I meet Sandra Smith and Josie Graham in the Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Society Garden.
A group of carved wooden animals, the size of small children, stand in a circle amidst fledgling pines in supportive, plastic cylinders. I had first noticed the two women a few metres away, studying a commemorative gate dedicated to The National Ex-Prisoner of War Association. Now they are off into a thinly wooded area devoted to lives lost at sea.
It is Sandra’s second visit to the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. This time she has brought her friend
‘I keep seeing things I haven’t noticed before. The first time I came it was all damaged by drought. But I love it. I thought I’d bring Josie along.’
‘It’s just great. Beautifully thought out,’ Josie says.
Around us, scattered over forty acres of windswept land, are more than one hundred and twenty separate commemorative plots. Most involve a simple stone or sculpture with a plaque and an explanatory panel. There is often a solitary bench and a few metres of shrub or hedge for a border. Dedicatees range from the Royal Hong Kong Police to those lost in the attacks on the World Trade Centre.
Hemmed in between a conservation area and the looming machinery of Lafarge Aggregates sand quarry, the effect of the arboretum is somewhere between that of a golf course, a cemetery and an out-of-season theme park. I find Mr and Mrs Mitchell, from Stoke on Trent, in a remote corner, trying to get reception on a mobile beside the memorial to sailors lost in the Yangtze Incident of 1948.
‘I can remember the end of the second world war as a child,’ Mr Mitchell says. ‘But soon no one will.’
‘This place jogs your memory.’
‘Things like the Korean monument – things you forget.’
Beside the Yangtze memorial is a small area dedicated to ‘All those who Served in or Supported the Armed Forces of the Sultanate of Oman.’ Another monument, an odd, shrine-like structure covered in plaster sea-shells, honours ‘All personnel of the Combined Services Task Force who served during the Nuclear Tests at Monte Bello, Emufield, Maralinga, Xmas Island and Malden Island, 1952-66.’ A long avenue lined with Chestnut trees takes you back towards the cafeteria and the Millennium Chapel of Peace and Forgiveness. This avenue, known as The Beat, commemorates members of the nation’s police forces who gave up their lives in the course of duty. Beyond it, an imitation beach, wooden shack and lifeboat belongs to the RNLI.
On October 12 the Queen attended the opening of a new memorial, by far the biggest at the arboretum and the one that has received the most press coverage. The Armed Forces Memorial remembers ‘all those service men and women killed on duty or as a result of terrorist action since the end of the second world war.’ On the day I visit it is open to the public for the first time. The woman on reception, manning a laptop containing the names and location of all those remembered in the arboretum, complains that many of today’s visitors think that there is only one memorial here.
‘They don’t realise we have more than a hundred others. That we’ve been open for almost ten years.’
There are four or five times as many visitors than usual. Most have been drawn by the new memorial and it is clear that it has provided a new focus for the arboretum, as well as a much-needed injection of publicity and £2.8 million of Millennium Commission funding. It dominates the landscape. Where the site was once a contourless expanse it now spreads out around a large burial-style mound crowned by a 150 ft-wide circle of Portland stone. The design is by architect Liam O’Connor. Two straight walls contain most of the names. They stand within a circular stone enclosure, on the inside of which the list of dead continues. A crack in the south wall is aligned so as to let a shaft of light through into the centre of the memorial on the eleventh hour of November 11th.
The monument is reached either by a flight of steps or a sloping spiral walkway past evergreen Holm oaks. At its head is a tall, thin obelisk. To the sides are two sculptured groups by Ian Rank-Broadley, comprising fourteen bronze figures in total. In one, a naked corpse is about to be wrapped in a shroud. The other, to the north, includes four men, three with bare torsos, bearing a fifth man on a stretcher. There are echoes, according to the memorial brochure, of the removal of Patroclus from the battlefield in Homer’s Iliad.
Uniformed volunteers circulate the memorial, clutching bulging files of information, trying to help visitors find the names they seek. There is always relief when they do. The dead are listed by year and, within each year, by service. The sober uniformity masks a vast variety of fates in over forty-seven different conflicts and beyond, although none are mentioned on the stone. It is tempting to search for narratives behind it all, but not easy.
One man is curious as to why there are so many names under 1965.
‘Aden,’ one of the volunteers thinks. ‘They weren’t happy to have us there. Bit like today’s situation.’
Another volunteer searches through her ring-binder to see if she can help.
‘1965…’ She reads out the conflict zones in which our troops were present. ‘Saudi Arabia, Malaya, Cyprus, Borneo…’
‘Arabia was Aden,’ the first volunteer insists. ‘Come through the Suez until you’re at the Red Sea. Before you cross it you get to Aden.’
I ask the man who raised the question if he is looking for anyone in particular. A former serviceman, who asks not to be named, he says he is looking for the name of a colleague and friend with whom he used to cycle competitively. But he has come primarily so that his wife can pay respects to her brother, killed in an army Land Rover in Cyprus in 1987. ‘It basically fell apart on the highway.’
It is for families such as these that the memorial is intended. The task it sets itself is to remember the accidental as well as the heroic, to identify a common cause between deaths bound only by the military occupation of the deceased. How are we to remember a soldier’s road accident in Cyprus? Like all memorials it must answer the question: what did he die for?
‘This is not a war memorial,’ Lieutenant Colonel Richard Callander insists. Callandar has headed the Memorial Project since it was set up in 2001 following a commons statement lamenting the insufficient recognition of forces killed since 1945. I meet him at his headquarters in Bloomsbury. The only clue that we are in anything other than a normal open-plan office is a notice on the wall advising us of our designated emergency bomb shelter.
‘The first thing I had to check were that the services agreed this was a good idea,’ Callandar says.’ Then we had to decide who, exactly, should be commemorated.’
There was general delight with the concept. ‘A sense that it was overdue.’ The second question proved less straightforward.
‘I presented them with a series of options regarding deaths to be included. These ranged from including only those killed in actual conflict, to listing everyone who died while in service.’
Were they, for example, to include someone killed prior to deployment? An individual killed in training? Those who died in suspicious circumstances?
Callandar gives a glimpse of the semantic labyrinth that opens behind the simplest of phrases when they are to be carved in stone for eternity. The formula of words finally agreed upon was: ‘Those killed on duty or as a result of terrorist action since the end of World War II.’ ‘On Duty’ itself is defined by what Callandar described as a book-length document. But even this is an abbreviation. A more expansive formulation reads: ‘to remember those killed whether in action, in training here or overseas, whilst supporting peacekeeping missions or as a result of terrorist action, including members of the Merchant Navy and Royal Fleet Auxiliary who have died while serving in conflict zones.’
‘The essential idea was to include anyone who died while in a medal-earning theatre,’ Callandar explains. ‘So as to emulate what happened after World War Two.’
The concept of a ‘medal-earning theatre’, linking the comparatively straightforward world of the Second World War to the disparate military operations of the last sixty years, is central to the thinking of the Memorial Project. It was the ‘medal-earning period’ of 1939-1947 that defined the remit of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) when it set out to ensure that the names of all soldiers killed in the fight against Fascism were suitably recorded. They collected deaths up to the end of December 1947. The new Armed Forces Memorial begins on the first of January 1948. It is in some sense, then, simply a continuation of the earlier project. But any attempt at establishing equivalences between the two periods only highlights an unprecedented complexity faced by Callandar and his team.
Among the non-combat deaths remembered are those of four recruits who took their lives in suspicious circumstances at the Infantry Training Centre in Catterick, North Yorkshire between 1995 and 2002. The more publicised deaths at Deepcut, in Surrey, over the same period, are not included. When Lembit Opik raised the question of this omission in parliament last month, a spokesman for the Ministry of Defence replied that, in the military, ‘deaths of a self-inflicted nature were treated as equivalent to deaths by natural causes.’
‘Each case is decided on its own merits,’ Callandar explains. He gives, as an example, ‘an incident where some soldier shoots two or three of his mates and then turns the gun on himself.’ Even then, if it can be shown that this is a result of ‘battle stress’, he would not automatically be excluded. Likewise, if a soldier took his own life while in the UK: ‘so long as medical records can be seen to show evidence of post-traumatic stress…’
The idea that every soldier deserved his own grave and gravestone was legally instituted for the first time by the North in the American Civil War. It is, unsurprisingly, a western tradition. Even today, in the memorials of Russia, China and Japan, long lists of names remain a rarity.
The first, widespread UK project of commemoration followed the Boer war, but it was the First World War that established the war memorial as we now know it. By 1916, individual burials were often impossible. In battles over that summer, 72,000 German casualties were identifiable, 86,000 missing or mutilated beyond recognition. Statistics were similar on both sides of the front. It was in the absence of bodies that our commemoration turned to listing names. Kipling chose ‘Their name liveth for evermore’, from Ecclesiasticus, to serve as the official Imperial War Graves epitaph.
The Armed Forces Memorial is not the first in the arboretum to fundamentally extend the remit of this commemorative tradition. Hidden in one of the few copses of mature trees stands the sculpture of a blindfolded soldier awaiting the firing squad. It is modelled on Private Herbert Burden, shot at Ypres when he was seventeen years old. He is surrounded by three hundred and six stakes of varying height, each with its own small plaque remembering a British or Commonwealth soldier executed for desertion.
When the Shot at Dawn memorial was unveiled in 2001 it was not without controversy. In the words of Conservative MSP and former Scots Guards officer, Ben Wallace, ‘This is history we are tinkering with. The crime of desertion is serious, and we cannot judge the severity of the punishment by our values.’ Several executed men had been only recently denied mention on memorials in their local communities. Private Thomas Highgate, a seventeen year old who fled the Battle of Mons, was executed just thirty-five days into the war. In 2000 the parish council of his hometown in Shoreham, Kent, voted not to include his name on their war memorial. It was not until 2006 that Secretary of State for Defence, Des Browne, offered formal pardons to all three hundred and six men, a gesture now recorded on the plaque beside the statue of Private Burden.
The Armed Forces Memorial reflects other changes in our recent thinking about war and memory. In front of the bronze stretcher-bearers stand a woman and child, the child clinging to the woman, the woman raising her arms. Behind them crouch an older couple, holding one another. While there is a French tradition of depicting bereft parents or other grieving civilians on twentieth-century memorials, it is almost unheard of elsewhere.
‘Is it a mother and child?’ Callander asks. ‘We don’t know. She’s looking up at a husband, or it could be a brother. All we know is that this is a civilian who has lost someone; a child who has lost someone. Then the older couple at the back – are they a mother and father? The important thing is that everyone can relate to one of the figures in the sculpture – if they want to. It is open to interpretation. There is no glorification of war, no religious symbol, no cross of sacrifice.’
‘Yet there is a reference to the afterlife,’ I suggest, ‘Or at least the spiritual, in the crack in the wall to which one man is gesturing.’
‘Is there?’
‘Or perhaps he is gesturing to the future,’ I say. ‘To memory.’
‘Perhaps he is gesturing to hell,’ Callandar says.
The new memorial’s foundation stone was laid by the mother and three sisters of Lance Corporal Jabron Hashmi, the first British Muslim soldier killed on active service since the start of our ‘war on terror’. His sister expressed hope that ‘lives sacrificed in recent conflicts will achieve a greater degree of peace worldwide and promote a better understanding between different religious ideologies and cultural identities.’ The only non-white faces I see on my visit to the arboretum belong to the Grewal family, from Sutton Coalfield. They were here last week, before the Forces memorial was open. Now they have brought their daughter, a student of A-level History. They don’t have any relatives listed, but are pointing out all the Indian names.
‘There is a Rai.’
‘And there is another Rana. Two Ranas.’
‘We go to a lot of memorials,’ Mrs Grewal explains, when I ask what brought them today. ‘Sad gits really. We went to the Washington one, memorials all over the United States.’
‘Both our fathers were involved in the army,’ her husband adds. ‘The British Indian Army. We’ve just met a gentleman who served in Burma and Singapore, and he’d been down the road my wife’s family live on.’
‘But this is just great,’ they insist. ‘You must write how fantastic it is.’
‘The Americans have their Vietnam memorials, their Korean memorials. It’s right that we have this one. We’re still fighting for the same principles: freedom, liberty.’
The new memorial in Staffordshire compliments the 1998 Strategic Defence Review and] the white paper of 2003, in which our enduring military values are presented: ‘To defend the UK and its interests, including against terrorism, strengthen international peace and stability, and act as a force for good in the world.’ To ensure the preservation of these values Lafarge Aggregates have sponsored an Education Centre beside the arboretum gift shop. It promises ‘to deliver an educational programme for school visits linked to the National Curriculum with a focus on Citizenship, incorporating remembrance, conflict, Britishness and the environment.’
As well as providing a geographical site for the commemoration of almost sixteen thousand deaths across the globe, the Armed Forces Memorial situates them historically. It lends a political as well as a physical unity. ‘The Memorial will be a place where school children and the public for future generations can come and learn about the ongoing cost of democracy and freedom,’ states the brochure for the dedication ceremony.
Britain has been relatively lucky in its ability to continue identifying national and moral victory. We have had to confront nothing like the complexities of commemoration in Germany and Russia: the challenge of commemorating defeat, of causes and ideals no longer deemed historically legitimate (they are there, of course, even in the Memorial, but silently). After the First World War, German memorials carried the epitaph ‘In the battlefield, undefeated’, but all that was permitted in former enemy countries was ‘Here lie German soldiers’. Soviet WWII memorials, with their quotations from Stalin, are now often seen as symbols of oppression or occupation and destroyed. One condition of the departure of Soviet troops from Berlin was that their war memorials would be maintained. As the cause for which the men died rolled back eastwards these came to commemorate previously unspoken traumas, referred to by locals as ‘The Tomb of the Unknown Rapist’, ‘Monument to the Plunderer’.
We have had to rewrite our text-books less frequently. For Prince Charles, the new British Memorial is ‘a poignant reminder to us all of the continuing cost of the democracy and freedom we enjoy, as well as the constant sacrifices being made on our behalf around the world.’ But it is not always so clear on whose behalf the men and women laid down their lives. The complicated diversity of the memorial itself is more honest than attempts to simplify its meaning. Amongst forty other conflicts, it incorporates the dead of Suez, Dhofar, Rhodesia, Cambodia, Georgia, Radfan, Northern Ireland, Kuwait, Angola and Iraq. It is tempting to search for a narrative, but not easy.
Frank Shorter knows more than most about history’s selective memory, especially when a cause becomes unfashionable or inconvenient. One of the volunteers at the arboretum, Frank is seventy-nine years old and a veteran of Palestine, Jordan and Korea. He offers me a lift back to the train station and swings his Land Rover towards Burton-on-Trent.
‘They look at us and think “the old codgers” but they don’t know what we’ve been through,’ he says. ‘Or what we’ve done.
‘We were sent into Palestine when there wasn’t a thing there. Landed on the beach just like D-Day. You know what we were there to do, don’t you?’ he asks, like someone used to having to explain. ‘We were there to stop the Jews coming down from the Galen Heights.’
Dennis Peck, another Palestine veteran and, like Frank, a member of the Sherwood Foresters regiment, only realised he’d been awarded a campaign medal in 1998. In 2002 the on-line journal CounterPunch reported on a systematic failure to issue medals to British soldiers who fought in a conflict that the government would rather forget. According to the journal, ‘Until two years ago, the campaign was never mentioned at the Armistice parade in London.’ There is not even a definitive figure for the British troops who died, although it is around four hundred.
It is the London ceremonies that will lose out now, Frank insists. ‘November 11th, Whitehall. A lot of people from the North will come here instead. We’ve got free parking, restaurants. You can spend a day here. You’re not told to get off Horse Guard’s Parade. That got me really ratty. I’ve done a couple of marches there and they’ll tell you to move along because the next lot are coming.’
When Callander first proposed the Staffordshire site he was asked to rethink. Geoff Hoon, then Secretary of State for Defence, didn’t like the idea of it being outside of the capital.
‘But I felt London was the wrong place,’ Callander states
He says he chose the arboretum for its peace, quiet and tranquillity, and because he did not want to conflict with the Cenotaph. It also offered him space. ‘The Royal Parks were willing to help, but it had to be no more than three feet high. Anything more than a button in the middle of Hyde Park would have involved a ten year appeal process. And there are so many memorials in London.’
There is also something appropriate about having it away from the pomp and politics of Whitehall, a good two hours from the sceptical and largely pacifist metropolis, closer to the middle of the Middle England that provides the forces with so many of their young.
‘Londoners say “why put it right up there? Everyone goes to London.” Well, no they don’t. Certainly if you’re a soldier or a soldier’s family you probably don’t. London’s too expensive for them.’
The Armed Forces Memorial, which starts with the first British deaths in Palestine, currently ends with the names of fourteen servicemen killed in September last year, when their Nimrod jet exploded over Kandahar. The fifteen and a half thousand names are followed by fifteen thousand blank spaces, waiting to be filled. I had wondered at the significance of this symmetry, as if we might be half way to getting somewhere, but Callander denies there is any prophecy involved.
‘When we got to finalising the design we still didn’t know how many names were to be included. The blank spaces are dictated by space left over, by the size of the memorial, that’s all. But we knew we wanted space, that it would go on for a considerable amount of time into the future.’
Already, the names of eighty more personnel are waiting to be engraved, servicemen and women killed since the initial list was finalised. These additions will be made next year.