The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer Page A

hand taking a pulse. If his fall appears to be lightened, it is only because both figures have been carved out of the same piece of stone.
    They are all over the country, these Tommies: taking leave of their loved ones (in Newcastle), standing to, resting, reading letters, attacking (in Kelvingrove Park in Glasgow),
binding their wounds (in Croydon), helping injured comrades (in Argyll), dying, returning home (to Cambridge). Representing and preserving a sample of the multitudinous gestures of the British
soldier at war, these frequently duplicated poses putme in mind of the Airfix soldiers which moulded my taste in memorial art.
    They are all over the country, these Tommies . . .
    Elland Memorial
    Age may not weary them but the years have condemned. Sundozed and snow-dazed, they sweat in greatcoats in the summer or freeze in shirtsleeves through the long winter months. Sprayed by
feminists – ‘Dead Men Don’t Rape’ – and damaged by vandals, all are rotted by pollution. Powerless to protect themselves, their only defence, like that of the blind,
is our respect.
    The self-contained ideal of remembrance
    Sometimes they are the only old things in the new No Man’s Land of bankrupt businesses and boarded offices, broken lifts and derelict estates. They have been around so long they seem part
of the landscape: it is impossible to imagine a time when they were not here. For years now, children who watched the statues being unveiled have been dying of old age. Perhaps what they
commemorate, then, is their own survival, the enduring idea of remembrance. The most common form of sculpture – a soldier, head bowed,leaning on his downward-pointed
rifle – actually represents the self-contained ideal of remembrance: the soldier being remembered and the soldier remembering. Sculptures like this appeal to – and are about – the
act of remembrance itself: a depiction of the ideal form of the emotion which looking at them elicits.
    Throughout the 1920s, and especially in the early thirties, attempts were made to ally the rituals of Remembrance with the cause of peace: war memorials, it was argued, should be termed peace
memorials; white ‘peace’ poppies were sold by the Peace Pledge Union as an alternative to the red poppies of the British Legion. Already, by 1928, however, the public was beginning to
cease thinking of itself as ‘Post-War’ and was beginning, in the words of a contemporary commentator, ‘to feel that it was living in the epoch “preceding the next Great
War”’. But this was exactly the period when the Great War was being remembered – in novels and memoirs – most intensely. Again there is a strange temporal elision as the
idea of Remembrance merges into a notion of Preparedness. Accordingly, sculptures erected in memory of the First World War come also to look forward to the Second. As war with Germany looms again,
the memorial sculptures come to represent a form of symbolic rearming whose job is not simply to protect the past but to guard against possible futures.
    On the Croydon memorial P. J. Montford’s figure bandages a wound as if in readiness for further exertions; in Port Sunlight two fit men – sculpted by William Goscombe John –
prepare to defend a third who is wounded; John Angel’s figure in Exeter and Walter Marsden’s in St Anne’s on Seashow soldiers weary but ready (if necessary
the rifle that was broken in victory in one sculpture will be wielded as a club in this one).
    Jagger’s figures lent themselves particularly well to the new conditions in which remembrance merged into resolve. Resisting suggestions that any peace symbolism be included in the Royal
Artillery Memorial, he had emphasized that the ‘terrific power’ of the artillery represented the ‘last word in force’. This, he had insisted, was a
war
memorial.
    On the south coast, in Portsmouth, Jagger’s machine-gunners were already in place. As plans were made to entrench ourselves in our