In my 2012 column “Faith,
hope and statuary,” I panned recent attempts to commemorate through public
statuary sacrifice by public protectors like firefighters and cops. Such works leave
a bad taste to the extent they reinforce the fetishization of the warrior in
all his guises; by calling anyone who puts on a uniform a ”hero,” we forget
they are ordinary human beings who do difficult things every day and some days
do extraordinary things, which is much more interesting.
Mainly, though, the statues and memorial suck as art. I was
prompted to this sour recollection while reading the past few weeks about the commemorative installation by Paul Cummins
and Tom Piper to
mark Remembrance Day, what the Brits call Memorial Day. They crafted 888,246
ceramic poppies and arrayed them in the Tower of London’s moat, one for each of
the British and Commonwealth
servicemen killed in the Great War.
“The effect of the
installation is of a tidal wave of blood,” wrote Christopher Fowler, “a
remorseful haemorrhaging of pain that’s a genuinely cathartic image.” Many have
found it so; thousands have crammed into that part of London to see, so many
that the city authorities shut the Tube station nearby to try to contain the
crowds.
The British have a genius for commemoration that we utterly lack. On Aug. 4, 1914,
when Britain declared war on Germany, “The lamps are going out all over
Europe,” Foreign Secretary Edward Grey told an acquaintance. One hundred
years later, as Reuters
described it,
British landmarks, including the Houses of
Parliament, Tower Bridge and St. Paul’s Cathedral, went dark for one hour,
during which time Prime Minister Cameron also asked Britons to switch off all
but a single light in their homes. At a service in London’s Westminster Abbey,
candles went out one by one until only a burning oil lamp remained at the Grave
of the Unknown Warrior; at the exact time the British Empire joined the war, 11
p.m., the lamp was extinguished. In Trafalgar Square, one single light shone
from an old police box.
Perhaps the Brits have a feel for these things
because they know what a real war is like, unlike Americans. The total British
casualties in World War I were more than 8 percent of its population; the U.S. losses
in World War II, our bloodiest modern war by far were one-tenth of that.
This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 5, 2014.
