The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer

precisely
because
it was filmed); as a medium sculpture was capable of
rendering the unphotographable experience of battle. Although many had the talent, no British sculptor – not even Jagger – had the vision, freedom or power to render the war in bronze
or stone as Owen had done in words.
    This speculative account of sculptures that were not made is really only an attempt to articulate a sense of what is missing from those that
were
: a way of describing them in terms not
of stone or bronze but of the time and space which envelop and define them. What is lacking is the sense of a search for a new form, a groping towards new meaning rather than a passive reliance on
the accumulated craft of the past. 15
    Even taking this absence into account, the realist memorials represent a great flowering of British public sculpture. That they may not have been the work of exceptional
individual talents illustrates how, at certain moments in the tradition of any art, the expressive potential of the average can exceed that of the outstanding at earlier or later dates. Nowadays
the human form cannot so readily be coaxed into such powerful attitudes; only an exceptional artist today could achieve the power routinely managed by the memorial sculptors, almost all of whom,
except Jagger, have been forgotten.
    We drive through Keighley on our way to watch Leeds–Everton at Elland Road. Clouds hug the ground. The anorak, a foreigner would suppose, is the English national dress.
The most frequently heard noise is a sniff. Everything
    that is not grey – clouds, road, pigeons – is brown: benches, buildings, leaves, bronze soldier and sailor, the figure of Victory perched on the memorial behind
them. Traffic and shoppers hurry past. The soldier stands erect, doing his best to ignore the fact that the bayonet on his rifle has long been broken off.
    In Bradford, too, where we stop for a lunchtime curry, the bronze soldiers have met a similar fate. Once they must have strode aggressively forward, one each side of the memorial. Now they
advance gingerly, as if about to surprise each other in a harmless game of hide and seek. That the bayonet was already virtually obsolete as a weapon by 1914 – ‘No man in the Great War
was ever killed by a bayonet,’ claimed one soldier, ‘unless he had his hands up first’ – only enhances the lack. Then as now the bayonets’ function was symbolic and
ornamental: without them the sculptures’ internal dynamic is thrown irremediably out of kilter.
    In Holborn, by contrast – or, more quietly, in the French village of Flers, where there is an almost identical figure – an infantryman mounts a pedestal of land, rifle in hand,
encircled by the vast radius of air that extends from head to bayonet-tip to trailing foot. This framing circle renders the sculpture (by Albert Toft) both more powerful and more vulnerable,
extending his command of space and fixing our attention, as if through a sniper’s sights, on the soldier at its dead centre.
    Near Huddersfield, in Elland, the light has called it a day. Twilight is falling through the bare trees. November here can last ten months of the year. The damp grass is
coveredin damp leaves. On a granite plinth a bronze soldier keeps watch in a drizzle of mist, looking out at the damp road. The collar of his greatcoat is turned up against the
coming cold. Old rain drips from the rim of his helmet. Except for the verdigris streaking his shoulders, all colour is a shade of grey. Brodsky:
    Leaning on his rifle,
    the Unknown Soldier grows even more unknown.
    At Stalybridge a soldier slumps into death. His body crumples beneath him but an angel is there; she has been waiting, it seems, for exactly this moment. Berger has described
another almost identical memorial in a village in France:
    The angel does not save him, but appears somehow to lighten the soldier’s fall. Yet the hand which holds the wrist takes no weight, and is no firmer than a
     nurse’s