The cartoonist Kenneth Bird, who used the pen-name Fougasse, is mostly remembered now for the propaganda work that he undertook for various government departments during World War II. The best known were on the theme ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’: the elegance and wit of his penmanship made a series of sharp messages come memorably, humanly alive. They were only really a step away from the body of his work, however, which was typically acutely observant of bourgeois foibles, but only gently satirical at best and shot through with a kind of forgiveness.
My dad, who served in the Pacific in the last months of the war, had several books of Fougasse’s work on the family shelves. Leafing through them as a child, I remember being drawn to his drawings of harassed young men who have made a social faux pas, and who are entirely alone and isolated – visibly ostracised – in the middle of the frame, and surrounded by a mass of outraged men and women who have all turned to stare at him. As I recall, these drawings typically had a title beginning ‘The man who…’.
I thought of them the other day. Fougasse would have made hay with a cartoon titled ‘The man who decided to leave the D-Day commemorations early’.
Rishi Sunak’s decision not to stay for all the ceremonies to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy on 6 June has united the country in a kind of baffled non-partisan shock, extending into anger, in a way that I can’t remember any previous prime ministerial decision doing. It is a kind of gift to the country, I suppose. Fougasse would have found the humour in it: the vast national crowd turning en masse to point at the hapless young man who didn’t think he was doing anything wrong. But I suspect Sunak is not alone among political activists of all parties in failing to understand the value of national ceremony in and of itself – whether commemorative or celebratory, defiant or bellicose – as a builder and binder of national identity. Politics is far from the rational enterprise many of its practitioners wish it to be, a thing of systems and spreadsheets only; policy is often just another language through which emotion speaks.
And what is more emotive that remembering our dead? It is as old a human habit as anything we might call civilisation; perhaps it’s what civilisation is. The Natufian people, in what is now southern Israel and Jordan some 13,000 years BC, were among the earliest and largest sedentary human communities on the planet. They buried their dead under their homes; like many ancient cultures their dead were part of their daily lives. Not even dead, really. “The dead were members of society as active as the living,” the archaeologist Chris Gosden has written, “they were simply harder to understand.”
Commemorations like those than happened on 6 June pull both ways, towards the dead and towards the living too, towards those who survived and who remember. They are a kind of dialogue of gratitude and regret, of griefs acknowledged and griefs overcome. The dead say nothing, but their silence, the silence of so many young voices, is palpable nonetheless. More than palpable, it feels a living force, a weather front. A lot of big words hang in the air at these events – service, duty, sacrifice, and so on – but none of them are louder than that one great silent choir.
The British ceremony – the one our prime minister did attend – took place at the new British Normandy Memorial at Ver-sur-Mer overlooking Gold Beach, which was designed by Liam O’Connor and unveiled in 2021. The chosen site had been farmland, although an archaeological survey revealed the remains of a Roman temple from around 300 AD, which gives the memorial an eerie, uncomfortable sense of continuity. (There is a good piece here on the its austere blend of classicism and modernity.) As it happens, we visited it last October, towards the end of an unseasonably warm day as the hazy sun sank into the west.
I have written elsewhere about Reginald Blomfield’s vast memorial arch at the Menin Gate at Ypres, which despite its mass still proved insufficient to hold all the names of the missing servicemen on the Ypres Salient. The numbers still shock a century on. The Menin Gate records 54,896 names; nearby Tyne Cot a further 34,986. Remember, these were just the dead whose bodies were never found.
O’Connor’s task wasn’t on quite that scale, but his memorial still records nearly 22,500 deaths during the liberation of Normandy in the summer months of 1944. Most of them are inscribed on slim, square pillars which run in colonnades above the shoreline on either side of the central open courtyard. From a distance, though, what you notice are the vistas to the open sea. Which is to say, you notice the spaces between the pillars and the great absences among the columns of the dead. It’s a powerful architectural statement. And it is only when you walk seaward through the gateways in the wall of the memorial court that you see the statue of three men in motion charging up the bluff. It is as if they have been there always, waiting to be caught in bronze.
The memorial still has the feel of a new site. The planting has yet to mature and the pathways are lined with young saplings. It is growing into itself. You can’t help but think how bitter it is that the memorial can grow and age while those it remembers cannot.
Juxtapositions of age and youth, fixity and change, ran through the commemoration too. There are less than a hundred British veterans of D-Day still living, all of them surely among the youngest of personnel in 1944, and not all of them were able to attend. A number of their testimonies - acts of memory and bearing witness - were read, a few by actors, but others by current young service personnel. It was the latter whom you remember, because they embodied the qualities and the potential of their forerunners eighty years ago. For a moment time looped back on itself, and if they lacked a professional polish to their reading, that was part of the point: you knew they understood and absorbed the meaning of the the words they spoke better than anyone. Young French children from a nearby primary school in Creully Sur Seulles, named after a British veteran named Cecil Newton, lined up to give white roses to the old soldiers. It was neatly done; a slow dance of sorts. I can imagine some might have found this mawkish, too determined to tug at people’s hearts. But how else to mark so simply the cycles of life and the sense of things passed between - and therefore things connecting - generations at the extremes of life?
Youth was everywhere. Time and again you heard the veterans refer to themselves and their fallen comrades as just ‘lads’. It’s a term that tends to have negative connotations these days, a synonym for boorishness and a loutish disregard of societal norms. But it makes me think of the verse in Shakespeare’s late play Cymbeline:
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
And it makes me think too of the late Lyn Macdonald’s extraordinary oral histories of World War One, begun in 1978 with They Called It Passchendaele. I haven’t read any of them for thirty years probably, but the memories and terrors they bear witness to are searing. And all the more so because of the local friendships and camaraderies embodied in the names of so many of the volunteer units: the Church Lads Brigades, the Glasgow Tramways Battalion, the Yeoman Rifles, and on and on, the so-called ‘Pals Battalions’ comprised of platoons “of twenty or so”, Macdonald writes, “often from a single village, a single street, a single factory or sports club”. To think of all the horror they didn’t yet know waiting up ahead of them.
And then you saw last Thursday, in the distance, the silhouettes of the men - 1,475 of them, one for each soldier under British command who died in that place on 6 June 1944, heads downcast as if in thought or prayer, frozen in time, but also seemingly moving implacably onwards through the fields towards the present. Embodying stillness, embodying motion. I wondered what the veterans thought looking out on all those shapes and shadows so like their fallen comrades, so like themselves. Time again folding back on itself. At first, and for a long time, people wanted to forget. Who can blame them? Life needed to be lived. it’s only over time, as the shadows have lengthened, that people have fought to remember.
The veterans who were interviewed all seemed gentle souls, men who had been plunged – in what should have been the careless days of youth – into a maelstrom which are they still reckoning with eighty years on, longer than most of us will live. Reckoning, of course, is an old word for a bill for payment due, and for the judgement that awaits us on the other side of death.
That maelstrom might have been a bleak, black version of those Fougasse cartoons – ‘The man who remembered coming through hell’, perhaps. Hell was certainly something that Fougasse himself knew about: born in 1887 he volunteered for service in September 1914 and was injured at Gallipoli the following year, returning home with “a shattered back and little hope of survival”, a friend recalled. It was three years before he could walk again. Bird chose the pen-name Fougasse because it was a kind of French mine that sometimes went off and sometimes didn’t. Like the lads who stormed these shores, his gentleness was mixed with something adamantine too.
It was only happenstance that brought those men to Normandy, the maelstrom of history. They had no chance to turn back, or turn away. They might have been any one of us, really. And if they can no longer choose to forget, how should approach the task, the weight of that remembering, now that generation has almost passed on through? To forget is as human as to remember. For us, it is a choice. Will committing to remember shape the paths the nation takes in future? I don’t know. For them, the fierceness of their grief still seemed raw after eighty years, the determination to honour their lost young friends somehow more harrowing for the lateness of the hour.
Next week: the Portuguese artist Domingos Sequeira (1768–1837) and a painting of his I’ve fallen in love with.
Beautiful piece Matt. The numbers of unfound dead really are shocking.
But you made me laugh about Sunak’s gift to the nation - your gift to the reader, the gift that keeps on giving.