Art, Writing and Research
Having written in the previous entry (about Belzec) ‘Walking is itself a vital part of the memorial’, I was interested to read the following in Neil Hanson’s book, The Unknown Soldier.
“However, no-one, not even a Prime Minister could impose a meaning unacceptable to the public on any memorial, which ‘by themselves remain inert and amnesiac, dependant on visitors for whatever memory they finally produce.
“The Post Office Rifles and the 6th Battalion – ‘the Cast-Iron Sixth – in turn would then pass through their lines to continue the advance to the next objectives on the downward slope of the ridge, the ‘Cough Drop,’ also known as ‘Leicester Square’, and the ‘Starfish Line’. The London Irish and the Poplar and Stepney Rifles were to lead the advance to the west of High Wood, before being succeeded by the 19th and 20th Battalions. ‘The postmen from quiet little hamlets or clerks who had spent their lives hitherto in snug offices, talked about these future regimental mortuaries with the homely names with astonishing calmness…'”
What struck me about this quote from Neil Hanson’s book, was how soldiers used the names of well known and familiar places, to name those places which were not only unfamiliar, but also terrifying, often places of horror and death on a scale which could never be imagined within those more familiar places back home. Trenches were named in a similar fashion: Oxford Circus, Oxford Street, George Street, Broad Street and so on.
“By day, the screams and groans of the wounded and dying had been drowned by the deafening clamour of the battle. At nightfall, though still counterpointed by the rumble of the guns, their pitiful cries and please for help could be hear echoing through the shattered wood…”
This quote reiterates how this war was a war of sounds; how men could be reduced to tears and much worse by sounds; those of the incessant shells or the solitary man crying in a dark wood.
“‘The reading of the battalion roll-call must have broken the hearts of all who heard it – ‘a hollow square of jaded, muddy figures… A strong voice… calls one name after another from a Roll lit by a fluttering candle, shaded by the hand of one of the remaining Sergeant Majors.’ Name after name went unanswered; each silence, another man wounded, missing or dead.'”
This very poignant passage reminded me of some text-based work I did whilst investigating the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau. These text-based pieces started as free-written prose and through a process of increasing the spacing between the letters changed to become squares where the words were reduced to a scattering of letters. As soon as I read the words ‘a hollow square’ I thought at once of those.
Finally finished priming the deckchairs and coated them with a layer of white oil paint. I will definitely display them as they appear in the photo below, i.e. flat on the ground (not white) as this gives them each the look of a tomb stone, such as one might find in the floor of a church.
I’ve also decided on a title: ‘The smell of an English Summer (fresh cut grass) 1916’. This relates directly to the extract from Neil Hanson’s book, ‘The Unknown Soldier,’ which I quoted in the previous entry ‘Reading and Experience.’
“Decayed sandbags, new sandbags, boards, dropped ammunition, empty tins, corrugated iron…”
These words are those of a German soldier – written at the Front just before the Battle of the Somme – and form just a small part of an extract in Neil Hanson’s book, ‘The Unknown Soldier.’ Instantly I read them, they called to mind the remnants dredged from the battlefield which I’d seen in the museum at Hill 62 in Ieper.
On their own, these artefacts are powerful – yet mute – witnesses to the Great War, but when reading a soldier write about them, even listing them as above, they change. They each regain their voice – their signifier, and re-emerge from the shadows.
In my painting ‘Auschwitz-Birkenau Remembered‘ I cut words up into individual letters and scattered them onto the painting, I also wrote directly into the paint itself to show how words failed to articulate the horror of such a place (the written words could barely be read). Another way of looking at this however, is to say that words are able to speak of such horror, but have simply lost their original voice. It then falls to us to speak the words for those who are no longer able to do so, to put them back together.
Subsequent to this, I’ve been thinking about the process of reading, for example an extract from Filip Muller’s powerful testimony, ‘Eyewitness Auschwitz – Three Years in the Gas Chambers,’ in which he describes the horrific murder of a fellow prisoner.
“There was utter silence, broken only by the twitterings of the swallows darting back and forth.”
We were not there in Auschwitz at the moment this line describes (the moment before the doomed prisoner speaks up against the camp’s brutal regime), yet we all know silence and have seen and heard swallows. So although we were not there to witness at first hand this terrible event, we can imagine a silence, a particular one we might have felt some place before, and picture a time we saw a swallow fly. We can use fragments of evidence (photographs, documentary footage) to construct a fuller picture, and fill in the gaps with fragments of own experience. When we speak the words of others therefore, those words will form pictures in our own minds drawn from our own experience.
“As the torrents of machine-gun bullets ripped through the grassy slopes up which the British troops were advancing, the smell of an English summer – fresh cut grass – filled the air. For thousands it would be the last scent they would ever smell.”
This extract, also from Neil Hanson’s book, ‘The Unknown Soldier,’ presents us with an image of slaughter, made all the more terrible (if that were possible) with a reference to the smell of cut grass – one of those smells which invokes in most of us, memories of lazy summer’s days. The two are, obviously, utterly incongruous, yet it somehow makes our task of imagining the horror a little easier. We know the smell of cut grass, and waves of associations and memories are no doubt triggered by the aroma. In the days before the battle, when the soldiers doomed to die waited for the day, they too might have smelled the grassy air and found their way back to times when things were better. It is again the contrast – something which I’ve described before in relation to my visits to Auschwitz-Birkenau and Ieper which makes this passage so heart-breaking.
Finally, I wrote earlier (Imagination and Memory) of how as a child I created a world, made up of fragments of landscapes which I loved, and how as I grew older, I created worlds that were ‘real’ – visions of Oxford as it might have looked centuries earlier. Just as when reading the quote above, I would – as I still do – use documentary evidence to start – images (photographs and drawings) of how the city looked, contemporary writings (such as those of Anthony Wood) – and then fill in the gaps using my own direct experience, in effect, the city as it looks today.
Extract from Neil Hanson’s book, ‘The Unknown Soldier,’ concerning the infamous Battle of the Somme.
‘The next day, the regiment began the long march to the Front. In the heat of early summer, nature had made attempts to reclaim the violated ground and a deceptive air of somnolence lay on the landscape. “The fields over which the scythe has not passed for years are a mass of wild flowers. They bathe the trenches in a hot stream of scent,” “smelling to heaven like incense in the sun.” “Brimstone butterflies and chalk-blues flutter above the dugouts and settle on the green ooze of the shell holes.” “Then a bare field strewn with barbed wire, rusted to a sort of Titian red – out of which a hare came just now and sat up with fear in his eyes and the sun shining red through his ears. Then the trench… piled earth with groundsel and great flaming dandelions and chickweed and pimpernels running riot over it. Decayed sandbags, new sandbags, boards, dropped ammunition, empty tins, corrugated iron, a smell of boots and stagnant water and burnt powder and oil and men, the occasional bang of a rifle and the click of a bolt, the occasional crack of a bullet coming over, or the wailing diminuendo of a ricochet. And over everything, the larks… and on the other side, nothing but a mud wall, with a few dandelions against the sky, until you look over the top or through a periscope and then you see the barbed wire and more barbed wire, and then fields with larks in them, and then barbed wire again.”
As the torrents of machine-gun bullets ripped through the grassy slopes up which the British troops were advancing, the smell of an English summer – fresh cut grass – filled the air. For thousands it would be the last scent they would ever smell.’