World War I Archives - Page 4 of 5

A Poignant Postcard

April 23, 2010 by Nicholas Hedges

As part of my forthcoming exhibition, I’ve been purchasing a few postcards for a piece of work, one which mirrors previous works I’ve made with postcards of World War One soldiers. One of my recent acquisitions can be found below.

The postcard shows a quiet, tranquil beach scene, which when one looks at the reverse becomes particularly poignant.

It was posted in the summer of 1914, just a few weeks before the outbreak of World War One. What’s more, the date at the bottom, 28th June 1914, is the date that Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated in Sarajevo.

8th May

April 9, 2010 by Nicholas Hedges

The following is a painting by Fred Roe (1864-1947) entitled The Eighth May which shows a scene from the Battle of Frezenberg Ridge, which took place on 8th May 1915 in what was to become known as the Second Battle of Ypres. My great-great-uncle, Jonah Rogers was killed that day near the farm depicted in the painting.

The painting is in the collection of Newport Museum and Art Gallery.

Mine the Mountain 2

February 27, 2010 by Nicholas Hedges

Postcards are a kind of conversation, inasmuch as they’re a connection between two places; one that’s unfamiliar and one that’s known. That’s not always the case of course, but their form’s a framework – a metaphor – with which I try to engage with the past.; to find its lost, anonymous individuals. ‘The Past is a foreign country’, wrote the author L.P. Hartley in the first line of his novel The Go-Between. Whatever information we receive about that place, whether in writing, an object, a painting or a photograph, it comes like a postcard from a foreign shore.

Postcards are fragments, pieces of a world which has vanished, often carrying information of little or no consequence. In the translator’s foreword to The Arcade’s Project, Walter Benjamin’s ‘monumental ruin,’ we read:

“It was not the great men and celebrated events of traditional historiography but rather the ‘refuse’ and ‘detritus’ of history, the half concealed, variegated traces of the daily life of ‘the collective,’ that was to be the object of study.”

The ‘collective’ is represented in this exhibition by the sheer number of postcards and the pictures which they make when grouped together as a whole. What their component images say, echoes my attempt to find the individual so often subsumed, both in unimaginable numbers and the history which we read in books or know through film and television.

In photographs we often come closest to finding individuals when – ironically – they’re distant, when they’re blurred and unaware of the picture being taken. These are genuine moments of history. With words, it’s often the smallest of details which brings the past alive, for in these parts the whole of the time from which they’re now estranged is immanent.

Tom Phillips, in the preface to his book ‘The Postcard Century’ writes that with postcards:

“High history vies with everyday pleasures and griefs and there are glimpses of all kinds of lives and situations.”

High history sits in every word, even in the ‘x’ of a single kiss. Or the words in the postcard below; prices for Train, Ale and Fags.

A postcard too is often the physical trace of a journey, one connecting the dots from the place in which it was posted to its final destination. But this destination’s never really reached, and as such, a conversation which may have begun 100 years ago, is never finished. We read the words today, written before we’d ever the hope of existing, sent by those who don’t exist anymore.

The images in this exhibition are not ‘genuine’ postcards per se, but they are (for the most part) postcard-sized, inspired by a collection dating from the First World War. It’s the idea of the part (the individual image) as being a part of a whole which interests me and the whole being immanent in the part, just as humanity is immanent in every individual.

Echo

September 15, 2009 by Nicholas Hedges

Last week I installed a temporary artwork in St. Giles, Oxford entitled Echo. The piece comprised approximately 200 photographs of individuals isolated from group shots of the fair taken in 1908, 1913 and 1914. The date of the exhibition, Wednesday 9th September was important in that it was the day after St. Giles’ Fair was taken down, and the ‘space’ left in its wake (the fair was up for two days and filled the entire street) helped frame the fact that all those people shown in the exhibition, who had once stood in the same street, had, like the fair, gone. I was interested in the boundary between existence and non-existence, the impossiblity – within the human mind – of death as nothing and forever. What I hoped the photographs conveyed was the importance of having been.

The installation required grass in order that I could place the markers in the ground and the War Memorial in St. Giles was the only viable option. What was particularly interesting was how the location altered the meaning of the work in that one couldn’t help identify the people with the memorial and in particular those who fell in World War One. Given that some of the men pictured in the photographs almost certainly went to war and may well have lost their lives, so the work took on a new and poignant dimension. Many of the women would have lost husbands, brothers, fathers, uncles and so on.

Click here to read more about this exhibition.

Front and Back Battlefield

February 11, 2009 by Nicholas Hedges

Below are examples of the postcards I have made featuring the names and addresses of next-of-kin of men of the 2nd Monmouthshire Battalion who fell in the Fisrt World War. I’m making the work for a conference in Tourist Experiences: Meanings, Motivations, Behaviours at UCLa in April. The first image shows the postcards in their entirety.

Front and Back (2nd Mons)

January 27, 2009 by Nicholas Hedges

I started work on a new painting today based on the work I made as part of my Mine the Mountain exhibition. This piece, Front and Back (2nd Mons), uses the ‘T’ shaped divides on the backs of postcards which are then stencilled onto the canvas, already painted with a generic battlefield scene. I would really like to paint this on a large scale but we’ll see how this goes first.

Remembrance

November 14, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

During this week of Remembrance, a few days after the 90th anniversary of the end of the First World War, I’ve been thinking about how it is that an event which happened almost a century ago still holds such a powerful draw on our consciences today. What is it that makes the Great War seem anything but distant when events which proceeded it only by a few years seem twice as far in the past?

In the last couple of days I’ve been continuing my research into my great-great-uncle Jonah Rogers, who was killed on the 8th May 1915 at the Battle of Frezenberg Ridge.

I have now been able to locate the positions he held as part of the 2nd Monmouthshire Battalion, on the day of the battle, being as they were part of the 12th Brigade in the 4th Division (thanks to Martyn Gibson and David Nicholas for their help with this).
In a ‘History of the 2nd Battalion Monmouthshire Regiment,’ compiled by Captain G.A. Brett, D.S.O., M.C., I read the following account of the battle in which Jonah lost his life.

“By the 8th May the British had withdrawn from the most advanced points of the Ypres salient, and the Germans, striving to obliterate the salient completely, made further determined efforts to gain ground. Desperate fighting ensued, the six days, 8th to 13th May, of the Battle of Frezenberg Ridge, giving many anxious hours to British commanders. When the storm broke the Battalion was on the right of the brigade still holding Mouse Trap Farm…”
Looking at a diagram of the Battle of Frezenberg Ridge, one can see clearly where the Battalion would have been stationed; to the left of the 84th Brigade at Mouse Trap Farm.

The more I ‘get to know’ Jonah, the more the war as an historic event, changes. Whereas before I could only know it as a thing in its own right, an homogenous mass observed from a distance, like a planet in the night sky, now, with a shift in focus, I see Jonah first, and then, through him the war. The telescope becomes in effect, a microscope, with Jonah the lens through which the war, in all its millions of parts, is magnified.
I do not know the exact details of how Jonah died. Given the ferocity of the artillery bombardment and the use prior to this of poison gas, there are any number of possibilities. And although knowing the nature of his death would add to the emotional weight of his story, it is the possibility of pinning down the location of his death which makes more of an impact upon me. It serves to make him – and the war – more vivid, more real. By locating him in the places where he lived and where he died, and by alternating one’s thoughts between the two, one can imagine too his loved ones, shifting their thoughts between memories of him at home and thoughts of him at war. And in that space between – a kind of No Man’s Land – one can locate their fears and their prayers. The same can be said for Jonah, who no doubt during the months he was at the Front, staring across at the enemy, thought a great deal of the place in which he lived.

For his family, left behind in Hafodyrynys, the war could only be imagined but would permeate everything they did. Whatever they did, however mundane, there would be the war. Even in the landscape, in its shape, its colour, its sounds, the war would be contained but never spilled beyond the outlines. And in these shapes and spaces, their hopes and fears would vie against each other.
Perhaps the fact I can share at least some of this space, in the movement of my own thoughts between the place he lived and the place he died, helps explain the reason why, although I know what happened to him, and where and when it happened, I still feel, when reading about the war prior to May 1915, a sense of concern for his wellbeing. If I read any account of the war after the day he died, every word is permeated with his absence. That is not to say I mourn as such (as his immediate family would of course have mourned) but I do sense his absence, I do sense the anxiety of his separation (in the end, eternal separation) from home.
Without a known grave, this separation – his death – must have been all the more difficult for his family. On the gravestone of his older brother, William, who died aged 10 in 1897, the following inscription has been added:
Also of Pte. Jonah Rogers, 2nd Mon Regt. Son of the above Killed in Action in France, May 8th 1915.

Jonah has no known grave, save that within the minds of those of us who remember him. Perhaps then, my concern is for the wellbeing of his memory?

We must all as individuals continue to remember. We must remember that the millions who died in the slaughter, were not an anonymous mass brought into play by History (just as we are not an anonymous mass brought together to remember) but young individuals, taken from their homes and loved ones; individuals to whom we are all related. A million British and Commonwealth soldiers lost their lives in the War. A million graves, known and unknown lay in the fields of Flanders and France. Back home, a million holes, will only ever be filled with the thoughts of those who come after them. Thoughts that pass with our passing. Holes to be filled again by successive generations.

Jonah Rogers (1893-1915)

November 3, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

Thanks to the efforts of Martyn Gibson and David Nicholas and their work on the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Battalions of the Monmouthshire regiment, I have managed to get hold of a photograph of my great-great-uncle, Jonah Rogers, whose image was published in David Nicholas’ history of the 2nd Monmouthshire’s experiences in the Great War ‘They Fought With Pride‘.

The image, taken from a newspaper cutting (the notice of his death) can be seen below:

Connections

August 7, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

This evening I began working on an idea I’ve had for a while which incorporates the World War 1 postcards I was given by Tom Phillips. The idea was to show these postcards on a wall but with only a few the right way round i.e. showing the portrait (they are all portrait postcards of soldiers, most individual, some with other people). The rest would be displayed reversed showing either writing or, as is mostly the case, nothing – they would just be blank. I wasn’t sure how this would look and so I began putting the postcards up on my bedroom wall and fairly quickly I could see that the postcards, displayed in this way had an impact.

There was something about the blank postcards which was particularly resonant and the more I looked, the more I could see what it was that leant them this quality. On most of the blank postcards there is a motif running down the centre of the card (dividing the address from the text). These lines are of various designs, some very simple, others more elaborate. I decided to scan a few which can be found below.

For me these motifs have something of the grave about them, perhaps because they are each shaped a little like a crucifix, and they reminded me of some of the memorials I had seen in the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.

And as I started making connections, I thought of the X paintings and those I discussed in a previous entry – Black Mirrors and thought about how these marks could be incorporated into a work just like the symbol of the ‘X’.

I also thought how these various motifs/symbols resembled the botanic labels I’ve had made, each engraved with the name of one of my ancestors such as that of Henry Jones (below).

And finally, one last connection between the motifs and a work I made in November 2006, soon after a visit made to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Kisses

July 31, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

Following on from my previous two entries regarding ‘Xs‘ (the signature of the illiterate, a secret location marked on a map), I wanted to look briefly at another use of the mark, that of course being the kiss. I was prompted to do this whilst selecting a number of World War One postcards for a new project website; www.8may.org – a project I hope to carry out next year. Most of the postcards are blank, but on a few there is some writing; the scrawl of a soldier or a more recent label, ‘Mum’s uncle.’ for example. One particular card however took my interest for it contained the mark I had recently been applying to my paintings. In my most recent versions of the ‘X’ paintings (those which have been obliterated by graphite powder) I have been scratching the symbol into the dust whilst considering the many anonymous miners who lost their lives deep underground at the time my great, great-great and great-great-great grandfathers were working in the pits of South Wales.

As I’ve written before, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote that those who die leave their names behind as a child leaves off playing with a broken toy. Those who died in the mines left their names underground; most would not have known how to write them, doing instead what my ancestors did and marking documents only with an ‘X’. And many of those men from the 19th century have all but been forgotten, their names discarded, swept away like Rilke’s broken toys. Even their graves might be lost, their remains buried and marked with an ‘X’, secrets known only by the earth itself.

The Xs on the postcard above are also marks of anonymity. We know they are kisses but we don’t know who they’re for or who gave them. But we know they are symbols of a relationship which once existed, whether between lovers, friends or relations; someone loved someone else. Many of those who fought in the Great War never returned home – all that did return were a few words on a postcard; and ‘Xs‘ – farewell kisses as they came to be. Hundreds of thousands of men not only lost their lives, but they have no known grave. Many too lost their names altogether. These Xs on the postcard therefore become symbols for their future anonymity, their unknown graves; their lost names.

And the Xs which I’ve scratched into dust on my paintings also become a kind of farewell; a broken name, a secret location in time. They also become a farewell kiss to the world.

Ancestry

July 22, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

I’m very pleased to announce that my forthcoming exhibition, Mine the Mountain, will be sponsored by Ancestry.co.uk.

I have been researching my family tree for almost a year now and in that time have used Ancestry to search thousands of records (census returns; births, marriages and deaths etc.) to build what has now become quite an extensive tree with roots stretching back to the mid eighteenth century. And although most of this research has been carried out alone, through using the Ancestry website I have been able to join forces with a relative (a second cousin) who I have never met and who lives on the other side of the Atlantic in Canada. He had already made good progress on one line of my family (that of my maternal grandmother) and through the website, I was able to merge much of that information into my own research (and indeed, share with him my own first hand knowledge of people he’d never met).
Using the website I made very quick progress, discovering hundreds of people, some of whom had been completely forgotten, swallowed up by time and almost lost to the past altogether. And it was in response to this idea of the anonymous mass, that what had started as a hobby became an integral part of my artistic practice.

I have always been interested in history and the past was always going to feature in the work I wanted to make and much of my work over the last two years has stemmed from a visit I made to Auschwitz-Birkenau in October 2006.

As with many historical and indeed contemporary traumas (whether ‘man-made’ or natural disasters), one of the most difficult things to comprehend at Auschwitz (and indeed with the Holocaust as a whole) was not only the sheer brutality and inhumanity of the place, but the scale of the suffering experienced there. How can one possibly comprehend over 1 million victims (6 million in the Holocaust as a whole)? The only way I could even begin to try, was to find the individuals amongst the many dead; that’s not to say I looked for named individuals, but what it meant to be one.
One of the many strategies I used to explore the individual was that of researching my own past; not just that of my childhood, but a past in which I did not yet exist.

Using the Ancestry website I began to uncover names, lots of names which seemed to exist, disembodied in the ether of cyberspace like the names one reads on memorials (such as on the Menin Gate in Ypres), and I was reminded all the while I searched of a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem ‘The Duino Elegies,’ in which he writes that on dying we
“…leave even our name behind us as a child leaves off playing with a broken toy…”

It is interesting that in looking back on our lives and beyond, we inevitably pass through our own childhood, and indeed, I can remember mine replete with all its toys – a fair few of which were inevitably broken. In Rilke’s phrase above, we have an implied progression from childhood to adulthood and the fate that comes to all of us, but travelling back, we move away from death and think of our childhoods, remembering those toys which in our mind’s eye are always new, or at least, always mended. This sense of moving back and the idea of toys, or things, that are mended again, resonates for me with my research and my using the Ancestry website. One can think of the 800 million names stored in their databases as each being a broken toy, one that when it’s found again is slowly put back together.

Having discovered hundreds of names (or broken toys) in my own family tree, I’ve started to put the pieces back together, looking beyond the names to discover who these people were, and therefore, who I really am. And the more I discover, the more I find myself looking at history in an altogether different way. History is sometimes seen as being nothing but a list of dates, but like the names on Ancestry, there are of course a myriad number of things behind the letters and the numbers (the broken toy in the attic has been to places other than just the attic – and has been things other than just a toy).
Now when I think of an historical date, I relate that to my family tree and consider who was alive at the time. For example, when reading about the Great Exhibition of 1851, I know that at that time Richard Hedges, Ann Jordan, Elijah Noon, Charlotte White, William Lafford, Elizabeth Timbrill, John Stevens, Charles Shackleford, Mary Ann Jones among many others were all alive; what is for me a distant event described in books and early black and white photographs, was for them a lived moment whether or not they visited the exhibition itself.

When this photograph inside the exhibition hall was taken in 1851, they were a part of the moment, even when farming in Norfolk. When the guillotine fell upon Marie Antoinette on October 16th 1791 (I’ve just been reading about the French Revolution), Thomas Sarjeant, Ann Warfare Hope, David Barnes, Mary Burgess and William Deadman were going about their normal lives somewhere across the channel in England, and it’s by understanding their lives – of which I am of course a consequence and therefore a part, that I can begin to understand history as not some set, concrete thing that has happened, but something fluid, made of millions of moments which were at one time happening. Every second in history comprises these millions of moments when the world is seen at once by millions of pairs of eyes.

Therefore, as well as being a huge database of names, Ancestry can be seen as being a database of moments, the more of which we discover for ourselves, the greater our understanding of history becomes. This, in light of the project’s origins at Auschwitz-Birkenau, is particularly pertinent; the Holocaust, as a defined historical event, becomes millions of moments and the Holocaust itself not one single tragedy, but a single tragedy repeated six million times.

In effect, Ancestry allows users to map themselves onto history and the family tree becomes not just a network of relationships between hundreds of people but a kind of physical and geographic biography of the individual. Places we have heard of but never been to, places we have never known before become as much a part of our being as the place in which we were born and in which we live. For example, if there’s a place with which I can most identify physically or geographically, then that place would be Oxford, the town in which I was born, grew up and in which I live. Its streets which I have walked and its buildings which I have seen countless numbers of times, all hold memories – and what are we in the end but these.

Of course there are numerous other places which I have visited and which make me who I am (seaside towns in Dorset where I holidayed as a child for example) but as well as these places are those which, until I began my research, I had either never heard of or never visited: Hafodyrynys, Dorchester, Burton Dassett, Southam, Ampney St. Peter, Minety, Ampney Crucis, Cefn-y-Crib, Kingswood, Usk, Eastleach, Wisbech, Walpole St. Andrew and so on. Furthermore, places I had known and visited were shown to contain memories extending way beyond my own lifetime but of which I am nonetheless a part, or at least, a consequence. I have been to Brighton many times and have many memories of that place, but all the times I have been there, never did I realise how much it and the surrounding area had come to make me who I am.

So, as well as being a vast database of moments, Ancestry can be seen as an equally vast set of blueprints, each for a single individual – not only those who are living, but those who’ve passed away. And just as the dead, through the lives they led, have given life to those of us in the present, so we, living today can give life back to those who have all but been forgotten. Merleau-Ponty, in his ‘Phenomenology of Perception’, wrote:

“I am the absolute source, my existence does not stem from my antecedents, from my physical and social environment; instead it moves out towards them and sustains them.”

Of course our existence does indeed stem from our antecedents (and as we have seen, our physical environment), but what I like about this quote is the idea of our sustaining the existence of our ancestors in return. The natural, linear course of life from birth to death, from one generation to the next, younger generation, is reversed. Generations long since gone depend on us for life, as much as we have depended on them.

In his novel, ‘The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,’ Rilke wrote the following:

“Is it possible that the whole history of the world has been misunderstood? Is it possible that the past is false, because one has always spoken of its masses just as though one were telling of a coming together of many human beings, instead of speaking of the individual around whom they stood because he was a stranger and was dying?”

This quote brings me back round to what I spoke of earlier; the idea that the past is made up of countless millions of moments – that History is not the concrete thing that has happened, but something more fluid, something which was once happening, and which, given Merleau-Ponty’s assertion above, is still happening, or at least being sustained. These moments are the world as seen by individuals. In Rilke’s quote, the history of the world, represented by the masses, has its back turned against us. We cannot see its face or faces, only the clothes that it wears. But the stranger in the middle, around whom history crowds is looking out towards us, and if we meet their gaze, we make a connection, we see the individual. And for a moment they might be a stranger, but through the dialogue which inevitably begins, we get to know them and the world to which they, and indeed, we, belong.

As I’ve said, Ancestry is more than a network of discovered (and undiscovered) relationships between hundreds of people; it’s also an immense collection of dialogues; one can imagine the lines which connect individuals as being like telephone wires carrying conversations between the past and the present. And the more one thinks of all these nodes and connections, the more one begins to see that Ancestry is also a metaphor for memory – after all, what are memories but maps in the brain, patterns of connections between millions of neurons which make a picture of what once was: history as it really is.

Mine the Mountain will run between 1st and 8th October 2008 in Oxford. Download a PDF for venues.

X

June 30, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

It was whilst I was cycling home from the studio this morning that the idea first came to me. I was thinking about the two paintings on which I am currently working, both of which are based on the landscape around Hafodyrynys, Wales (the village in which my Grandmother grew up) and one of which I intend to show, veiled, at the Mine the Mountain exhibition in October.
The paintings themselves were going quite well, but remembering the original idea behind them, I realised that there was something missing. The original idea was that these paintings, or rather the final selected painting would be based on both the death of my great-great-uncle, Jonah Rogers who was killed in action in the Second Battle of Ypres on May 8th 1915 and my birthday, May 8th 1971. The title of the piece was provisionally May 8th, but as is often the case, the painting has led me away from this. That isn’t to say the subject has been lost completely; I still want to think about Jonah, but how do I show him in the painting? How do I show the ambiguity between existence and nonexistence/death?
The answer came as I thought about names and some of the documents I have obtained through researching my family tree. Almost without exception, none of my ancestors from Wales at this time could read or write and all of them signed their name (or rather, indicated their presence) with an ‘x’. The ‘x’ therefore becomes a sign of a presence, but one which is anonymous.

Of course the ‘x’ is usually accompanied by the line; ‘the mark of…’ (as above) but without that, the human becomes relegated to this nondescript, anonymous sign (one could argue of course that we are all, in our names, reduced to signs, but the ability to write allows us to transfer to the page – and therefore leave to posterity – much more than just the name by which we are known). The act of making that mark instead of writing one’s name is also very significant. It levels all those who make it; it renders everyone the same – at least in the eyes of history. One could say that the greatest leveller of all is death and that the ‘x’ becomes the mark of death; presence is defined by absence.

We know much of what happened in the past through the written word although there are of course many other sources in which it’s also revealed; paintings, artworks, newspaper stories, oral histories/stories, fingerprints, photographs and so on, but for the most part, we know about the past through what we read. I have written about the limits of the written word before in relation to the work I did on ‘The Gate’, but looking at it again in relation to these paintings and to my previous work/research, there is something very poignant about these anonymous signatures; I can’t help but think of the names we see on memorials, carved into walls and so on. Imagine if they simply read ‘x’… For many who died in the Great War and whose bodies were either never found, names have been lost and an ‘x’ is perhaps all one could write on their behalf.

In relation to the landscape, ‘x’ has different connotations; on maps it marks a spot – it denotes the presence of something, a thing which is present and yet absent – hidden away from sight and mind like buried treasure. Marking the canvas with an ‘x’ would give the painting the meaning I was looking for; the presence of someone absent; the reduction of everyone in time to complete obscurity. Furthermore, taking what I wrote in the paragraph above, ‘x’ marks the last resting place of all those (including my great-great-uncle) whose bodies were never found.

The paintings are still in the early stages but there was instantly something about the marks which appealed. In some respects I saw them (those in the sky) as angels which given the nature of the work seemed relevant. They also reminded me of the stars one sometimes finds painted on the ceilings of cathedrals or in mediaeval manuscripts. But those ‘on the ground’ called to mind something else, something which given Jonah Rogers’ fate gave the paintings another dimension; first the shape reminded me of the deckchairs I made for the Residue exhibition (The Smell of an English Summer 1916 (Fresh Cut Grass))..

…and secondly, the x-shape defences one sees on wartime photographs such as those of the Normandy landings below…

2nd Battalion Monmouthshire Regiment

May 9, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

Having discovered that my great great-uncle, Jonah Rogers, was a Private in the 2nd Battalion of the Monmouthshire Regiment (he was killed in active service on May 8th 1915 and is commemorated on the Menin Gate) I began searching for anything which might tell me more about the place in which he fought and died. Fortunately, I happened upon a book which couldn’t be more useful; ‘A History of The 2nd Battalion The Monmouthshire Regiment’ compiled by Captain G.A. Brett, D.S.O., M.C. in the 1930s.

The first thing I wanted to do was be sure that this book covered the history relevant to Jonah, and in the back, in the Roll of Honour, I found him, ROGERS J., one amongst many other names.

In the book, the author relates in great detail information concerning the preparations for war and the route the Battalion took as it moved into the theatre of this terrible conflict. It seems that there were three units of the 2nd Battalion, the first formed from the outset of war in August 1914, with two and three following thereafter. I wondered to which unit Jonah had belonged. The following is a passage taken from the book:

“The 7th November, 1914, is an historic date for the and Monmouthshires, for early on the morning of that day the Battalion landed at Havre on active service. Over four long and terrible years were to drag their slow length before it would recross the narrow sea from France, and few of those who disembarked with it were fated to return with it. Its strength on landing was 30 Officers and 984 Other Ranks. Before it came home t8o Officers and 3,878 Other Ranks had passed through it. But they had earned for their Battalion a name for fighting and endurance of which their county, with all its old traditions of border pugnacity, could well be proud. While some of the officers came from other counties, a few indeed from the colonies and abroad, the vast majority of the men were from the mining valleys of Monmouthshire, every town, village and hamlet of which must at one time or another have been represented in the 2nd Battalion.”

The key part of this passage is of course the date, 7th November, 1914, and having consulted Jonah’s medal records, I discovered ‘the date of entry therein’ corresponded exactly: 7-11-14.

The movements of Jonah Rogers and the 2nd Battalion can be listed as follows:
5th August 1914 – Orders to mobilise the Battalion.
6th August 1914 – 7.30pm. The Company entrained at Crumlin nearly 100 strong, en route for Pembroke Dock.
Evening of 7th August 1914 – The transport moved off and halting for the nights at Llanellen, Hereford, Ludlow and Church Stretton, completed the march to Oswestry on the afternoon of the 11th August 1914.
20th August 1914 – The Brigade moved to Northampton where the Welsh Division was concentrating.
Evening of 5th November 1914 – The Battalion embarked at Southampton on the ‘Manchester Importer’.
6th November 1914 – Arrived off Le Havre and anchored until night.
7th November 1914 – The Battalion landed in Havre.
8th November 1914 – Entrained, arrived at St. Omer, 10th November 1914.
18th/19th November 1914, passed fit by Inspector or Reserve Troops, marched to Bailleul, halting for the night at Hazebrouck and reaching Le Bizet the following day.
21st November 1914 – ‘C’ and ‘D’ company enter the trenches, relieved by ‘C’ and ‘D’ on the 23rd.
2nd December 1914 – 2nd Monmouthshires relieve the 2nd Essex, taking over a battalion frontage of eleven hundred yards of trenches.
Christmas Day 1914 – Informal Truce
January 1915 – Redistribution of troops. The forward company of the 2nd Monmouthshires, which was relieved every 2 days, held some cottages and some trenches behind Le Ghier Wood.
20th February 1915 to end of March 1915 – The Battalion relieved the 2nd Essex taking over the same frontage occupied in December.
2nd May 1915 – 2nd Monmouthshires experienced the heaviest shelling they had yet encountered. Later in the day, the enemy launched a fierce attack under cover of asphyxiating gas.
Night of 4th/5th May 1915 – The Battalion relieved the 5th South Lancashires about Weiltje. Another heavy gas attack, not followed up by infantry assault. The position included Mouse Trap Farm (known also to the British as Shell Trap Farm).
8th May 1915 – Battle of Frezenberg Ridge with desperate fighting ensuing for the following six days. Private Jonah Rogers was killed in action on the 8th May 1915.
Although I have no photographs of Jonah, there is a photograph in the book showing a front-line trench in 1915. It’s impossible to say whether one of these men is Jonah, but what one can say is, he was no doubt just like them.

The following is a map of positions occupied by the 2nd Monmouthshires during the 2nd Battle of Ypres. You can see (click on the image for large view) that on the day Jonah was killed, they were positioned in Shell Trap Farm.

Verdun

April 30, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

On 26th April I visited the battlefields and sites of Verdun. The name, like that of the Somme and Ypres, calls to mind visions of unimaginable horror; thousands upon thousands of men turned into names carved in monuments in towns throughout Europe, or lost completely, names and all, in the churned and pulverised fields. In my imagination, such places are always wet, cold, dark and desolate, as frozen in their appearance as they are fixed in old black and white photographs.

I won’t at this point discuss the battle’s history, suffice to say it’s a place in which around 500,000 men lost their lives, a figure which like so many grim statistics (I’m thinking here of my work on the Holocaust) is almost impossible to imagine (as much as it’s impossible to correlate). 26,000,000 shells rained upon the battlefield, six shells for every square metre. But difficult as these facts are to process, we must at least try.

Having arrived in Verdun, we stopped the car at a track leading into a wood and no sooner had we started to walk amongst the trees than we became aware of the undulating ground; the shell craters and trenches, around and from within which this new wood had grown. At once we recalled the craters and trenches of Sanctuary Wood in Ypres, but the contrast between the two was clear; in Sanctuary Wood the trenches had been, at least, ‘over-preserved’ (some suggest they were dug for tourists after the war) but here they’d remained untouched since the end of hostilities. They were rounded and smoothed, and all the more powerful. At Sanctuary Wood, the whole place had the feel of a playground, whilst in this wood, the peace and quiet provided a stark counterpoint to the horrors of war.

This counterpoint came in the birdsong and the colour of the sky, which on what was a glorious day was tinted by the brown of the trees and last year’s leaves filling the craters and trenches; a curious bruising as if a part of the dusk was somehow stained upon it. And between the carpet of leaves and the blue of the sky, was the green of this year’s growth; the whole scene a complete contrast to what the name, Verdun, had until now conjured in my mind. This place was simply beautiful.

Save for a few tourists, we walked the woods alone, and yet, even then, the trees like those we’d encountered at other sites of trauma, seemed more than what they were. But whereas those which grow in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Belzec are strangely complicit in the events of the past, those in Verdun had grown from its wreckage; they did not hide what happened there. And stranger still was the sense that in this place Mankind was older than nature; Man had shaped the ground through his own destruction; he had made the void – the quagmire of mud – from which nature had risen, giving the trees a human quality, as if they carried with them the memory of all who fell – as if they were the fallen soldiers. And the resilience of Nature, it’s ability to rise from such appalling devastation, was one of the most striking aspects of our visit; despite the human feel of the trees, I realised how small humans are, even when they are made big through war. No matter what we do, Nature will in the course of time return. Long after we have finally gone, she will still be here, just as she was that day, in blue sky and birdsong, and as such, to walk through the woods was like being the last two people left on Earth.
This scarred idyll was littered with other wartime detritus; the pillboxes within which men would hide, seeking out their fellow man beyond the apertures through which their guns were trained. They sat like concrete bells, still ringing with the war, like the ringing heard in silence, after exposure to something loud. (I am reminded here of the idea of sympathetic vibrations, where when a bell is struck, another bell across the room begins vibrating, giving off the same sound. These pillboxes which litter the landscape around Verdun, and which we saw in Ypres, seem to contain within their walls and deep impenetrable interiors, a sound which finds sympathy in all the others. I can imagine these vibrations ringing in sites all across the world, again long after man has gone.)

Having recorded the sounds of the birds (and on playback I notice the insects – and I start to think of flies trapped in amber) we left the wood and made our way to Fort Vaux, the second to fall in the Battle of Verdun and a place I will return to later.

This persistence of Nature was nowhere more apparent than in one of the ruined villages which we visited towards the end of the day. There was nothing left of Fleury-devant-Douaumont save for the street names preserved on signposts along with signs indicating where there’d been a farm, the cafe, Town Hall and the workshop of a weaver.

One of the interesting things about the numerous ruined villages is how they each have a Major, a post created to preserve the memory of the place as well as those who lived there. Like the woods, the landscape was blistered beneath the lush grass, undulating like immeasurably slow ripples following the impact of thousands of shells. It was pockmarked with craters some of which had filled with water to make ponds, beautiful beneath the dappled shade of the trees. Again, one had the feel of Man being older than Nature, with the new wood growing out of what remained of the village; despite the unimaginable numbers of shells which ploughed the soil, the sheer number of dead, the poison of the gas used in the battle, the ground had somehow made this beautiful landscape. And just as a corpse can tell us much about its demise through what nature has written upon it – the time of death for example – so the woods grown out from the corpse of the landscape speak of the time that has passed; and here is the curious enigma of the Great War. Despite the fact that almost a hundred years separates us, it doesn’t seem that long ago.

Fort Vaux is a name synonymous with the suffering, endurance and the bravery of the soldiers who fought there. Even after the French were forced to surrender, the Germans presented arms as a mark of respect. The following is an extract from H.P. Willmott’s book on the First World War.

“The German bombardment of the Fort began on June 1st 1916, at one point firing shells at the rate of 1,500 to 2,000 of the per hour. Inside were 600 troops under the command of Major Raynal. Just before dawn on the 2nd the barrage stopped and two German battalions moved forward. By mid-afternoon they had overwhelmed the defenders and occupied a large part of the superstructure. Raynal was determined to resist, and he and his men withdrew to the underground corridors where a grim battle was fought in the darkness with grenades and machine guns. On June 4th the Germans used flamethrowers in an attempt to drive the French out with asphyxiating black smoke…”
It’s a curious shell, a skull like structure cut into the rock which belies the horrors it has witnessed. Standing on top, one could see why it was so important, commanding spectacular views of the surrounding countryside and here, the contrast between the view of the tourist and that of the soldier becomes stark. What would they have seen from this same position? Hard to imagine that it was such a wasteland.

From Fort Vaux we made our way to the Memorial Museum and then to the Douaumont Ossuary. At the Museum, there was one object in particular which interested me, and that was a notebook containing handwritten translations of English words into French.

The first line is the translation for Dead; Mort.

The structure of the ossuary is very much of its time and has the appearance of something which wouldn’t look out of place in Fritz Lang’s vision of the future, Metropolis. And this fact reminds us that it was just twenty years later when Europe and the world would be plunged into yet another catastrophe, indeed, during our journey around Verdun, we found evidence of this catastrophe in a memorial to 16 people killed in the second world war whose mutilated bodies were found dumped in a ditch which itself formed their memorial.

From the top of the tower, one is again presented with spectacular views of the battlefields and again one can’t imagine what it would have looked like in those dark months of 1916. The tower itself houses the Victory Bell and the Lantern of the Dead which shines out over the battlefield.
Most of the structure is taken up by the 137 metre long cloister where each tomb shows a precise area of the battlefield from where the bodies were recovered. What one does notice – especially on a warm sunny day like that on which we visited – was how cold it is inside. One expects it to be colder given the thick stone walls, but there is something of an extra dimension to the chill, one is made all the more aware of being in the presence of the dead. And yet, this cold defines the living, it shows up our breath and for me, this was one of the most powerful aspects of the building.

Outside the ossuary, through a row of small windows, one can see the bones of the 130,000 dead entombed within. Seeing the piles of leg bones, shoulder blades, vertebrae and skulls, one is reminded of the randomness of war, the arbitrariness of death on the battlefield. Like numbers and lists of names, it’s hard to imagine that these mountain of bones were once thousands of individuals, just as walking amongst the graves of the 15,000 men in front of the ossuary, one cannot imagine that many dead. Multiply that number, that space by thirty, see where it stretches out into the distance, and one begins to understand – in part – the horror of the war.

But one can never know what it was really like, and that to some extent is the point. Would we want to? We must do everything we can to never know. The inability to contemplate such horror in the face of such natural beauty is exactly its power. What we see when we walk through the woods is in some respects the world as it was before the war, the world of better days as remembered by those caught in the ‘meat-grinder’ of battle. The trenches gouged in the ground and the shell-craters pock-marking the soil are reminders of a brutal past, and yet they are also a warning about the future.
Having left the ossuray we made our way into the town of Verdun itself. Music was playing from speakers attached to all the lamposts, and at the appearance of people dressed in costume and sporting masks, we realised we had come at the time of a carnival. But there was something sinister about these people, the way in which they were a part of the town but detached, within but without. Something about their featureless, anonymous faces; the way they looked at us but we could not look at them, just a version of their selves.

And seeing all these colourfully dressed people on the steps of the town’s huge memorial served to illustrate the continuity of life, but also the fact that those who died on the battlefields outside the town would have known brighter, happier, more colourful times, a juxtaposition which is everywhere in Verdun and which was to be found in the town’s Cathedral, itself hit on the first day of the battle – February 21st 1916.

The Cathedral still bears the scars of war, but on the inside, one finds again the colour.

Zuleika Dobson

March 31, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

It was through reading E.M. Forster’s lectures (collected in a book entitled ‘Aspects of the Novel’ and first published in 1927) delivered under the auspices of Trinity College, Cambridge, that I first came across a reference to Max Beerbohm’s satirical novel Zuleika Dobson. In particular it was a passage quoted by Forster as ‘this most exquisite of funeral palls… Has,” he goes on to say “not a passage like this a beauty unattainable by serious litertature?” The answer to that is in some respects yes and below is that very passage:

“Through the square, across the High Street and down Grove Street they passed. The Duke looked up at the tower of Merton… Strange that tonight it would still be standing there, in all its sober and solid beauty – still be gazing over the roofs and chimneys, at the tower of Magdalen, its rightful bride. Through untold centuries of the future it would stand thus, gaze thus. He winced. Oxford walls have a way of belittling us; and the Duke was loth to regard his doom as trivial.

Aye by all the minerals we are mocked. Vegetables, yearly deciduous are far more sympathetic. The lilac and laburnum making lovely now the railed pathway to Christ Church Meadow were all a-swaying and a-nodding to the Duke as he passed by – ‘Adieu, adieu your Grace,’ they were whispering. ‘We are very sorry for you – very sorry indeed. We never dared suppose you would predecease us. We think your death a very great tragedy. Adieu!”

The premise of the novel concerns the arrival into Oxford of the beautiful Zuleika Dobson, a woman of such beauty, any man who sees her cannot help but fall in love.

“To these Emperors, for whom none weeps, time will give no surcease. Surely, it is sign of some grace in them that they rejoiced not, this bright afternoon, in the evil that was to befall the city of their penance.”

The problem is that Miss Dobson herself cannot love any man who loves her in return and so, having fallen in love with the brilliant Duke of Dorset, her love is immediately lost on hearing of his reciprocal feelings. Spurned, there is only one course of action left to the Duke and that is suicide by drowning in the Isis during Eights Week. But such is the esteem in which he’s held, and such is the love every undergraduate holds for Miss Dobson, that almost the entire undergraduate population of Oxford plunges into the river and is lost.

Taking the plaintive tones of the passage above and some other extracts of the novel, I assumed (not recalling the date of its first publication) that Beerbohm’s novel was something of an allegory about the lost generation of the First World War, of the lost innocence of Edwardian Oxford. However, the novel was first published in 1911, and as such, the book is not unlike the pair of black owls which perch on the battlements of the Duke’s ancestral home and foretell of his death.

“Young Oxford! Here, in this mass of boyish faces, all fused and obliterated, was the realisation of that phrase. Two or three thousands of human bodies, human souls? Yet the effect of them in the moonlight was as of one great passive monster.”

Just after reading the novel, I started reading again Peter Vansittart’s survey of the First World War, Voices From the Great War. Comprising quotes, poems, letters and so on, the book paints a picture of the war through the long lost contemporaneous voices. I first bought the book following a visit made to Ypres and turned to it again having received a gift of almost 200 postcards from the time of the Great War.

Taking the three together – Beerbohm’s novel, the postcards and the quotes – one begins to read the absurd fantasy of Zuleika Dobson in an altogether different way. We have all seen images of men cheerfully marching to the Front, waving their hats and shouting, and when one reads of the mass (almost cheerful) suicide of all the young men in the novel, one cannot help but compare.

“There was a confusion of shouts from the raft of screams from the roof. Many youths-all the youths there-cried ‘Zuleika!’ and leapt emulously headlong into the water. ‘Brave fellows!’ shouted the elder men, supposing rescue-work. The rain pelted, the thunder pealed. Here and there was a glimpse of a young head above water-for an instant only.
Shouts and screams now from the infected barges on either side. A score of fresh plunges. ‘Splendid fellows!'”

And from Vansitartt’s book…

“The enormous expansion of wealth in the peaceful years between 1908 and 1914 brought not happiness but fear, and fear so powerful that it could be expressed only in images of fear and destruction. When war came, it was almost universally accepted as something foreseen and foretold. Even those who loathed the notion of it acquiesced in it as inevitable, and it is not foolish to conclude that what ultimately brought the war was not the ambitions and fears of Germany, but a death-wish in the peoples of Europe, a half-conscious desire to break away from their humdrum or horrifying circumstances to something more exciting or more exalted.” C.M. Bowra

“War might drive a man till he dropped: it could be a dangerous and bloody business; we believed, however, that it still offered movement, colour, adventure, and drama. Later, when the murderous, idiotic machinery of the Western Front was grinding away, of course all was different.” J.B. Priestly

Of course it was different – the reality of the situation. And having turned the last few pages of Beerbohm’s novel, I wondered what it would have looked like, all those dead young men lying prone in the waters of the Isis.

Colour

November 12, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

Each string (in what I have so far called the ‘net’) represents in its ‘cut end’ the end of a path, the end of a life. Each string also represents a life entire as measured by the three fates. Furthermore they could be said, as a group to represent the combination of paths which, at a specific moment in time created one of the many terrible moments of the Holocaust. Also, the image of the whole represents the sum of the snatched visions of the tower at Birkenau (the drawings).

Of the physical appearance of the net, the following quote from Fernando Pessoa’s ‘The Book of Disquiet’ is very pertinent:

“I also have my crochet,
It dates from when I began to think,
Stitch on stitch forming a whole without a whole,
A cloth, and I don’t know if it’s for a garment or for nothing,
A soul, and I don’t know if it’s for feeling or living.”

The image of the net looks like a ‘dream-catcher’ and in many ways that works in respect of this theme; dreams which many would have had of going back home, trapped in its strings. (There is also the idea of the writes of the telegraph poles carrying messages out of the camp and across Europe).

I was also thinking today about work by two of my colleagues which was very much to do with colour. This made me look at my own work (which is anything but colourful) and the subsequent contrast interested me. It reminded me of a television programme I watched last night about the photographer Albert-Kahn who documented the First World War in colour photographs. When we think of the past, in terms of the war, pre-war and Victorian periods, we think of it in terms of black and white. When we see colour photographs of the First World War they seem to validate reality – the very fact of time before we were born.

In my work there is no colour as such, but it is there, just as colour is there in Black and White photographs.

In the image above, I was reminded of the stained glass windows in the many tombs of Montmartre and Pere Lachaise cemeteries. The lines of the image (of the net) could just as easily be the lead work of a broken stained-glass window; what is missing of course is the colour.

Colour could be a validating factor in this case. Often when we think of the Holocaust or World War One for example, we see them in Black and White (like the cats (although evidence suggests they may have limited colour vision) we saw in the cemetery); we often think of the weather as being dull, grey, miserable, always winter, and when we read evidence of the time that talks of blue sky and sun, it always seems somehow shocking. The following is an extract from Tadeusz Borowski’s “This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen.”

“‘…You have no idea how tremendous the world looks when you fall out of a closed, packed freight car! The sky is so high…’
‘…and blue…’
‘Exactly, blue, and the trees smell wonderful. The forest – you want to take it in your hand!'”

When imagining arrival at somewhere like Birkenau, one imagines it being night, or the smoke from the chimneys hiding the sky like a fog. But of course, people would have arrived on beautiful summer days, when colour was abundant.

Walking and Memorials

June 3, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

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 Final Week

May 4, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

The final week before the exhibition opens and new ideas are presenting themselves. I wanted to do something with the dismantled typewriter and so I took the letters and the ribbon and printed the title on some paper ‘The War to End All Wars’.

What I liked about the result was how the red of the ribbon was smudged beneath the writing, giving the impression of blood. The unevenness too reminded me of some text-based work I did following a visit to Auschwitz and I wondered whether I could reprise this work. However, there would have to be differences. The dismantled typewriter, as a piece, has the title, as above, ‘The War to End All Wars’. Clearly we know that this wasn’t the case and that there have been hundreds of wars fought since 1918. Giving the typewriter such a title makes it a metaphor for the First World War (I originally arrived at the idea thinking about the names of all the dead being recorded on just such a machine) and so, as the First World War wasn’t the last, so the typewriter must be shown to still work somehow. Using the letters and the ribbon does this, but if the result is on paper, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the typewriter has been dismantled i.e. it could have been made before it was taken apart. Printing directly onto the wall however does make this connection; after all it is obviously impossible to type with a working typewriter onto a wall, this can only be done if the machine is in pieces. The First World War may be over, but man has continued to fight nevertheless.

From Dinosaurs to Human Beings

April 25, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

After yesterday’s viewing, I began to think about the works I’ve produced so far on this residency and what it is that links them; not that there should be a link – I just know that there is one. Despite the differences, there is an underlying theme which unites the drawings, the text pieces, the deckchairs and the paintings. So what is it?

In answering this I have started to think about… dinosaurs. Not something which first springs to mind when looking at my work and if I mention Jurassic Park, then it might seem that I’m losing the plot altogether, but there is a sequence in this film which is relevant to my work.

In the film, the visitors to the Park are shown an animated film, which explains how the Park’s scientists created the dinosaurs. DNA, they explain, is extracted from mosquitoes trapped in amber and where there are gaps in the code sequence, so the gaps are filled with the DNA of frogs; the past is in effect brought back to life with fragments of the past and parts of the modern, living world. This ‘filling in the gaps’ is exactly what I have done throughout my life when trying to imagine the past, particularly the past of the city in which I live.

As well as reading about and drawing dinosaurs, I also as a child, liked to create and map worlds; countries which I would build from fragments of the world around me; forests, mountains and plains – unspoilt landscapes. And in these worlds there would exist towns and cities, created from ‘the best bits’ of those I had visited.

These invented worlds became, as I grew up, the ‘invented’ or imagined landscapes of Oxford’s past; landscapes that were – just as they still are – created from fragments, parts of the past which are still extant in the city; old buildings, walls, objects and so on. Between these structures, these fragments, I would fill the gaps, with my own imagination, with thoughts derived from my own experience. The city’s past and the past in general, as it exists within my mind, is then, to use the metaphor of cloning in Jurassic Park, a cloned dinosaur. The extant buildings, structures and objects within museums, are like the mosquitoes trapped inside the amber. They are broken strands of DNA. All that is required is for me to fill the gaps, and this I can do with my own DNA. I am in effect, the frog.

This metaphor is interesting in that DNA patterns are, of course, unique to everyone. My DNA is different to everybody else’s as there’s is to mine. Therefore, using my imagination to plug in the gaps of the past, means that the ‘past’ will comprise large parts of my own experience; my dinosaur will contain elements of my own being. (See ‘Postcard 1906’). But although my DNA is unique, it is nonetheless derived from my own past, elements have been passed down by my ancestors from time immemorial. The code which makes me who I am, comprises parts of people I know now (parents and grandmothers), people I knew (grandfathers and great-grandmother) and people lost to the past altogether (great-great grandparents and so on). What interests me about this, is that, through stating above how ‘my dinosaur will contain elements of my own being’ I can now see that ‘my dinosaur’ will contain elements of my own being, which is itself comprised of elements of hundreds – thousands – of people, the majority of whom I will of course never know and who have been dead for centuries. I like to think therefore, that ‘my dinosaur’ and my imagination aren’t entirely unique.

This leads me to look at paths – not the route I walk around the castle, or those recorded by my GPS receiver (although these are entirely relevant) but to the paths taken by my ancestors so that I might be brought into being. The chances of any of us being who we are is practically nil. In order for me to be born, I had to be conceived at the exact time I was conceived, any difference in time – even a split second – and I wouldn’t be me. Also, everything leading up to that moment had to be exactly as it was; anything done differently by my parents, no matter how small, how seemingly irrelevant, any deviation from the path and I would not be me. This is extraordinary enough (whenever I see old photographs of members of my family, I think that if it was taken a second sooner or later, I would not be here) but when one considers this is the same for my entire family tree, again, all the way back to time immemorial, then one realises how, to quote Eric Idle in ‘Monty Python’s Meaning of Life’, ‘incredibly unlikely is your [my] birth’. We are all impossibly unlikely. The chances of all our ancestors walking the exact paths through their lives which they walked is almost nil.

Therefore, my walks, my mapping, my identifying (seemingly irrelevant) objects, my recording them, my palimpsests, are all linked. Memorialising objects (disposable or otherwise), snatches of conversation and so on, inscribing them on a slab, shows how vital these fragments are to future generations and to me in terms of my own past. But how does this fit in with my work on Auschwitz-Birkenau, death camps and World War I?

These ‘arenas’ of death were constructions (although the carnage of a battlefield was often random, the battles themselves were always planned, ‘constructed’ for the purpose) in stark contrast to the rather arbitrary paths our ancestors took so that we might each be born. Death in these places was designed, it was planned, particularly with regards to the horrors of the death camps and by looking at these places, by visiting them, by looking at the seemingly irrelevant, everyday objects left behind, we can fill in the gaps, each using our own existence to imagine the lives and the deaths of others. We understand what it means to be human, the near impossibility of birth and the absolute certainty of death.
Imagining a group of a several hundred people walking to their deaths, whether down a path to the gas chambers, or on a road to the Front, we can easily imagine the route; we can in places walk the route today. But imagining the paths walked by thousands of people through time, to bring each of the victims into being is almost impossible: I say almost impossible, but, as I’ve written above regarding each of our births, it’s possible in the end.

Looking at death therefore is to to look at life and its inestimable value, whoever we are and wherever we live. It is to understand what it means to be human and to cherish the lives of others.

The Unknown Soldier

April 17, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

“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.