Monuments to the missing

Published 17 July 2006

The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme
Gavin Stamp Profile Books, 224pp, £14.99
ISBN 1904897606
Following the horrors of the Somme, architects set about commemorating the dead. Jonathan Meades salutes the timeless grandeur of Edwin Lutyens’s arch at Thiepval

It is impossible to imagine an English popular singer acknowledging the sacrifices of his grandparents' generation and the terrors they suffered. Michel Sardou (born in 1947) wrote a song in the late 1970s called "Verdun". It is grave and melancholic, horribly apt. And in a small way it is compensation for his nation's failure to honourably commemorate its dead by architectural means. Sure, the Voie Sacrée, which runs from Bar-le-Duc to Verdun, is a memorial of a sort: 90-year-old tanks detrited by rust constellate a landscape that recalls the steppe and is furrowed with gun emplacements and redoubts. But the vast ossuary at Douaumont is a matter for shame. It is shockingly inappropriate.

Léon Azéma, Max Edrei and Jacques Hardy were not architects of the first rank. And they adopted an idiom peculiar to French and Belgian sacred architecture of the 1920s and 1930s. In the hands of Paul Tournon (the architect of Sainte-Thérèse in the Renault garden village of Élisabethville and Saint-Esprit on avenue Daumesnil, Paris 12e) or Jacques Barge (Sainte-Odile, Paris 17e), this wilfully exotic, vaguely oriental art deco is charming: if you like your churches to resemble cinemas, it is just the ticket. But even had Azéma and his collaborators been less ham-fisted, the very style, which might derive from an illustration by Willy Pogany, could only be counted a frivolous mistake - a mistake exacerbated by its proportions (the ossuary is almost 150 yards long). The architecture of pleasure, monstrously distended, is inimical to meditative remembrance. The designers seem not to have had the nerve to address the awful purpose of their monument, and shamefully made light of it - they effected a betrayal of the dead.

Gavin Stamp is neither chauvinistic nor Francophobic in his assertion that the monuments and cemeteries erected by the architects of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission possess a fitness manifestly lacking in the indigenous works. Rudyard Kipling, who lost his son among the millions of dead and who selected the inscription "Their name liveth for evermore" from the Book of Ecclesiasticus, described the campaign of building as "the biggest single bit of work since any of the Pharaohs - and they only worked in their own country". It is a proper comparison, for the greatest of the monuments - that which gives this fine, austere book its title - is as elementally potent as the pyramids.

The architect was Edwin Lutyens. Stamp considers the arch at Thiepval, between Arras and Amiens, to be his supreme creation. Despite the rehabilitation that Lutyens's reputation has enjoyed over the past 30 years, not least through Stamp's own persuasive championship, this is a far from orthodox view. It is the precocious early Lutyens of spellbinding, almost hallucinatory informal villas for Randlords and Tono-Bungay-ish entrepreneurs who is more routinely valued. Nikolaus Pevsner's opinion is typical: Thiepval reveals "little of the best of Lutyens"; his art was "petrified by the cold, never wholly relaxing grip of Palladianism". But then Pevsner was nothing if not parti pris: he couldn't - more likely wouldn't - see beyond the matter of a generalised idiom which he reckoned retardataire (one of his favourite words), regardless of how infected with genius this work might be.

He didn't, however, go as far as Alison and Peter Smithson, who claimed, preposterously, that by eschewing modernism Lutyens had "perverted the course of English architecture". This silly aesthetic factionalism fails to acknowledge modernism's incapacity to devise a commemorative mode. Such artists as Richard Gilbert Scott in the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Birmingham, Le Corbusier at Ronchamp in Haute-Saône, and Sáenz de Oiza and Laorga at Arantzazu in the Basque Country, made churches of signal architectural merit: but whether they fulfil the needs of their particular communion is another matter. And anyway, the arch (or arches) at Thiepval is not a religious monument; it was certainly not constructed with a denominational bias.

One might, in a Whiggish way, suggest that Lutyens's tectonic ecumenicism was "ahead of its time". Equally, it was a case of respectful manners, a courteous recognition that those who gave their lives for a still predominantly Christian country were not themselves necessarily believers: it was not war and victory that were being trumpeted, but innocent, mostly conscripted victims who were being honoured. There is, further, the matter of Lutyens's own beliefs.

It is telling to note among the architects who contributed to this unprecedented programme the name of W H Cowlishaw. He belonged to the folksiest tendency of the arts and crafts, and his greatest work, the determinedly eccentric Cloisters at Letchworth, was built for his fellow theosophist Annie Lawrence. Lutyens wasn't much of a joiner, but he was a fellow-traveller of theosophy, despite more or less losing his wife to it. Stamp describes him as being "sympathetic to its pantheism". That he designed the Theosophical Society's headquarters in Bloomsbury (now the British Medical Association) cannot have escap ed his detractors. The Catholic Herald dismissed his earlier Cenotaph as "a pagan monument", and his refusal to include Christian motifs, specifically the cross, at Thiepval excited wrathful questions in parliament and the indignation of Randall Davidson, then archbishop of Canterbury.

Lutyens was fortunate. His adamancy was doggedly supported by his patron, the founder of what was initially the Graves Registration Commission, Sir Fabian Ware, a sometime imperial administrator who did not conform to the clichés ascribed to that caste. Stamp has always possessed a gift for the demolition of received ideas, and his economical sketch of this singular and selfless man is salutary. Of course, in Lutyens, Ware had an artist whom it was not difficult to defend. By the end of the war he was 50, the designer of New Delhi and the most celebrated architect of the empire, if not a figure of the establishment (as it wasn't then called) like that fulminating devotee of demolition Sir Reginald Blomfield: it is enjoyable to imagine the outrage that Blomfield's louche nephew, Edward Burra, must have caused him.

Stamp is surprisingly sanguine on the subject of Blomfield's ponderous Menin Gate at Ypres. Siegfried Sassoon wasn't: "Was ever an immo lation so belied/As these intolerably nameless names?/Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime/Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime." The futility of stylistic taxonomy could hardly be better illustrated than by comparing Blomfield's clodhopper to Lutyens's refulgent creation. "Classical" is rendered meaningless - or is, rather, an epithet so broad in its application that it can signify almost anything. Lutyens wrote about his struggle to master the orders as an adept of free verse might write about a prosodical leap to pentameter: "You cannot copy . . . If you tackle it in this way the order belongs to you, and every stroke must become endowed with such poetry and artistry as God has given you . . . You alter one feature (which you have to, always) then every other feature has to sympathise and undergo the same care and invention." Invention is key: Thiepval's "classicism" was as new as anything the modern movement devised; newer, indeed, for by 1932, when it was completed, modernism was already frenetically feeding off its brief past.

What it wasn't was modern "in our specialised sense", as Hugh Casson once quaintly put it. Stamp considers that early Lutyens presaged the Lutyens of Thiepval by playing the "high game" of classicism from almost the beginning of his career. It is also the case that his genius remained consistently powerful when applied to apparently different idioms. He seldom failed to create a genre of his own. The link between houses such as Marsh Court or Tigbourne Court and Thiepval is the breathtaking deftness of the architectonic mind that is revealed. Unlike those houses, Thiepval has the advantage of might. It dominates the killing fields in isolated grandeur and is the beneficiary of the illusory phenomenon called size constancy: our brain persuades our eyes that the distant object is larger than it is. This is a book of remarkable emotional restraint. Few works of architectural history are so founded in admiration for their subject, and few evince such indignant scorn for the negligent callousness without which that subject would have had no cause to exist.

Post this article to

We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.