More on War Memorials

Sometime ago, I wrote a piece about Washington DC war memorials. Well, Stephen O’Shea the author of Back to the Front: An Accidental Historian Walks the Trenches of World War I, has this to say about the subject:

The British saw Ypres as a mausoleum. The stupendous profligacy with which those in command had wasted lives in the defense of a Belgian backwater called for an extravagant peacetime riposte. Well before the armistice, the authorities in London ordered elaborate and expensive plans drawn up for commemorations, graveyards, statuary, and the like. A new sacredness, a civic religion, would have to be invented to ward off mounting nihilism — all the suffering had to be made legitimate so that those in power would not be blamed. Thus was born the modern war memorial, a mix of accountancy exactitude and the notion of universal victimhood. Determine the correct tally of the dead, etch their names in stone, and avoid the sticky question of responsibility by implying that such a regrettable calamity occurred independently of human agency. At Ypres, the British invented the twentieth-century response to war. By commissioning a stone ledger of the lost, the State, through its very punctiliousness, can be absolved. Visitors to the Vietnam memorial in Washington will recognize the device.

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12:34 pm on March 21, 2009