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Monday – Memorial Day
One of the key monuments memorializing the war dead is the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing, which is dedicated to the 55,000 unnamed British and Commonwealth soldiers who were killed in the five World War I battles while defending the so-called Ypres Salient. (Over a million soldiers lost their lives in those battles.) One man who was not impressed was poet soldier Siegfried Sassoon.
Sassoon sees the memorial as scant compensation for Ypres’s “dim defenders.” Given that the memorial is honoring nameless soldiers, Sassoon points out the irony in its claim that “their name liveth forever.” While Sassoon himself acted heroically in the war, at one point single-handedly capturing a German trench and scattering 60 German soldiers, he eventually turned pacifist and came to oppose the war, barely avoiding court martial. As he saw it, what had started out as a war of defense became a senseless slaughter for dubious ends.
In “On Passing the New Menin Gate,” written years later in 1927, he imagines the dead returning to deride “this sepulcher of crime.” Those responsible for the war think they can pay off the dead with “a pile of peace-complacent stone.”
It is a sentiment reminiscent of Wilfred Owen, whose poetry Sassoon encouraged and, after Owen’s death in the last week of the war, promoted. I’m thinking particularly of “Dulce et Decorum Est,” where Owen savagely attacks the notion that “it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” In “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” meanwhile, Owen says that passing bells are inadequate “for these who die as cattle.”
For Sassoon’s part, in “Menin Gate” he speaks of “the unheroic dead who fed the guns.” No one can “absolve the foulness of their fate,/ Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones”:
On Passing the New Menin Gate
By Siegfried Sassoon
Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
the unheroic dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate,-
Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?
Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.
Here was the world’s worst wound. And here with pride
‘Their name liveth for ever’, the Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so belied
as these intolerably nameless names?
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulcher of crime.
While war memorials are important, we prove ourselves deserving of derision if we do not do all in our power to prevent the wars that make them necessary.
