KSO, then, with the centenary — keep soldiering on. Although everyone I know who has seen Journey’s End says it is extremely well done, not one of those who contacted me after the post and your Comment has said they are going to see it…
The point in your Comment that particularly moved me and has kept me thinking is your dialogue with your son about war games and the reality of war. I too have been agonised by the sight of children and teenagers playing computer war games, yet I know very well that I was mad on war comics and acting battles with ‘Jerries’ at that age (partly under the auspices of the Combined Cadet Force)! I think the young do know more about the reality of modern warfare. One could argue that the latter is so different from trench warfare that they don’t need to know about it, but actually I have been very impressed by how many know what PTSD is, so they have already learnt, and doubtless ‘experienced’, one of the most important things about the ‘reality’ of WW1 and the setting of Journey’s End. On the other hand, one simply cannot deny that young men are fascinated by the ‘glory’ of armed conflict and that this was a major factor in all those public schoolboys and undergraduates rushing to the Front. It definitely was too for George Calderon. It is a major problem in any discussion of culpability for WW1. I agree with Adrian Gregory in his classic The Last War: British Society and the First World War that ‘In moral terms it was a war against unprovoked aggression and the violation of international treaties. The moral case was about as clear cut as a war can ever be’ (p. 294). Yet the jingoistic enthusiasm with which so many young and old Britishers entered into it hints naggingly at a collective responsibility.
Where our war-burnout is concerned, so accurately paralleling our forebears’ own, it seems, one only has to see how people (even feminists) have wearied of the #metoo campaign, to recognise that there is only so much ‘feeling your pain’ that humans can do. I feel at times, e.g. with Journey’s End, that I have no more empathy or compassion to give, but as I have said before, I think that the limits of empathy (which I believe our commemoration has been a visceral act of) should be understanding. Believe it or not, I now think the ‘understanding’ one must turn to after the ‘experience’ is probably historical, as David Reynolds has pleaded. But I certainly don’t believe that equates with ‘forgetting’!
Inversely, so to speak, I acknowledge that audiences at the premiere of Journey’s End in 1928 were riveted by its accuracy to the reality of trench warfare as they had experienced it, and I recognise that that accuracy can validate regarding the film today as ‘historical’. But as far as I can gather, the camera is used to go outside the dugout and depict the wider Front reality. This is a vital difference from the play. The play all takes place in the claustrophobia of the single dugout. Sheriff wanted originally to call it Suspense or Waiting. The critic Laurence Kitchen was right, therefore, to say that ‘rather surprisingly, [Sheriff] joins European masters from Strindberg to Beckett, who exploit the possibilities of a confined space, a cult of enclosure. […] Sheriff’s masterpiece […] is ultimately about the resistance of material to stress’ (International Dictionary of the Theatre – 1 PLAYS, p. 383). To experience this in the theatre is not, of course, an historical acquisition, it’s an acquisition of empathy and compassion, of fear and existential understanding, of perhaps tragic ‘purgation’. I’m sure this experience is immeasurably heightened in the film by the use of close up, and it’s precisely the experience I can’t face yet!
You have had such a long experience and close engagement with the commemoration of the fallen in WW1, Clare, might you be tempted to commemorate the end of it all by communicating your conclusions in some public setting? I think there are many out there who would be really interested to hear your summing-up.
This is a rum kind of conversation though Patrick. Here I am, talking to you; and there you are, privately discussing what I said with – who?
So may I address this comment to the Shy Seventeen emailers and the unnumbered communicators-by-other-means: won’t you consider sharing your views more widely? It is not that I don’t empathise with your reluctance to comment; believe me, I do. I know how daunting it is. The first time I posted something on Calderonia I felt exactly as if I was sticking my head above a parapet. I still regularly feel nervous that I will be shown up as a complete fool. But honestly, it won’t happen – Patrick is terrifically polite and enormously kind, besides which he moderates our comments to stop us posting nasty stuff about each other! Speaking personally, I have also found that writing up a nebulous train of thought for online publication can clarify it in an extremely helpful way.
So go on – please do give it a try. I for one would love to know more about these views that Patrick so tantalisingly alludes to. You, who writes about the War for a parish magazine – have the past four years changed your definition of heroism? You, whom the fields of crosses make furious and ill – have you always felt this way, or has the spotlight of the centenary period – or the ongoing crisis of Brexit – changed something for you? And you, who feel uncomfortable at the scale of the monuments – is it the sheer number of names, or something to do with the relationship between the stones and the landscape?
I share Patrick’s surprise that nobody has come out in defence of the marmoreal giants of the CWGC. Let me do so now. Thiepval is the only large memorial that I have visited, and my first and lasting impression – as I saw it from afar on the bus – was astonishment at how small and insignificant, and dare I say it, temporary, it seemed against such a vast and beautiful landscape. I found the experience of standing in front and within the monument very moving, but in an entirely gentle and peaceful way. I felt glad for the missing of the Somme that they are remembered, and very much hope to visit them, and their monument, again.
And talking of monuments… I spent an hour this afternoon with two students, one of whom who will be travelling to Flanders during the Easter Vacation to visit the graves and memorials of members of Trinity who fell in the three Battles of Ypres. Next term she will be putting on an exhibition of her photographs in the college hall during Arts Week. This is student-led commemoration; the excitement and enthusiasm are palpable and infectious, the ‘vision’ for it is inspiring. I asked them if they had seen Journey’s End, and neither of them had even heard of it.
Why does this make me feel so cheerful? I think because I suddenly realised that it doesn’t matter a hoot if I see it or not. The future of commemoration is – as it should be – in the hands of the young.