Jonathan
Jones 04 November 2014. Posted in News
Recording
only the British dead of world war one confirms the illusion that we are an
island of heroes with no debt to anyone else, no fraternity for anyone else.
IN 1924
the German artist Otto Dix depicted a skull, lying on the ground, a home to worms.
They crawl out of its eye sockets, nasal opening and mouth, and wriggle among
patches of hair and a black moustache – or are they growths of grass? – that
still cling to the raw bone.
This
horror comes from Der Krieg, a series of etchings in which Dix recorded his
memories of fighting in the first world war. He was a machine gunner at the
Somme, among other battles, and won the Iron Cross, second class. But he
remembered it all as pure horror, as did other participants who happened to be
artists or writers such as George Grosz, Siegfried Sassoon, Ernst Jünger and
Robert Graves.
I was
thinking of that death’s head by Dix when I wrote in an online Guardian article
earlier this week that I would rather see the moat of the Tower of London
filled with “barbed wire and bones” than the red ceramic poppies currently
drawing huge crowds to see what has become the defining popular artwork in this
centenary of the Great War’s outbreak. I called the sea of poppies now
surrounding the Tower “toothless” as art and a “Ukip-style memorial” – to quote
my words not in their original context but as they have since been republished
in angry articles in the Mail, Telegraph and Times, with the Mail in particular
denouncing me as a “sneering leftwing critic” and the Guardian for publishing
my wicked words. Even the prime minister got drawn in at question time in the
Commons. “Cameron defends ‘toothless’ poppy tribute,” reported Thursday’s
edition of the Times.
But my
criticism of this work of art was and is reasonable, honest and founded not in
some kind of trendy cynicism but a belief that we need to look harder, and keep
looking, at the terrible truths of the war that smashed the modern world off
the rails and started a cycle of murderous extremism that ended only in 1945. If
it did end.
I strongly
believe that an adequate work of art about the war has to show its horror, not
sweep the grisly facts under a red carpet of artificial flowers.
Otto Dix
told the truth about this war that killed more than 8 million men from many
nations and left many more disfigured and disabled when he drew that
worm-infested skull. Their deaths and injuries were not beautiful. But the
installation at the Tower is spuriously beautiful: it allows us to mourn
without seeing anything to cause visceral distress. It muffles the terrible
facts. It is so tasteful, so decorous.
What a
feeble contrast not just with Dix but with the photographs that show this war
as it was. On a bookcase when I was a child I remember finding AJP Taylor’s The
First World War: An Illustrated History. On its cover was a photograph of a
skeleton in a dugout still wearing a uniform on its fleshless bones.That was
the historical reality of this war, which Taylor brilliantly chose to show
visually in his classic book.
This war has
always been there, for me, in the background of family life. As it happens I
quite possibly owe the Daily Mail my existence, for it helped get the Jones
genes through to 1918. As my great-grandparents in their farmhouse on the edge
of Snowdonia faced the threat of their teenage son’s call-up in the Great War,
my great-grandmother saw an advert in the Mail for volunteers for the new Naval
Air Service. So my grandfather worked as a joiner keeping wood-framed flying
machines going, and as he said when asked what he did in the war: “I survived.”
My other
grandfather also survived, but with scars on his memory. He was a runner on the
western front. He would never speak about what he experienced, except to once
tell my dad he had been trapped for days in a pothole in no man’s land. Hearing
of that I have always believed the photo on Taylor’s book, the drawing by Dix.
And I don’t believe the Tower of London’s floral tribute.
These
experiences were real, this war was real, and it means absolutely nothing to
reduce it all to vague feelings of universal grief. What we owe the youth of
that generation is to attend to the details of the history that caught them in
its hungry jaws. We need to smell the rotting earth and gunpowder, feel the
boots falling apart in muddy water, the pounding in the chest as the guns
started up. The installation at the Tower is abstract, and tells nothing about
that history. It is instead a representation of grief as such – a second-hand
evocation of feelings about the dead.
It does
not matter now, a century after it started, how sad we are about those the
first world war killed. Our soulfulness won’t bring back a single slaughtered
soldier. What can make a difference is our historical understanding of the
Great War, its causes and consequence. History is worth far more than the illusion
of memory, when none of us today actually have a memory of being soldiers in
1914-18.
That
brings me to my “sneering” remark that something about this memorial nurtures
the world view of Ukip. Out of the millions who died, this installation is very
specific about who it mourns. It does not include the French, who lost a tenth
of their young men, or Russia, where the war precipitated revolution, civil war
and famine. And of course it does not include a single German. Instead it is
accumulating 888,246 ceramic poppies each of which – explains the Tower of
London website – “represents a British military fatality during the war.”
If we can
only picture the Great War as a British tragedy we have not learned very much
about it. Yet some historians today glibly encourage that blinkered vision. It
sells books. Popular history has been invaded by revisionists who tell us that
far from being lions led by donkeys in a futile bloodbath, the British soldiers
who fought from 1914-18 were fighting, as the propaganda at the time claimed,
to defend democracy from militarist authoritarian Germany.
I believe
this fashionable view of the first world war to be historically unjustified.
I’ve been interested in its history ever since I spent too many hours as an
18-year-old reading up to win a history entrance scholarship at Cambridge – no,
before that, since seeing that photo of an unburied corpse on the cover of
Taylor’s book. The best current work on the origins of the first world war,
Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, is a 562-page analysis that does not
pander to instant explanations. He demonstrates the absurdity of seeing Germany
as the unique culprit and reveals the complex process of diplomatic folly that
started the war. So as I asked Lord West on The World at One, why not mourn
German soldiers at the Tower?
In so
explicitly recording only the British dead of world war one, this work of art
in its tasteful way confirms the illusion that we are an island of heroes with
no debt to anyone else, no fraternity for anyone else.
The war
poet Wilfred Owen did not want us to remember him and his contemporaries with
the bland sentimentality of this installation. He wished instead we could
witness what he witnessed, a young man dying in a gas attack:
If you
could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted
lungs, Obscene as cancer … My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To
children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est Pro
patria mori.
A true
work of art about the first world war would need to be as obscene as cancer.
But Owen, who died soon after writing this, is “represented” by one of those
ceramic flowers now, his bitter truth smoothed away by the potter’s decorous
hand.
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