Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

The Unknown Soldier

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“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…'”

“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…”

“‘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.'”

Reading and Experience

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“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.

The Unknown Soldier

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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.’

Two Minutes Silence

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Every year, at the 11th hour, on the 11th day of the 11th month, we pause for two minutes and remember all those who died in two world wars and subsequent conflicts. We stand still and in silence, a tradition which, one hopes, will always be respected. Over the last few days, having written about the nature of silence in those places which have witnessed appalling human suffering, I’ve been thinking more about this tradition of silence – not so as to question it (as I’ve said, it is a tradition which must always be recognised and respected) but rather its process; what we think about when we stop and are quiet; what it is we are doing when we remember?

The silence temporarily turns the street, the office or wherever it is we’re standing into a different place; it creates a contrast, against which we might compare our normal everyday environment – that from which we step for two minutes to then rejoin at its end. This act of rejoining is, I believe, as important as the stopping and the silence, for as simple as it is, it’s nevertheless something which millions were unable to do, whether through disability or simply because they never came home at all.

Postcards

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I was thinking (given the theme of Residue) about the residues of war, and listed the following sorts of things one might expect to find in the wake of conflict: objects dredged from the battlefield, pieces of shrapnel, bullet casings, shell casings, shoes, photographs, letters, memoirs, bones, clothes, luggage, memories (sights, sounds, smells)… and as I wrote, I thought how important the idea of ‘home’ was, and what a dreadful contrast it must have been to the realities of the often appalling predicaments of those caught up in conflict, whether soldiers or civilians.

Reading various books about World War One, it’s been interesting (and indeed heart-breaking) to read extracts from soldiers’ letters and postcards sent from the trenches, and to read about the packages they received in turn from home. How difficult (as well as comforting) it must have been for them to receive these little pieces of home as they suffered in such unimaginable conditions, and how terrible for parents and relatives to receive the postcards and letters from a loved one after news of their death.
Given that I am exploring the theme of contrast (particularly with regards to the silence of a place following a traumatic event) I thought this was an interesting ‘contrast’ to explore, particularly as Gloucester Green is a place where people are in transit, perhaps travelling away from home.

To change the subject slightly for a moment, one way of identifying with people and events so long ago – for example the Great War – is by identifying with a place (with which we are particularly familiar) as it was at the time, i.e. 1914. I have for a long time been interested in the idea of memory spaces (spaces within the memory of someone either dead or living) and how by accessing these spaces we might gain access to their contemporary thoughts. Under ‘Objects‘ on this site I have written:

“These objects, each through their own unique provenance, allow us, if we use our imaginations, to glimpse people from the pages of history; they, along with tens of thousands of others, once held a place in the minds and memories of men and women long since dead. Now we hold these objects within our minds and memories and as such share a place, a single, common space with those who have long since vanished from the world. To read about the past and those people who made it is one thing, to share this common space with them through the power of objects is quite another.

Objects can be those found in a museum, or buildings contemporary with the time you wish to explore within your imagination; in the case of the Great and the Second World War, it is most of the city (Oxford) as it stands today. As I have already written (on Objects), Aristotle says in relation to systems of memory:

“We should also seek to recover an order of events or impressions which will lead us to the object of our search, for the movements of recollection follow the same order as the original events; and the things that are easiest to remember are those which have an order, like mathematical propositions. But we need a starting-point from which to initiate the effort of recollection.”

This starting point could be anything contemporary with the time we wish to explore. In respect of the Great War, there is a photograph showing men marching to war over Magdalen Bridge and past the Jubilee Fountain which stands near what is now The Plain roundabout. These men are as anonymous to us now, ‘living’ in this photograph, as they are dead, yet the landmarks past which they march are still in existence. That same fountain occupied a place in each of their minds, and so by choosing this as our starting point we might find our way into their thoughts by placing ourselves in their position.

“For remembering really depends upon the potential existence of the stimulating cause… But he must seize hold of the starting point. For this reason some use places for the purpose of recollecting.”

The fountain, in this example, is therefore our ‘stimulating cause’, our ‘starting point’, a place for the ‘purpose of recollecting’. We share in effect a common space with those men who are marching in the photograph and as such we have a starting point from which to ‘initiate the effort of recollection’.
Whilst looking for old prewar photographs of Oxford, I happened upon some old postcards and thought at once how these objects were the perfect metaphor or symbol for our being away from home; a small sliver of our journey away. What we choose to write on the back is largely inconsequential, what is important, is that we have written, that we are remembering those back home.
As I wrote above:

“…how important the idea of ‘home’ was, and what a dreadful contrast it must have been to the realities of their often appalling predicaments.”

Home is an ever-present contrast to that place in which we find ourselves, whenever we travel or make a journey, no matter how long or short, and postcards (now perhaps superseded by texts and emails) are a means by which we remember where it is we come from, by which we close that gap.

Silence

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It was after reading a poem by Edmund Blunden that I started to think much more about silence as a space in which to remember. In ‘1916 seen from 1921,’ we get a glimpse of what it was like for Blunden, for a survivor of the Great War, as he looks back at the horrors of the conflict and ahead towards the future.

“…Those ruined houses seared themselves in me,
Passionate I look for their dumb story still,
And the charred stub outspeaks the living tree…”

In my previous entry, ‘Night and Day’ I touched on emptiness as a means by which we (or a place) might best remember an event or events:

“It is better to form one’s memory loci in a deserted and solitary place, for crowds of passing people tend to weaken the impression…”

Emptiness equates of course with silence, and, particularly in the case of the war, and all proceeding wars, silence is the means by which we collectively remember those who lost their lives. It is only now, having visited Auschwitz-Birkenau and Ieper, that I see the two minutes silence as a metaphor for the holes left by those who died; holes made by the absence of sound, the absence of voices. It is not only our voices which are stopped as we remember, but rather those of the dead.

© Nicholas Hedges 2024