A couple of weeks ago a small group of us went to see some of the battlefields, cemetaries and memorials of the Great War or World War I. I think I've touched on this subject before but I am always concerned, when I visit such sites, about a conflict of emotions.
Take the Canadian memorial at Vimy Ridge, for example [pictured]. Here we have one of the most elegant of monuments, erected in the 1930s and recent having undergone an extensive renovation programme requiring a long-disused quarry in Croatia to be re-opened.
The result? Something achingly artistic, filled with light, beauty and with sorrow. The central image is of Canada crying for her lost sons.
But what are we to feel about this? Is it a celebration of heroism or of waste? A sort of Arch de Triomphe or Picasso's Guernica [picture]? History is of little help here because by the standards of that bloody 1914-18 conflict, the attack on Vimy Ridge was - after long months of planning and preparation - efficient with fewer than 4,000 Canadian soldiers killed. A horrendous number but when you compare it to the 20,000 the British lost on the first day of The Somme in July 1916 ...
Of course such comparisons are at once odious and meaningless but it is interesting to speculate on the meaning viewers will attach the the statuary and, within the graveyards, the symmetry of northern France and Flanders. Will a sense of this war fade or will these many symbols transcend one conflict to be symbols of the futility of all wars? One hopes so.
In the post a couple of days ago, I received a compilation of copies of The Wipers Times (and equivalent titles) published through much of the second half of the war, wherever the editor and sub-editor (both of whom survived) were posted. To them the last word (which has little to do with anything except the humour of those impossible times):
"The following is a true extract from a return of reserve rations from a certain garrison:-
Locality - Foxhall Kemp
Map Ref - P 67 X 19-32
Commodity - Bully Beef
Quantity - 1 Tin
Remarks - Not Full"
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