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A fitting memorial, Jones contends, would rub this herd’s faces in the horrors of war: quoting (as seems almost obligatory in these cases) Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, he argues that ‘[a] true work of art about the First World War would need to be as obscene as cancer’:
‘A meaningful mass memorial to this horror would not be dignified or pretty. It would be gory, vile and terrible to see. The moat of the Tower should be filled with barbed wire and bones. That would mean something.’
The Tower of London poppies acknowledge the nature of the war’s cost more than Jones allows. The blood-red flowers flooding the Tower’s moat are an uncanny mixture of Old Testament apocalypse and the lift scene from The Shining, while the hand-shaped fragility of the poppies themselves suggest the vulnerability of the human body to the smash and damage of industrialised warfare.
Nevertheless, he raises an important point: how realistically should war memorials portray the sufferings of the commemorated? Authentic representation of war’s effects can be put to devastating use – witness Charles Sargeant Jagger’s stunning sculptures on the Royal Artillery Memorial on Hyde Park Corner. Jones’ idea, though – however well-intentioned in educating its audience – is really, really bad, teetering between gratuitousness and kitsch. Suppose his ‘barbed wire and bones’ memorial was commissioned. Should we have craftsmen fashion tastefully grotesque bones out of ceramics or fibreglass? Should we use real bones, and if so, who do we dig up?
‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ is a poem about the incommensurability of war experience; Owen’s speaker knows that the sights he has seen will never be fully understood, despite his telling of it (‘If in some smothering dreams you too could pace’, ‘If you could hear’). In this instance, ‘obscene as cancer’ implies occlusion as well as profanity; even a poet as graphic as Owen, who was there, can’t communicate the utter hell of war.
This being the case, an attempt straightforwardly to convey the brutality of war in art will inevitably fall short. In a culture already saturated with scenes of horror, whether from the Somme, Bergen-Belsen or Syria, evocation in art might ultimately be more useful than provocation. Jones has written elsewhere that memory is ‘savagely political’, but that tells only part of the story. In working out our relation to the disasters and atrocities of last century, and their continuation into our own, we do need, contra Jones, to be inward-looking – to question the feelings that arise from a contemplation of such a myriad of deaths. Such reflection is more likely to be cultivated by a field of poppies than of bones and barbed wire.
Philip Sidney is a writer and academic, specialising in travel, literature and travel literature
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