Category Archives: First World War

Arts, Britain, First World War, Government, History, Society

The art of remembrance that can never fade

GREAT WAR CENTENARY

Euphemism-free: in John Singer Sargent’s ‘Gassed’, blinded soldiers hold on to the man in front to find their way.

AN exhibition earlier this year at the Imperial War Museum (North) – best described as Lest We Forget – was a memorable and deeply sad tribute to the fallen of the Great War. At the end of the display, visitors were asked whether we’re in danger of forgetting the First World War.

There isn’t much chance of that. Not in this centenary year of the Armistice, following four years of remembrance of the anniversaries of Ypres, Gallipoli and all those blood-soaked, out-of-the-way names we’d never know but for the history of war.

This particular exhibition shows how quickly and how very effectively our ways of remembering the war today were set in stone after 1918. Literally, in the case of the Imperial War Graves Commission. By 1919, they had already come up with prototypes of the curved headstones, which they presented to Parliament that year and which were on display, in pristine condition. The headstone epitaphs, too – ‘A Soldier of the Great War’; ‘Known Unto God’ – were also worked out in 1919, thanks to Rudyard Kipling, who lost his son in the war, and his advice on memorial wording in The Graves of the Fallen (1919).

The commission’s diktats were direct and unremitting. Soldiers’ bodies were not to be repatriated but were to be buried where they died; officers were to be buried alongside their men. It was an early burst of progressive, democratic emotion and feeling.

At the time, these orders caused understandable heartache and pain among the bereaved, who had no consolation of a nearby grave to visit, or a tombstone design to even choose. Lady Florence Cecil, who lost three sons, instigated a petition to the Prince of Wales by seeking the use of crosses instead of headstones. Her attempts failed.

Families were permitted only three lines of their own composition on tombstones; and, even then, the commission had copy approval, to prevent ‘the sentimental versifier, or the crank’ – as Sir Fabian Ware, the commission’s founder, put it. However cold all this may sound, the result today is a funerary triumph. Those serried ranks of identically shaped tombstones across the fields of northern France give a sharper picture of the breathtaking scale of the losses than an asymmetrical free-for-all – Highgate Cemetery writ large – would have done.

This enforced burial of soldiers abroad led to an explosion of memorials over here: from the Cenotaph, caught on film at this exhibition, with George V laying the first wreath in 1919; to the heartbreaking visiting cards, and even fire screens, engraved with the names of the dead. In the 1920s, the flood of relatives aching to see the war graves began. The green cemetery signposts and printed guides to the battlefields have a hauntingly jaunty look to them.

Most moving of all was the idea (first proposed by army chaplain the Rev David Railton) of the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, one of the few bodies brought back from the Front, in 1920.

For the Warrior to be claimed by all the bereaved as something of their own, he had to belong to no one. As Henry Williams, a British officer charged with selecting the body, said, ‘We examined them very, very carefully to make certain there was no possible identification, even by teeth.’ Brutal, but more affecting for it.

We’re hungry to remember the dead of the Great War today, even though we never met them. The popularity of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse, for example, is testament to this. The much more intense desperation of loved ones to remember lost soldiers they knew so well was also palpable during this display. They longed for photographs of their sons’ tombs or first-hand reports of how they perished.

By the end of the war, there were a staggering 559,000 unidentified bodies on the Front: that makes for millions of relatives who didn’t know the true fate of their loved ones. Some went years, wrongly believing their sons, husbands and fathers were still alive. Many fewer were in the happier, but still agonising position: like the family of Lt HD Bird, pictured in the exhibition, wrongly reported as killed in 1918, but in fact taken prisoner and repatriated in 1919.

Euphemisms – or gentle lies – were necessary in the telegrams to mothers from officers who did know the truth. After the Third Battle of Ypres, Jessie Nicholson was told by the CO that her husband ‘suffered no pain as he was killed instantaneously by a fragment of shell’. This was a well-worn line, unverifiable in the fog of war.

The Great War poets – original manuscripts by Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen were on show – held concordance with the art on display – admirable, harrowingly euphemism-free. John Singer Sargent’s Gassed. The line of blinded boys walking, hand on the soldier in front, past piles of bodies, so shocked the first viewers in 1919 that many felt physically ill.

Paul Nash’s The Menin Road reveals an utterly smashed, dead moonscape on the Front. CRW Nevinson’s The Harvest of Battle is unrelenting in its depiction of open-mouthed bodies, outstretched arms stiff with rigor mortis.

The impressive thing is that these paintings – the polar opposite of triumphalist art – were government-approved, commissioned in 1918 by the British War Memorials Committee.

The most famous of the war’s memory symbols was the poppy. Before it became an official totem, with the first Poppy Appeal of 1921, the poppy was the soldier’s rare, informal blast of beauty on the Front. The show had four cards sent back to sweethearts, enclosing a fragile poppy. One, describing war as ‘Hell on earth’, sent the flower with the words, ‘This I plucked while I was convalescent, a souvenir from France.’

The show was well-balanced. It was neither jingoistic, nor was it a lions-led-by-donkeys agitprop. But it makes a difference in that Britain won. The British won’t forget. How could we?

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Arts, Britain, First World War, History

The Magnificence of the British Bayeux Tapestry

WORLD WAR 1 MASTERPIECE

CAPTURED on fabric in intricate and delicate detail for the benefit of future generations hangs an epic pictorial history of conflict and conquest – death, destruction and warriors in action. Displayed not in the Bayeux Tapestry in Normandy, but in the Potteries Museum in Stoke-on-Trent.

There is no sign of Norman ships in this tableau, nor King Harold with an arrow in his eye. What we see is the wreckage of Ypres, rats in the trenches, artillery barrages and an enemy pilot plunging to his death.

Yet, as in Bayeux, the theme is timeless: war on a grand and mighty scale.

In this case, it tells the story of one battalion’s valour and sacrifice through the Great War. It is a vivid memorial to the fallen by those lucky enough to have returned home. It could easily be described as the ultimate Roll of Honour.

It is unlikely that many people would ever have seen this stunning work unrolled to its full 70ft length. Were it not for a stroke of luck last year, it might have disappeared for ever, having long ago been dumped at the back of a municipal storeroom. There it sat for years, wrapped in a sheet with a faulty label attached to it saying, ‘Tram Map of Stoke-on-Trent’.

Now, however, it is in pride of place in the city’s museum, ahead of the centenary of the end of World War I this month.

Whilst it has never enjoyed the fame of that illustrious tapestry and needlework in the Bayeux – which recounts William the Conqueror’s invasion of England in 1066 – there is, nonetheless, a similar magical quality to what we should call the Great Wall-Hanging of the West Midlands. It, too, commemorates a monumental, bloody cross-Channel military expedition.

It honours the 5th Battalion of the North Staffordshire Regiment, a unit which suffered almost double the average casualty rate on the Western Front. Running beneath it are the names of nearly a thousand men from the Potteries who never returned.

The first thing that should strike you on entering the gallery is the sheer size of it. Though a third of the length of the Bayeux model, it is much taller – 9ft from top to bottom. But, of course, this is not a tapestry.

 

AT a 1921 reunion of veterans, Tom Simpson MC proposed the idea of a pictorial Roll of Honour for the battalion and recruited a small team of old comrades who, like him, had an artistic flair.

It was painted in the same year on to an industrial roll of canvas. It was then brought out for display at regimental gatherings. But when the last of the old ‘Terriers’, as the North Staffords called themselves, ended their reunions in the Seventies, the great canvas disappeared with them. Last year, it was found in a warehouse. The staff who unrolled out were said to be astonished at their find.

For here was a warscape on both a grand and human scale, set amid towns and villages with tragically familiar names like Ypres, Lens and Passchendaele. And the colours have not faded because they were never exposed to daylight. The canvas still needs expert conservation work before it can go properly on display. For now, only a central section is on show, alongside a facsimile version of the original. Once £50,000 has been raised, the original will go on display in a new gallery.

Levison Wood, 65, a former teacher and Territorial Army officer turned historian, started the hunt for the lost work. He has spent four years recording every fallen member of the North Staffords in a magnificent two-volume register and says, “these are the teardrops of a lost generation.”

A replica version of the ‘tapestry’ shows the scenes which open in Flanders in 1915 when the battalion saw its first action.

Shortly afterwards, they were stationed at a notorious pinch-point in the Western Front’s trench network known as Hill 60. Here the men witnessed their first aerial dogfight. Many regimental accounts refer to a grim scene on June 25, 1915, when a German pilot leapt from his burning aircraft above the British lines – in pre-parachute days. And there he is.

In the same year, the 5th North Staffords suffered their worst losses at the battle of Loos when 800 men went over the top and 500 were lost in just half an hour (including three brothers). They endured similar carnage a year later during the Battle of the Somme where they were ordered to charge an impregnable German bunker at Gommecourt Wood.

By the start of 1918, so many men had perished that the battalion was disbanded and its survivors transferred to other units, including the 6th Battalion which helped capture the Riqueval Bridge over the St Quentin Canal, a pivotal action at the end of the war. As a result, the bridge features right at the end of the ‘tapestry’.

After the war, survivors resumed civilian careers. The last of the ‘Terriers’ is now long gone, of course. And yet, thanks to the efforts of Tom Simpson and his comrades, their memory lives on. The North Staffords became part of the Staffordshire Regiment. They, in turn, became part of today’s Mercian Regiment, who served with distinction in Afghanistan.

Their motto: ‘Stand Firm and Strike Hard’. By looking at this profoundly moving testimony to their forebears you will see why.

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Britain, First World War, History, Society

Great War Centenary: Respect the decision of our forebears

WW1 AND ITS CENTENARY

THE First World War was the primal disaster of modern times. Debate rages over whether to mark its centenary next month as a victory or as a catastrophe that should have been avoided.

The war began four decades of violence, hatred and cruelty that the peoples of 1914 could not have foreseen in their darkest nightmares. Across Europe, nine million soldiers died. In Britain, one in three men aged 19 to 22 in 1914 were killed. The cost could have paid for thousands of hospitals and schools, and a university for every city.

The argument that Britain should have kept out of the war seems, therefore, insurmountable. Most people in July 1914 assumed it would: the prime minister, HH Asquith, thought there was “no reason why we should be anything more than spectators”. The Cabinet, Parliament and public opinion agreed, and the government tried hard to defuse the crisis.

So, what changed?

Germany launched a surprise invasion of Luxembourg, France and Belgium. The social reformer, Beatrice Webb, decided that “even staunch Liberals agree that we had to stand by Belgium”. They thought Britain had to resist a direct threat to its security and uphold international law and order against “militarism”. Wrote the diarist Ada Reece: “We must fight, but all are agreed that it will be more terrible than any previous war [and] the ultimate consequences… none can foresee.”

Given that she was right about the consequences, should they still have kept out? Three arguments are produced to say yes. First, that it was not our fight. Secondly, that the war was futile. Thirdly, that without British intervention, Germany would have won quickly, and Europe would soon have acquiesced in its domination – a lesser evil than the horrors to come.

All these arguments are founded on very optimistic guesses. More pessimistic scenarios are at least as plausible. As early as September 1914, the German government decided that Belgium would become a “vassal state”, with its ports “at our military disposal” to directly threaten Britain. To ensure “security for the German Reich in West and East for all imaginable time”, Germany planned to annex large parts of northern France, impose a crippling financial indemnity, make France “economically dependent on Germany” and exclude British commerce. Neutral Holland would become “dependent”. Vast territories would be taken from Russia to “thrust [it] back as far as possible” – precisely what happened in 1917.

Had Germany won, democracy and liberal government would have faced a bleak feature. Authoritarian regimes would have been in the driving seat. French democracy might well have collapsed, as it did in 1940. What German soldiers and governors actually did is telling – more than 6,000 civilians in Belgium and France were massacred in the first weeks of the war by invading troops, occupied territories were subjected to military rule, and they subsequently suffered semi-starvation, mass forced labour and systematic economic devastation.

In short, Britain faced a prospect in 1914 not so different from that in 1939. It could have survived, even as a cowed and impoverished satellite state, and it is possible to consider that this would have been a lesser evil than the brutal carnage of the trenches. But in 1914, government and people decided otherwise. For one thing, they feared being forced into a future war without allies against a German-dominated coalition. They were probably right to fear what a victorious Germany might do, but they underestimated – like everyone else – the cost of preventing it. Nevertheless, most of them always believed it was worth the sacrifice.

We can choose to disagree with our forebears, but theirs was not a senseless decision – they had no safe option. If tomorrow the Russian army marched through Poland, and we were faced with the prospect of hostile aircraft based just across the Channel, would we react any differently? Let us hope we never face such a choice as the people of 1914 did. Their determination gave democracy and freedom a chance, even though it took a second war to complete the victory.

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