They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
\nAge shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
\nAt the going down of the sun and in the morning
\nWe will remember them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nSo wrote\u00a0the poet Laurence Binyon<\/a>, watching some of the first British soldiers march off to a war that would ultimately kill three-quarters of a million of them.\u00a0Too old to offer them his life, he promised his memory:\u00a0We will remember them.<\/em> \u201cAnd yet,\u201d I wrote earlier<\/a> in the ongoing World War I centenary, \u201cwe forget. Time marches forward, carrying our attention with it. The complicated riches of contemplating the past don\u2019t stack up against the urgent needs of the present and the terrifying anxieties or tantalizing possibilities of the future.\u201d<\/p>\n
So when we mark Remembrance Day (or Veterans Day), we join our voices to Binyon\u2019s\u00a0and those of generations before\u00a0who\u00a0\u201cfor a hundred years have pledged themselves against their nature.\u201d Though the fallen \u201chave no lot in our labour of the day-time,\u201d wrote Binyon, nonetheless \u201cthey are known \/ As the stars are known to the Night.\u201d<\/p>\n
To help prompt such remembrance of people who \u201csit no more at familiar tables of home,\u201d we erect memorials \u2014 speed bumps that slow our rush into the future and turn our gaze, fleetingly, back to the past.<\/p>\n
For example,\u00a0this past Thursday ground was finally broken<\/a> for a new National World War I Memorial in Washington, DC\u2026 nearly two years after the winning design was\u00a0announced. But it\u2019s not clear<\/a> that the memorial will be complete by this time next year, the 100th anniversary of the Armistice: there are still debates over the design (\u201cIt\u2019s a bit presumptuous,\u201d one critic said of the groundbreaking), and\u00a0the fundraising goal of $40 million is still far from being met.<\/p>\n
If\u00a0and when that memorial is completed, only time will tell if it retains the commemorative power of its more venerable European cousins, many of which\u00a0my students visit during the travel course<\/a> I help lead every other January. In honor of Remembrance Day, let me share five WWI memorials that\u00a0have struck me as being especially memorable:\u00a0(all photos CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Chris Gehrz)<\/em><\/p>\n
The Cenotaph \u2013 London, England<\/h2>\n
The most famous, most-copied World War I memorial\u00a0is the handiwork of Sir Edwin Lutyens (also the architect of the monumental arch at Thiepval).\u00a0Standing in front of the Foreign Office and just down Whitehall from 10 Downing and the Ministry of Defence, the stone\u00a0slab effectively makes (in historian Jay Winter\u2019s words) \u201call of \u2018official\u2019 London into an imagined cemetery.\u201d Controversial for its sparse symbolism,\u00a0Lutyens instead erected what Winter called\u00a0\u201ca form on which anyone could inscribe his or her own thoughts, reveries, sadnesses.\u201d So while it has no overtly religious symbols or inscriptions,\u00a0it always turns my thoughts to Resurrection \u2014 since\u00a0cenotaph is Greek for \u201cempty tomb.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\n<\/head><\/html>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div><\/div>\nSlide: 1 of<\/i> 4<\/div>\n <\/div>\n\t\n\t\t\t\t<\/i>Continue Reading<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\nThe Bavarian War Memorial \u2013 Munich, Germany<\/h2>\n
Resurrection\u00a0also came to mind when we visit\u00a0the last\u00a0WWI memorial on our trip. Resting\u00a0in front of the local state government in Munich, Bavaria\u2019s\u00a0Kriegerdenkmal\u00a0<\/em>is easy to miss: sunken into a seven-foot deep pit,\u00a0the top of its crypt barely rises about the level of the surrounding Hofgarten. As at the German cemetery in Langemark, Belgium<\/a> (many of whose fallen were\u00a0named here, on engravings\u00a0destroyed by Allied bombing in World War II and never restored), one descends to the dead when visiting the memorial. But the western wall of\u00a0the memorial is inscribed \u201cSie werden auferstehen.\u201d At first, I wanted to translate that phrase as \u201cThey will be resurrected.\u201d But given that the crypt houses a statue of a \u201csleeping soldier\u201d and is overseen by the statue of an older warrior, I think that \u201cthey will rise again\u201d takes on a different, less hopeful meaning.<\/p>\n
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\n<\/head><\/html>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div><\/div>\nSlide: 1 of<\/i> 3<\/div>\n <\/div>\n\t\n\t\t\t\t<\/i>Continue Reading<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\nThe Brooding Soldier \u2013 St. Julien, Belgium<\/h2>\n
As Binyon predicted, the\u00a0Commonwealth dead of WWI \u201csleep beyond England\u2019s foam,\u201d in dozens of cemeteries all over the Western Front. So\u00a0there are few places on Earth more densely populated with commemorative structures than the former Western Front. One of\u00a0the most impressive\u00a0is the Canadian National Memorial outside Vimy, France, but an even more moving memorial from that nation stands across the border in Flanders, the Belgian province whose poppy-red, cross-marked fields were made famous by a Canadian doctor<\/a>. Instead of erecting a more typical obelisk, the Canadian government commemorated the 1st Canadian Division by commissioning a statue to stand near the spot where those troops fought back the first German chemical weapons attack, in April 1915. (It\u2019s not far from the site of Passchendaele, the terrible battle whose 100th anniversary Canadians just observed<\/a>.) Known as \u201cThe Brooding Soldier,\u201d\u00a0war veteran Frederick Chapman Clemesha\u2019s\u00a036-feet tall\u00a0statue\u00a0somehow turns\u00a0cold\u00a0granite into something warm and tender: the moment when a soldier who has just buried one of his comrades rests his hands on his upturned rifle and pauses\u00a0to mourn, remember, and\u00a0(perhaps) pray.<\/p>\n
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\n<\/head><\/html>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div><\/div>\nSlide: 1 of<\/i> 3<\/div>\n <\/div>\n\t\n\t\t\t\t<\/i>Continue Reading<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\nVictory Memorial Drive \u2013 Minneapolis, Minnesota<\/h2>\n
Finally, an example of\u00a0the \u201cliving memorials<\/a>\u201d that are so\u00a0distinctive of American commemoration. While\u00a0it took a\u00a0Second World War to popularize this approach, even in the wake of WWI architects like Martha Candler were already arguing that \u201cmere shafts of granite and statues of bronze, be they ever so artistic, are inadequate to express the tribute we would pay to our soldiers of democracy.\u201d That didn\u2019t stop hundreds of towns<\/a> from erecting copies of E. M. Viquesney\u2019s\u00a0\u201cSpirit of the American Doughboy.\u201d (145 of still stand.) But\u00a0several cities decided instead to remember the war by spending money on something more useful: e.g., a football stadium in Chicago, an opera house in San Francisco, a swimming pool in Honolulu, and a 3.8-mile parkway in Minneapolis.<\/p>\n
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