As The 100th
Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars)
Continues ... Some Remembrances-Writers’ Corner
In say 1912, 1913,
hell, even the beginning of 1914, the first few months anyway, before the war
clouds got a full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed
their unmitigated horror at the thought of war, thought of the old way of doing
business in the world. Yes the artists of every school but the
Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists and
Surrealists or those who would come to speak for those movements, those
who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society and put the pieces to
paint, sculptors who put twisted pieces of metal juxtaposed to each other saw
that building a mighty machine from which you had to run created many problems;
writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish
theory of progress, humankind had moved
beyond war as an instrument of policy and the diplomats and high and mighty would
put the brakes on in time, not realizing that they were all squabbling cousins;
writers of serious and not so serious novels drenched in platitudes and hidden
gabezo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing words that
man and woman had too much to do, too much sex to harness to denigrate
themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and by having half-virgin, neat trick, maidens
strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose muse spoke of
delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, not the stress and strife of
the tattoos of war marches with their tinny conceits; and poets, ah, those
constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing on a stack
of seven sealed bibles, that they would go to the hells before touching the
hair of another man. They all professed loudly (and those few who did not
profess, could not profess because they were happily getting their blood rising,
kept their own consul until the summer), that come the war drums they would
resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist,
Constructionist, Cubist worlds and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes,
words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels. They would stay the course.
And then the war
drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out
their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, poets,
artists, sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went to the trenches to
die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for humankind, of course,
their always fate ….
Guide to the battlefields. Italian front, vol III, Piave-Cadore-Carnia
Tourist guide, published in 1919, by an Italian Touring Club highlighting the importance of battlefields and monuments.
View images from this item (8) Differences between countries
During and after the war, the process of memorialisation posed a number of questions. The dead, in particular, were difficult. Where were they to be interred? How should their resting places be marked? How should the absent dead – those with no known grave and those buried in a field far from home – be represented? The answers related to wider questions that concerned the living. Which aspects of wartime behaviour should be commemorated for future generations? What versions of the war offered an acceptable ‘truth’? The answers were conditioned by practical issues of finance and manpower, but determined by factors that were cultural and political. For all these reasons, remembrance differed from country to country.At a national level, differences in commemoration were born out of military and diplomatic realities. Was the tension that they had to resolve between mass bereavement and victory or mass bereavement and defeat? For the UK, the wave of commemoration that took place at the start of the 1920s – including the opening of the permanent Cenotaph in Whitehall, the burial of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey, and the construction of war grave cemeteries at home and overseas – was hardly triumphalist, but it was able to legitimate wartime death in terms of a crusade to defend civilisation. In Germany, the aftermath of defeat meant that it was longer before national monuments could be constructed. The Tannenberg Monument was opened in 1927 and an unknown soldier interred in Berlin in 1931. In comparison to the war’s victors, German memorials were even more sombre reminders of death: it was much harder for them to cast the war as moment of salvation or liberation.
The decision to convert the London Cenotaph from a temporary structure, built to represent the dead at the Peace Parade of 1919, to a permanent monument, was occasioned by the strength of public response to the original memorial. As this suggests, national remembrance could be a ‘bottom-up’ as well as a ‘top-down’ process, but it was never equal or all-inclusive. By its nature, commemorating the war meant privileging some versions of the war and discounting others: memorials were a means of forgetting as well as remembering. For example, remembrance reflected a world in which some empires had survived the war: beyond the Western Front, neither France nor Britain memorialised Asian and African service personnel in the same way as their white counterparts.
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