WAR MEMORIALS.

Across Europe in the wake of the First World War, the erection of war memorials transformed the private grief of millions into public statements that expressed not the joy of victory but the burden of sorrow. Memorials facilitate identification with fallen soldiers and justify their sacrifices, and they allow participants in memorial ceremonies to transfer their own feelings onto the sculptors' creations. War memorials also provide a legacy for later conflicts.

Memorials were erected in profusion after the U.S. Civil War, the various colonial wars, and the conflicts surrounding German unification, such as the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871). But following World War I they were erected in nearly all the affected countries and recalled the omnipresence of the 1914–1918 tragedy. Only Russia, which had been transformed into the Soviet Union, suppressed memory of the war. It is remarkable to see the extent to which defeated and victorious countries alike shared the same frenzy for memorials, which moreover were quite similar in style, symbolism, and allegories. Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), artist and First World War veteran, designed in 1925 a project for a triumphal arch, much larger than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the better to honor his comrades. This fact, the Australian historian Ken Inglis notes, shows clearly that those who create memorials tend to forget and to invent as much as to remember. Memorials are products of their time, as are all intellectual and artistic products, ones in which death and grief occupy both public and private space.

For a lost generation, Armistice Day, first celebrated in 1919, was designed to unite through remembrance: unity of time, 11 November; unity of place, the war memorial; and unity of action, the commemorative ceremony. At the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" of the fifth year of the war, 1918, the guns ceased fire, yielding a time of silence and sorrow. Therefore, the day of 11 November became a national holiday in some countries—in France, for example, in 1922—and was everywhere a day of remembrance. Perhaps most spectacular was the two minutes of absolute silence in Britain, observed everywhere from production lines in factories to city buses. In most countries, at eleven o'clock in the morning, people gathered around memorials, bedecked with flags, black crepe, and flowers, in a ceremony where the living honored the dead; there were speeches and invocations of a moral and civic pedagogy, a lesson in citizenship, and a plea never to allow war to return. Elements of this liturgy might conclude with fireworks and floodlights, banquets, or sporting events—in short, the social customs and events of the prewar period adapted both to commemorate the dead and to celebrate the living. Community memorials to fallen soldiers became no less sacred than religious sculptures in church parishes.

TYPES OF MEMORIALS

Monument aux morts is the French expression; the English war memorial expresses the larger concept that remembrance of the war dead is also remembrance of war itself. Although many Protestant nations involved in the war decided on "utilitarian" memorials such as scholarships, stadiums, libraries, clocks, fountains, swimming pools, and meeting places, the statue, usually erected at the center of some public square or space, remained the most common. Most towns had numerous memorials located in many different places. To obtain some idea of the extent of commemoration of the war in the 1920s, consider that there are some thirty-six thousand towns in France, for example, each with their own memorials. Every fallen soldier's name was engraved on a public monument but also in his former school, workplace, and parish church. Rooms in family homes were turned into altars, with photos and souvenirs.

For the community cenotaphs, in most cases, a stela of a kind commonly found in cemeteries was chosen. These memorials were cheaper and suited the public spirit of the times. Architects and marble workers were much in demand; funeral homes were busier than ever. Smart tradesmen offered catalogs selling palms, laurels, war crosses, even a relief of the poilu or the Tommy—informal terms for infantryman—to be affixed to the burial stone. Some commonly used inscriptions included enfants, They answered the call; morts; héros; Caduti per la patria; guerre; Fallen Heroes, 1914–1918; devoir; sacrifice; martyrs; mémoire. Exalted rhetoric such as the line from Horace, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, was used as well.

After World War I, pacifist movements flourished to such an extent that one wonders why so few memorials show it. In France, at most a dozen monuments bear the inscription "Que maudite soit la guerre" (What a Curse Is War). State interference may be ruled out. Everywhere memorials were put up spontaneously under the auspices of veterans or their families, which essentially meant, after 1918, by the whole of society. In France, where separation of church and state meant that religious decorations could not appear on public buildings, memorials were nevertheless often decorated with a crucifix, even outside of cemeteries. The unfathomable magnitude of grief shaped the massive response to loss, but implicitly there was still a powerful message in the war memorial movement: that war of this murderous kind must never happen again.

The lists of the fallen soldiers, a second element of the inscriptions, completed the funereal monument. Alphabetical order was usual and it reinforced the uniformity found in military cemeteries. Rank was not usually recognized; the equality of death came first. To cite names was of major importance, for names recall individuals and bring them back to life for a moment. To engrave the names, to read them, sometimes to physically touch them, as is seen in some photographs dating to the 1920s, was a way to individualize the dead as opposed to the anonymous unreality of mass slaughter.

The sculptures represent the tragedy of death, of courage, of the stoic and sometimes the martyr. Statues of poilus (French soldiers), Tommies (British soldiers), Diggers (Australian soldiers)—the warmth of these nicknames is significant—multiplied, memorializing men of a particular place and time. German and Austrian statues were more classical in form but no less powerful in their invocation of nobility. Brave, defiant, and even brash poses show that these men were viewed as heroes even if defeated. Uniforms and weapons were sculpted with accuracy. Standing on their pedestals, they are determined to pursue for eternity the exemplary fight for which they gave their lives. Their war is clean and aseptic, stripped of mud, lice, and blood, like tin soldiers. Yet these memorials are empty tombs, and such cenotaphs swiftly remind the beholder that they were erected on the backs of dead men like so many posthumous symbols of honor. Often, on battlefields or in large cities, generals have their own monuments; the troops are remembered collectively by a single memorial.

No matter what the iconographic impulse, there is always underneath the art a sense that death is intolerable. The dead can be exalted, but death cannot be glorified. This is one reason why these memorials usually deny death by depicting soldiers forever living, resurrected in bronze.

Memorials, especially in France but also in Italy, Germany, and Bohemia, honor both soldiers and the war's civilians, whose material and psychological support was so crucial. Finally and above all, they express sorrow. To borrow a term from French philologist Georges Dumézil (1898–1986), the war sculptures might be said to represent the three facets of war efforts—that people had to believe, to work, and to fight in order to carry on with the war. Memorials illustrate as much in stone and in bronze. At their summit, one finds a rooster, a lion, St. George, an eagle representing the nation; a soldier stands in the middle, while at the foot of the monument civilians, old people, women, and children contemplate the soldier or go about their daily chores, whether farming (still the most common activity), or factory work, or educating children. Although memorials were meant to glorify the courage of those who fought the war, they are first of all repositories of sorrow, grief, and public recognition of sacrifice on a monumental scale.

Some of the language used in these monuments was religious; other monuments drew on Romantic or classical notation. On memorials, as with stained glasses in churches, the Christian soldier joins the sacrifice of Christ in a representation—an Imitatio Christi. When the soldier is delivered to her, the new Virgin Mary holds him in her arms and the memorials become a statement of the terrible losses millions of mothers suffered during the conflict.

CHANGING MODES OF COMMEMORATION

Although commemorations celebrated the soldiers above all, other victims of the war, by contrast, were excluded or marginalized in commemorative sites. The suffering of noncombatants, of prisoners of war, and of occupied populations was for the most part denied or forgotten. Victims who were not heroes did not easily fit in the commemorative language of the day. How do we acknowledge hunger, cold, forced labor, rape, the fate of hostages, of civilians who simply got in the way? Remembrance could not cope with all of this until the Holocaust of World War II transformed the commemorative landscape.

European war memorials were thus symptomatic both of cultural demobilization and its impossibility, something that was underscored after the Second World War. Only tablets, and occasionally sculpture, recalled the dead combatants of that war; this was also true of the wars of decolonization. An exception would be the Soviet Union, where gigantic memorials were raised to the "great patriotic war." Since the 1970s, however, everything has changed, with a new efflorescence of memorials that bring to light repressed memories, especially of the Jewish Holocaust. Contemporary artists try to render in their works and monuments the general obsession with disappearance, the burial (or the impossibility of it) that became the fate of those in the First, then in the Second World War.

Although memorials change over time, the brutal reality of grief remains. New media intervene in recent commemorations. After the attacks of 11 September 2001 in the United States, the Internet became a place for remembrance and grief, with pictures and biographies of the victims, virtual ex-votos multiplied ad infinitum by online visitors. The same phenomenon was observed in Spain after the attack of 11 March 2004. In Australia, France, and Britain, the names of victims of World War I also appear online. In Israel, on Memorial Day (Yom HaZikaron), the names of soldiers who died for the nation scroll across television screens. An immense tower to replace the World Trade Center, as designed by architect Daniel Libeskind, will evoke elements of the Statue of the Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. With names, photographs, architectural symbolism—through whatever medium—these "monuments to the dead" are meant to bring life back to those who died in war or more recent postnational violence.

And yet virtually all war memorials have a quixotic element to them. They were constructed so that the dead would not be forgotten. And yet that is precisely what happens, and perhaps must happen, as war retreats into history. The dead are forgotten; "never again" fades into a cliché, resurrected the next time war erupts, and contemporaries cry once more "never again." War memorials are thus irrepressible expressions of collective and personal grief, marking the European landscape. If there is an icon of twentieth-century Europe, it is the monument to war and to its millions of victims.

See alsoWar Neuroses; World War I; World War II.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Inglis, Ken. "War Memorials, 10 Questions for Historians." Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains, no. 167 (July 1992).

Prost, Antoine. "Monuments to the Dead" and "Verdun." In Realms of Memory, 3 vols., edited by Pierre Nora, English edition edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman and translated by Arthur Goldhammer, vol. 2, 307-330; vol. 3, 370–404. New York, 1996–1998.

Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge, U.K., 1995.

——. Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century. New Haven, Conn., 2006.

Winter, Jay, and Emmanuel Sivan, eds. War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, U.K., 1999.

Annette Becker