Contrasting monuments to industrialised slaughter

CONTRASTING MONUMENTS TO INDUSTRIALISED SLAUGHTER

By Gavin Stamp Remember that if you just want to visit the Scottish National War Memorial and faithfully promise to keep strictly to the pilgrimage route to the very top of the Castle Rock, deviating neither to right nor left to look at older attractions, there is no entrance charge to Edinburgh Castle.

Quite right too: the Memorial is not only for tourists but was ‘intended to be the tryst of the living as well as a monument to the dead’. So, wondered Ian Hay in the original official guide, ‘How many people would trouble to toil up the Mound, the Lawnmarket, and Castle Hill, then traverse the wind-swept Esplanade and breast the cobbled roadway which winds up and up through the Inner Barrier, through the Portcullis Gate, past the Six Gun Battery, through Foog’s Gate, to the level of Mons Meg herself all to visit a modern building …’ The answer, of course, is legion.

For that modern building, which happens to be the masterpiece of Scotland’s greatest Arts and Crafts architect, is a melancholy shrine to mark the dreadful consequence of Scotland’s tradition of military ardour between the years 1914 and 1918.

Now I admire much of the work of Sir Robert Lorimer. The exterior of his new, secular chapel, rising higher than the bulk of the converted barrack block, is magnificent, and the architect’s ability to make creative use of national stylistic precedents, to combine the Mediaeval with the Classical, to balance intricate sculpture against broad masses of rubble walling, and to create a sense of the solemn and holy in a secular context is deeply impressive. But there is also something cloying, something overdone or too descriptive and literal – or do I mean something too militaristic? – about the interior with all those flags and regimental symbols and images of soldiers in bronze and stone and stained glass. The Victorian revival of the ideal of chivalry (especially in the cannon-fodder-producing public schools) – The Quest for Camelot, as Mark Girouard’s book was entitled – has much to answer for, and the quaintly idealised romanticism of Alice Meredith Williams’s suspended figure of St Michael, dressed in a Mediaeval suit of armour, says it all. As an Englishman (and a devotee of the greatest British architect of the last, dreadful century: Edwin Lutyens) I cannot help comparing this emotional feast of symbolism with the pure, restrained, austere abstraction of that white pillar of national mourning in the centre of Whitehall in London: the Cenotaph.

Now I am far from being the first to wonder if the telling contrast between these two contemporary national war memorials tells us something about national characteristics.

In a guide to the Scottish memorial published in 1932,

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General Sir Ian Hamilton – he who was in charge of the bloody Gallipoli fiasco – admitted that: ‘The London Cenotaph is an original conception, God be praised: – not a pillar; not a Cleopatra’s needle; not a Monolith – it is I suppose an obelisk but of a shape conceived by an artist who is no imitator. Rearing itself quite suddenly as it does from the midst of those rectangular nests of bureaucrats in Whitehall, it strikes an attitude and makes a contrast which just escapes the fantastic and impels the most thoughtless to bare their heads before it. But I feel quite sure that the mere sudden sight of it is incapable of releasing those tragical or overpowering thoughts of beauty or of immortality which strike so irresistibly upon a Scot as he enters the Shrine upon the Castle Rock.’

Some professional writers agreed. In 1929 in his own book on the Edinburgh memorial, Sir Lawrence Weaver argued that ‘while England has made an ethereal monument of her inarticulateness, Scotland has seized the occasion to mobilize all the resources of her national art into a visible monument with form and colour’.

This idea was developed by another architectural writer for Country Life magazine, the young Christopher Hussey, in his monograph on Lorimer published in 1931: ‘The difference in character between the English and Scottish peoples has never been more clearly shown than by their respective War Memorials. It is the difference between inarticulate sentiment, and romanticism flowing out of realism under the stress of emotion.’ And he considered that the three symbols of remembrance in London – the tomb of the Unknown Warrior, the Two-minute Silence and the Cenotaph ‘satisfied English sentiment by their very reticence. They are sublimations of the unspoken. Yet when the war is forgotten, their significance must be forgotten too. This may ultimately be to the good, but it cannot be denied that it connotes a certain poverty of imagination. The emotion that makes an Englishman bow his head in silence impels the normally silent Scot to lift up his voice. The Scottish need to unlock their hearts […] The Scottish National War Memorial is, and will continue to be, a profoundly moving memorial of a great national effort because it is so intensely human […] It has the sublime pathos of a folk-song, the pride, the wistfulness, the grandeur of the pipes crying among the hills.’

Perhaps it takes an Englishman to write such sentimental guff.

Of course, another world war and its attendant murderous persecutions, together with colonial retreat and immigration,

and the need for racial justice have made all talk of national or racial characteristics seem most undesirable and dangerous (although, to the historian, the continuity of certain national or local traits may seem indisputable: even in the 16th century foreign observers commented on the English dislike of children). But we still indulge in them, even if the stiff-upper-lipped Englishman is surely no more, or less, a caricature than Rab C. Nesbit. One might be equally well contrast the austerity of the dour, tight-lipped, iconoclastic Presbyterian with, say, the loud, extrovert thuggery of an English football supporter. Besides, talk of national character in the national war memorials of the Great War is undermined by consideration of those in two other parts of the British Isles.

The Welsh Memorial in the centre of Cathays Park in Cardiff is a circular Classical colonnade best characterised (to cinemagoers over a certain age) as being in the style of Pearl & Dean. Designed by the niminy-piminy Aberdonian Episcopalian ecclesiologist Sir Ninian Comper, it encloses a handsome, naked figure of Victory above three servicemen (in uniform) all modelled by the sculptor A. Bertram Pegram using the ideal physique of a sailor carefully chosen by the architect from a line-up of the entire crews of two battleships at the Union Jack Club in London. And Ireland went to Lutyens for the complex of pergolas and pavilions created in Phoenix Park in Dublin. Recently restored at the instigation of President Mary Robinson after decades of (deliberate?) neglect, it commemorates the 56,000 Irishmen – both Catholic and Protestant – who died fighting in the Great War and who were all, most significantly, volunteers. It is, however, difficult to draw general conclusions from either example, for the Welsh chose not to use a Welsh architect while the Irish commissioned an Englishman.

What seems clear is that the huge differences between the Scottish National War Memorial and the Cenotaph have little to do with imagined national characteristics and much more to do with circumstance, context and the particular aesthetic aims of their respective chosen designers.

Building the war shrine above Edinburgh Castle took almost a decade from inception to its completion in 1927, and was the product of long discussion and acrimonious public debate. Initially proposed in reaction to nebulous proposals for a National War Memorial and museum in London, it might have been built on one of several sites in the Scottish capital. Even when the Castle site had been chosen, Lorimer’s first ambitious proposals provoked opposition because of the effect they would have on the familiar skyline (Lord Rosebery rather unfairly compared the shape of the shrine to a ‘jelly mould’). Furthermore, the memorial as built was a complex collaborative effort: fulfilling

the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement which had flourished in Edinburgh after the turn of the century, Lorimer and his partner John F. Matthew had to co-ordinate the efforts of a team of sculptors, carvers, painters, stained-glass designers and other craftsmen (several of them, interestingly enough, women – just as, quite rightly, women (as nurses) are depicted inside the memorial: ‘It was everybody’s War’).

The Cenotaph, in contrast, was almost unintended, a sort of accident (but perhaps that is rather English?). The initial brief (from a government fearful of revolution by ‘Bolshie’ exservicemen) was for a visual focus for the parade planned for the Peace celebrations in July 1919. It was learned that, for the similar celebrations being organised for Paris, a catafalque in memory of the legion of French war dead was proposed. So the Prime Minister asked Lutyens to design a similar, temporary ‘catafalque’ for London.

In retrospect, he seems the inevitable, preordained choice: David Lloyd George wanted to use ‘some prominent artist’ and Lutyens was widely recognised as a great talent, was the architect for New Delhi and was already advising the Imperial War Graves Commission – and was socially wellconnected. Lloyd George, however, seldom displayed much aesthetic discrimination and another, inferior designer could well have been approached.

Mercifully (thanks to Sir Alfred Mond, First Commissioner of Works), it was Lutyens who saw the Prime Minister and who responded: ‘not a catafalque but a Cenotaph’. As the more mature Christopher Hussey wrote in his magnificent life of the architect, Lutyens, ‘with one of his flashes of simultaneous intuition, memory and visual perception,’ had remembered a conversation with Gertrude Jeckyll in her Surrey garden about a large rustic podium which she called the Cenotaph of Sigismunda and was told a cenotaph was a monument to someone buried elsewhere.

Lutyens and the Office of Works had a fortnight in which to design and erect this cenotaph and, so the story goes, he produced sketches of the essential concept in a matter of hours. In fact, he had been thinking about such a design for some time and he had already explored the idea of a pylon supporting a funerary effigy in his design for the Southampton war memorial. This time the recumbent effigy was replaced by a symbolic coffin or sarcophagus.

The result was a tall pylon of wood and plaster, which was erected in the middle of Whitehall for the generals and soldiers and politicians to march past on July 19th 1919. And then, the parade over, something extraordinary happened: Lutyens’s temporary structure fulfilled its emotional purpose and it suddenly became sacred: ‘the people’s shrine’. Tens of thousands of women, grieving for husbands or boyfriends or sons who were buried abroad or whose bodies had simply

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disappeared (there were half a million of those), found that the Cenotaph was what they needed: a focus for mourning.

It became a spontaneous site for pilgrimage and the surrounding roadway soon became heaped with wreaths and flowers. The Cenotaph was necessary: the newspapers ensured that the structure was not soon removed as originally intended, and eventually the government acceded to popular pressure and it was recreated in Portland stone.

The permanent Cenotaph was unveiled on Armistice Day, 1920.

The Cenotaph remains remarkable as well as powerful as a symbolic monument. There are, after all, no visible emblems or symbols on it representing Triumph, or Heroism, or Victory; there are only carved wreaths and ribbons, and three flags along each flank (Lutyens originally wanted stone flags, eternally still, as he achieved on his memorials at Leicester, Rochdale, Etaples and elsewhere, but that was vetoed). It speaks only of death, and loss. Nor are there any religious symbols: there is no cross, let alone a crucifix, or representations of angels, or of St George or St Michael in armour. This is, perhaps, surprising in a nation with an established Church. The bishops, indeed, were very unhappy about this and the burial of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey on the day the permanent Cenotaph was unveiled was the Church of England’s riposte to this official secularism. But the Great War was a conflict in which British Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and, yes, even atheists as well as Christians had been fed into the slaughter. Lutyens knew this and (owing to his wayward wife), influenced by Theosophy, argued for forms not just in Whitehall but in all the war cemeteries and memorials which had meaning ‘irrespective of creed or caste.’ The matter was debated in Parliament and the massed ranks of bishops, cardinals and ministers and other supporters of the symbolic Cross (like his old adversary in New Delhi, Herbert Baker) were defeated. As Lutyens remarked afterwards, it was important ‘to make folk realise the inherent cruelty of the forced Cross’. (That, however, did not deter the Catholic Herald from later dismissing the Cenotaph as ‘nothing more or less than a pagan memorial […] a disgrace in a so called Christian land’ as it was for ‘Atheist, Mohammedan, Buddhist, Jew, men of any religion or none’ – who, presumably, were of no account, whether alive or dead.)

(Equally impressive because similarly realist was the contemporary work of the Imperial War Graves Commission, for in the hundreds of war cemeteries no distinction was made between officers and men, rich and poor, while all the headstones are of identical, secular shape – slabs, not crosses. A concession, however, did have to be made: each cemetery was to be given a free-standing Cross of Sacrifice designed by that blimpish Classicist, Sir Reginald Blomfield, with a bronze sword placed on a stone cross which gives the thing a regrettable Onward, Christian Soldiers! air. Sometimes, however, rugged terrain precluded the erection of either the Cross of Sacrifice or Lutyens’s monolithic, secular, neo-pagan

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Great War Stone. This was the case in North Italy where the War Graves Commission’s architect was Lorimer, who therefore designed cemeteries with rough rubble walls and a sort of pylon-cross in rough stone – Arts and Crafts by necessity. These make a more telling comparison with Lutyens’s work than to compare and contrast the Scottish National War Memorial with the Cenotaph. But I digress.)

Lutyens knew better than to resort to sentimental symbolism, whether the Christian Cross, or emblems of Empire, or military badges. His Cenotaph speaks through pure form and deep cultural resonances. This slim pylon, which makes no attempt to compete with the height of the surrounding government buildings, somehow managed to express the inarticulate grief of a damaged society. Words and symbols were not required. Not that the Cenotaph is simple; indeed, it is a highly sophisticated essay in geometry and form. The bulk diminishes as it rises, governed by Lutyens’s own personal system of massing, with set-backs on alternate faces, while all the verticals and horizontals are not straight lines at all but curves, governed by a system of entasis or optical correction to give visual dynamism as in Greek temples – what Hussey called its ‘magic quality’.

Furthermore, all the verticals are curved and sloped so that they would converge at an imaginary point some nine hundred feet in the air. In its abstraction, the Cenotaph might seem ‘modern’ (whatever that may mean), but its power surely comes through it being rooted in a tradition which still had – and still has – resonance: the Classical, Renaissance tradition (what Lutyens and his generation liked to call ‘Humanist’). Pace Paul Fussell and others, it is a mistake to think that the Great War marked a caesura between traditional forms of expression and modernism; as Jay Winter has argued, ‘the war gave a new lease of life to a number of traditional languages expressed both conventionally and in unusual and modern forms’.

Lorimer’s Memorial shrine is also rooted in tradition, but a much more exclusive and literal one as the exterior draws its references from Falkland Palace and Stirling Castle – that peculiar Gormenghast architectural expression of the early Scottish Renaissance. There had been much public opposition to the memorial being taken over by the churches; even so, the shrine containing the memorial casket looks like a (Scottish) church – the chancel of the Holy Rude at Stirling, perhaps. Indeed – as Elizabeth Cumming suggests to me – it is possible that the religious, sacramental character of the Memorial both in general conception and in detail may well have been intended as an ecumenical gesture by Lorimer – a concession to Scotland’s Roman Catholics at a time of militant and virulent Presbyterian hostility.

The Hall of Honour, however, is more conventionally Classical, but the general conception is overwhelmed by the detail.

Clearly this is what was intended. The result is that the memorial is not just to the dead, to inexpressible, irreplaceable loss, but also a celebration of arms. With the

names of battles carved in stone, with regimental colours and flags, with badges and coats of arms, with pictures in bronze or glass of ships, tanks and aeroplanes, the interior tells the story of four years of fighting and, thus, accepts the military imperative. This worried some Scots; indeed, as early as 1919, J. Lawton Wingate, President of the Royal Scottish Academy, criticised Lorimer’s first design as ‘too exclusively a glorification of militarism’. Perhaps this is unfair: Ian Hay noted that, among all the many inscriptions in the memorial, ‘there is no suggestion anywhere of exultation over a beaten foe. The word ‘Victory’ is only once mentioned throughout the building …’ But, on the other hand, ‘Scotland alone among the nations has erected a war memorial commemorating in detail the service of every unit of her arms.’ But why? Did the tens of thousands of ‘Fallen’ die for their regiment, or for their country (or because they had no choice)?

Worst of all – for me – is that inside, as an afterthought, there is a bas-relief portrait of one of Scotland’s most unfortunate exports to England: Douglas Haig, ‘the living embodiment of the highest type of soldier’. Given that he was born in Edinburgh, I suppose that was inevitable but I cannot go along with the revisionism which seeks to restore the tarnished reputation of the British commander-in-chief. Can he still be a national hero? One of the most unpleasant aspects of the British – both English and Scots – is our inability to admit we may not have been anything but shiningly and consistently virtuous and ultimately victorious in war. Even if Haig was fighting a necessary war of attrition against Imperial Germany, to have done so as he did, on the Somme and at Passchendaele, suggests an inflexible realism which was callous to the point of criminal inhumanity. Philip Gibbs, who saw what really went on, complained that most British generals were remote and belonged ‘to a definite type and tradition […] they did not reveal any spark of genius, or any imagination, or any touch of spirituality, or any eccentricity of mind’ (and yet we still dare sneer at the Germans). As for Haig, ‘Occasionally he rode out with an escort of Lancers with fluttering pennons, extraordinarily handsome and noble-looking, but impassive and inexpressive, like his own wax effigy in Madame Tussaud’s […] he was without genius. It was a question only of blasting a way through, and flinging human flesh against underground fortresses.’ Anyway, the smug old butcher has his reward in the gauche and pathetically realist equestrian portrait in bronze which stands on the Castle Esplanade. What is annoying is that this stiff and unimaginative soldier was also commemorated in London by a superb, once-controversial work of art: Alfred Hardiman’s necessarily symbolic and formalised equestrian statue of the commander-in-chief which stands further down Whitehall from the Cenotaph. At

least it annoyed Lady Haig. But again I digress …)

Hussey contrasted ‘inarticulate sentiment’ with ‘romanticism flowing out of realism under the stress of emotion’.

Romanticism can also be inarticulate, or at least essentially self-explanatory, but what is conspicuous about the Edinburgh memorial is that the interior is covered in words carved in the stone. Everything is labelled, explained, or exhorted. Does this reflect a culture in which universal literacy had been encouraged by John Knox (in contrast to the traditional brutish ignorance of the English)? Or is it simply that a really great work of art or architecture needs no explanation, and that to label is a confession of failure – like having to say ‘Entrance’ or ‘Exit’ in a modern building (not that, say, Lutyens’s great Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval is in any sense a failure because it is decorated with the dense pattern of 73,000 individual names carved in the stone: the meaning and purpose of that necrological wallpaper is horribly clear). The best architects are often suspicious of words: ‘All this talk,’ Lutyens once complained, ‘brings the ears so far forward that they make blinkers for the eyes.’

There are, of course, words on the Cenotaph: just three – ‘THE GLORIOUS DEAD’. Their appropriateness may be questioned, for it was not particularly glorious to be machine gunned or bayoneted or blown to pieces or drowned in mud or burned alive or choked to death by poison gas. But while those words satisfied an inevitable patriotic sentiment, it does not seem to me that the Cenotaph in any way celebrates war or violence. It signifies only loss. Of course, each individual can draw a different meaning from the same symbol, or ritual. I am not a pacifist, but I do not wear a red poppy each November as a patriotic gesture but in memory of the millions of victims – not heroes – of many nationalities: German, Austrian, Hungarian and Turkish as well as French and British – who were sacrificed in stunning numbers by cynical governments in a murderous convulsion which cast a long shadow over the rest of the last century. I have long been haunted by the knowledge that something truly terrible happened, a deep cosmic sin was committed between 1914 and 1918 and that Britain (because of the many who condoned and encouraged it) was somehow tainted by the experience. (I say that, of course, as an English male, for good did come out of the war, not least for the female half the population.) The wreaths of red poppies which are placed on the Cenotaph each November seem appropriate as – to me – Lutyens’s extraordinary memorial conveys a similar melancholy meaning.

And it is extraordinary – extraordinary that a British government should have commissioned a very great architect

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to realise something so pure, so devoid of conventional military or patriotic symbolism. It could easily have been otherwise; indeed, had the government been more responsive we could have been given a national memorial in London more like Lorimer’s in Edinburgh. One has only to look at the memorials unveiled in public schools after 1918 to see what sort of structure might have been raised in Hyde Park had the bishops and vice-chancellors and headmasters had their way: all those chapels and halls with regimental badges and figures of soldiers and flags and noble thoughts set in bronze or stone; all those figures of St George – in armour – vanquishing the wicked Hunnish dragon, which attempted to do justice to the numbing loss of ex-public schoolboys (on average, one in five of those who served).

One of the worst is at Tony Blair’s alma mater, Fettes, where – to quote C.F. Cernot’s British Public Schools War Memorials of 1927 – there is ‘a beautiful bronze figure of an Officer of a Highland Regiment … struck down while fighting’ and lying, with arm raised, on a stone pedestal carved with the noble exhortation: ‘CARRY ON’.

Lorimer’s memorial is better than many or most of those memorials, but the sentiments it expresses are not dissimilar.

Perhaps now, after the half-century or so of comparative peace that we, in Britain, enjoyed (before the belligerent antics of that wretched Fettes alumnus), it is difficult to empathise with that once overpowering sentiment. Also, it is to miss the point to judge war memorials by aesthetic criteria alone: the most poignant and telling can be the most naïve and unsophisticated monuments on village greens.

Nevertheless, art can have a high purpose, and Lutyens managed to convey the enormity of loss without extraneous meanings by using a language of pure form which is rooted in comprehensible tradition. From the point of view of aesthetics, the Great War took place at the right time, when a meaningful monumental Classicism was in the ascendant in Britain and elsewhere and the artistic culture was capable of giving it an imaginative interpretation. Lutyens’s Cenotaph was truly modern. But so, in Scotland, was Lorimer’s national war memorial – ‘We should hear less about the feebleness and decadence of modern art now that this notable Hall of Regiments and Shrine have been thrown open to the public,’ commented the journal Architecture in 1927. The Arts and Crafts movement in England may have lost its vitality or changed direction after the turn of the century but in Edinburgh the ideals of William Morris remained potent at least into the 1920s. Nevertheless, as Elizabeth Cumming has written, ‘However successful, the Scottish National War Memorial nevertheless sounded the last post of the Edinburgh Arts and Crafts movement. The magnificence of its interior could not be repeated nor improved.’

There is one last factor which needs to be considered in responding to that outpouring of emotion disciplined by art and tradition which rests on the Castle Rock. My book of public school war memorials includes some interesting statistics on the last few pages. For instance, the so-called Third Battle of Ypres – that is, Passchendaele – cost £22 million and involved the firing of 480,000 tons of ammunition. Killing was quite expensive, so at a cost of some £250,000 the Scottish National War Memorial seems cheap at the price as well as rather more worthwhile. The

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book also lists the comparative losses in the war per head of population: France lost 1 in 28, Germany 1 in 35, Great Britain 1 in 66, Italy 1 in 79 (the huge Russian war loss remains unrecorded, and is difficult to distinguish from subsequent ideologically motivated massacres). But these figures can mislead. Scotland’s own dead in the Great War numbered some 148,000 in a population of 4.76 million (1911 figures). That is a level of loss equivalent to Germany’s. Scotland, with one tenth of the population of the United Kingdom, bore one-fifth of the casualties. Surely no further explanation need be sought for the nation’s depressed and depressing history in the decades that followed. And no wonder that many who survived the trenches were haunted by the conviction that the best had perished.

Seen in this light, the Scottish National War Memorial is a scream of pain, with national sentiment and imagery introduced to try and staunch the wound. Lorimer’s hope was that a modern Scottish architecture could develop from his approach to design, but it was not to be. So we are left with a curious architectural contrast – but not that between Edinburgh Castle and Whitehall: that tells us little (apart from confirming the towering artistic greatness of Edwin Lutyens).

Instead, we now have – today – two extravagant public monuments at either end of the Royal Mile, one belonging to the beginning of the 20th century, the other to its end. The first was the product of informed and passionate public debate, the second the result of cynical political manipulation in defiance of public opinion; one is national in character, the other vaguely international; one the product of national selfbelief, the other representing a vapid desire to be up to date – a posturing assertiveness born of lack of conviction; the first represents brave self-confidence in the face of devastating loss, the second the mismanaged consequence of a damaged national psyche, long-established loss of confidence and self-destructive parochialism. High up on the Castle Rock, the Scottish National War Memorial enhances the city, is truly monumental and speaks clearly of its terrible purpose, while the Scottish Parliament building, dumped down by Holyrood Palace … ? Well, perhaps this is not the place to comment, but I certainly know which of these two public buildings I admire the more.