At 11am on 11th November 1918 the guns on the Western Front fell silent marking the end of what was to become known as The Great War (sadly before history deemed it necessary to rename it as World War One). For the nation, when the killing stopped, remembrance began. This presented a huge challenge to a country whose coffers had been hugely depleted by four years of fighting on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Against this financial reality was the fact that every community from hamlet to metropolis, understandably, wanted the loss of a husband, son, brother or sweetheart to be commemorated in perpetuity in the areas in which they lived.
The UK National Inventory of War Memorials (based at the Imperial War Museum) has since 1989 been recording memorials and as of 2007, upwards of 60,000 had been documented. This figure rose to around 70,000 with increased interest and activity that came with the commemoration in 1914 of the centenary of the start of ‘The Great War’. The majority of these 70,000 memorials remember the fallen of 1914-1918 (sometimes 1914-1919) and may are supplemented with the addition of the names of those lost in the Second World War (1939 to 1945 of course). You don’t have to be so eagle-eyed to spot them for they are pretty much everywhere around us, in parks, railway stations, council offices, churches and on traffic islands.
Most memorials were funded in large part through contributions from relatives and organised fund raising activities. The local nature of the funding and planning of these memorials resulted in a wonderful variety in terms of scale, design and complexity (in sharp contrast to the uniformity of the memorials under the responsibility of the CWGC for example).
Of course, it goes without saying that the poignancy of these war memorials is the same, from the most simple and humble to the most ornate and grand. However, amongst this vast array of monuments, my favourites (if favourite is an appropriate word to be applied to a war memorial) are those that incorporate sculpture, especially those depicting soldiers (or in some cases animals).
One such, and the subject of this post, is the principal Great War memorial in the City of Cambridge. Located to the south of the city centre at the intersection of Hills Road and Station Road (and relocated within the same area in 2012 to its present site in front of the entrance to the Cambridge University Botanical Gardens. I have walked past this memorial countless times and whilst I have not ignored it (I have always greatly admired it) I haven’t paid close enough attention to the detail of the work. This is in great part due to the fact that for much of the time when I was viewing it, it stood stranded on a traffic island on a busy junction, a position that never encouraged close inspection.
Spending ten minutes with the memorial last week it became apparent that I had misinterpreted the sculpture in all of the years that I had been looking upon it. And my mistake was quite fundamental.
The face of the soldier depicted on top of the plinth is that of a fresh-faced youth, someone in their late teens or early twenties. I assumed that this was a reflection of Cambridge as a university town. There is also attitude of the sculpture. The subject has an over-exaggerated stride expressing great purpose whilst the young soldier glances back over his right shoulder, intimating something that is being left behind. He is bare headed carrying his helmet almost jauntily in his right hand. For years, the detail that I took in lead me to the assumption that this was a representation of a Cambridgeshire youth heading off to war in 1914. At that time thousands of young men saw the opportunity to participate in a war as an offer of adventure and excitement. It was a chance for a time at least to escape the drudgery of the factory, office or perhaps even the college library. Buoyed up by jingoistic speeches by politicians as well as by the patriotic recruiting tunes spilling out of theatres, men and boys took the King’s shilling with great enthusiasm and indeed headed to our ports with a spring in their step.
How wrong could I be?
The memorial carries the name of ‘The Homecoming’. As such, clearly the soldier is returning from the war victorious. Suspended from his rifle which is sloped over his left shoulder is a laurel wreath, a representation of triumph in both Ancient Greece and Rome, the wreath in turn rests upon a German steel helmet, a souvenir brought back from the trenches. In addition he clutches a rose in his left hand, an offering of thanks from a bystander in the homecoming parade one can assume.
I will say this (before a more knowledgeable aficionado on all things Great War than myself points it out!), the clincher to whether this was a depiction of Tommy off to war (1914) or returning from the trenches (1918) lies in the fact that he is clutching a steel helmet of a design that was only introduced to British troops in the Summer of 1915, thus ruling out a 1914 setting for the Cambridge War Memorial statue.
The ‘Homecoming’ statue was the creation of the Canadian sculptor, Robert Tait McKenzie, who as well as being an artist was a physician and surgeon, skills which let him in 1915 to travel to England to enlist in the Royal Army Medical Corps.
I was partially correct in stating that the soldier shown in the uniform of the Cambridgeshire Regiment was intended to be representative of many of the young Cambridge University undergraduates who interrupted their studies in order to go and fight. The face of the statue has a name, for it is the face of a real person selected by the artist. He was Kenneth Hamilton, and undergraduate of Christ’s College who was reading English in 1921. A photograph of a clay study of the statue/Kenneth’s head is held by the Museum of Cambridge.
The monument was unveiled by the Duke of York (later to become Kind George VI) at a ceremony held at 3pm on 22nd July 1922. At that time, the bronze was not yet finished so a gilded plaster cast filled in on the day. A dedication ceremony was held later on 3rd July 1923.
The inscription on the plinth reads:
to which was later added
For me the statue, stunning as it is, says a lot about the national viewpoint on the war as it was in the early 1920s. So close to the end of hostilities the prevailing attitude was that the fallen had sacrificed their lives heroically for King and Country (which was true) and that they had died glorious deaths (which is an attitude that has since been challenged, especially in the context of the First World War). The notion of a glorious death on the battlefield conjures up images of cavalry charges with swords drawn or close quarters skirmishing… real "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes" stuff. In a truly mechanised war as was the case from as early as 1915, death was commonly delivered anonymously by artillery batteries separated by miles or by unseen machine guns. This crucial difference however was not a topic of discussion or debate in the aftermath of the war. For many years, veterans refrained from talking about the horrors that they had been witness to, either because they couldn’t or, as was often the case, wouldn’t since anyone who had not experienced the trenches first hand hadn't the capacity to comprehend the reality of such warfare. It was only really by the time that the 50th anniversary of the outbreak came around that historians and veterans really started shaping our understanding of the war (and the war as it was fought on the Western Front in particular) into what it is today. Families of fallen soldiers were not equipped with such knowledge at the time when this and thousands of other such memorials were erected and dedicated. And it is probably a good thing that this was so.
I have read many personal accounts of the wartime experiences of soldiers that include photographs taken before and after the war and it is not unusual to see the face of a boy staring out at you from the page at say 20 only to be transformed on the next page into the face of a 40 year old after four years of fighting. McKenzie well understood the facial changes brought on by stresses and strain. Prior to the war, he cast bronzes entitled ‘Violent Effort’, ‘Breathlessness’, ‘Fatigue’ and ‘Exhaustion’ reflecting the facial expressions of athletes at the end of their endeavours and post war he was involved in the therapy and treatment of soldier’s damaged both mentally and physically by the war. But, I guess in 1922, Cambridge was not yet really for such realism in a memorial.
The person looking at and reflecting upon statue of the soldier in ‘The Homecoming’ memorial must therefore in part view it through 1922 eyes in order to properly understand it. Here is the description of the work in the sculptor’s own words:
‘The statue shows a private soldier in full kit on his triumphal return after the War. With discipline relaxed, he is striding along bare-headed, helmet in hand, a German helmet as a trophy slung on his back and partly concealed by a laurel wreath, carelessly flung over the rifle barrel. In his hand he holds a rose. Another rose thrown to him has fallen to the ground. His head is turned to the side, his expression is alert, happy and slightly quizzical, and his lips are slightly parted as if he has recognised an old friend in the welcoming crowd and is about to call upon him. In this face I have tried to express the type on whom the future of England must depend.’
The artist clearly intended his work to be optimistic and representational of a new bright future for the country after the fighting was done.
I still love it!
