Chapter 6

Rhetoric, materiality, and US Western Front commemoration

V. William Balthrop , Carole Blair and
Neil Michel

Heffernan’s observation serves as our point of departure in accessing the modes by which interwar US memorialization on the Western Front was produced and how it has been continually reproduced. The invented landscape Heffernan marks is not just a periodized memorial production; it is an assemblage of commemorative places always being produced. Thus, we take particular US locations on the Western Front as exemplars of practiced, rhetorical memory places (Blair et al., 2010: 22–32).

Rhetoricians, like other communication scholars, have theorized materiality in various ways. These include, but are not limited to, considerations of rhetorical praxis: (1) in relation to the body; (2) as itself material, and as a response to material conditions; (3) as differentially material, because of its specific modes of mediation; and (4) as consequential not only in the sense of mediating cultural identities and/or political economic conditions, but also in terms of its various modes of effectivity.¹ This chapter intersects these possibilities by attending to interventions in a particular space in different times that invented and continue to reinvent American commemoration in Europe. The Western Front, once a largely agricultural and industrial space, was transformed by World War I (WWI) into a space of mass death and ground obliteration. After the war, it was remade as again industrial and agricultural, but also as an international commemorative space that accommodates, and that is constantly changed by, tourism, rituals and spectacles of remembrance, political and military actions, and so on. Our focus here is the interwar invention of the space as commemorative and its reinvention through time, focusing especially upon US memory places within the international context of commemoration on the Front.

Place – especially memory place – is often thought of as bordered, unchanging, exclusionary, and predicated in some sense of stable, “authentic” community (Cresswell, 2004: 26). An exemplar of this view is Nora’s distinction between milieux and lieux de mémoire (1989: 7): a milieu represents a kind of “natural” habitat of memory, while a lieu de mémoire (memory place) is an artificial trace of the lost milieu, in an age of “globalisation, democratisation, massification, and mediatisation” (Carrier, 2000: 41). However, like many geographers and other rhetoricians (Stewart and Dickinson, 2008; Zagacki and Gallagher, 2009), we see place instead as practiced and produced; characterized by openness and change; and its borders, character, and “authenticity” as rhetorical effects. Massey’s notion of trajectories that produce and reproduce place (in the sense of remaking rather than replication) is more aligned with our position. She argues that place should be conceived as an event, as “open and as internally multiple” (2005: 141). She suggests, furthermore, that: “In sharp contrast to the view of place as settled and pregiven, with a coherence only to be disturbed by ‘external’ forces, places as presented here in a sense necessitate invention; they pose a challenge …” (ibid.). Massey invites us to think of places as always under construction, as spheres of heterogeneous trajectories, or “stories-so-far” (ibid.: 9).

Massey’s understanding of place is consonant with many understandings of public memory production; for example, Graham describes relations to the past as inescapably and “essentially transient” constructions that reflect the “particular time and place of their genesis,” but that become for future generations resources of new interpretations (1998: 23). These positions suggest a bond with rhetoric, understood materially. It was through the rhetorical invention and reinvention (otherwise put, through the negotiation of sometimes contradictory trajectories), that the commemorative sites of the Western Front were established and have changed over time. As Blair et al. suggest, “memory places themselves have histories … [T]hey do not just represent the past. They accrete their own pasts” (2010: 30).

WWI was the most destructive conflict in history to that time. Along a front of trenches that reached 400 miles, from the ports of Belgium and France to Switzerland, the damage was unprecedented and devastating (Thrift, 1983: 18). Demangeon described in 1920, a “zone of death … in which good land had been transformed into a desert, a wild steppe, where the fields have erupted, … wherever the ‘cyclone’ had passed” (quoted by Clout, 1996: 3–4). In France, the devastated region was “more than twice the size of Wales or Massachusetts” (Kramer, 2007: 314). The human toll was even more staggering, with almost 9 million war dead and approximately 5 million civilian deaths (Kramer, 2007: 251).

In addition to issues of restoring the destroyed landscape, the questions that confronted all combatant nations were: What do we do with the bodies, and how do we prevent this from ever happening again? These questions were answered by what Smith describes as a territorialization of memory, “the creation of a field or zone of powerful … attachments” (2003: 134). Hundreds of monuments and military cemeteries – French, British (Empire), Belgian, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, and American – were constructed alongside and coincident with the rebuilding and/or relocation of factories, farms, homes, and villages, during the interwar period.

The American commemorative program for WWI consists of 8 cemeteries and 14 monuments. Six cemeteries are located in France and Belgium where US troops saw combat; the others are in suburbs of Paris (Suresnes) and London (Brookwood).² The monuments include large structures at Montfaucon, Château-Thierry, and Montsec recognizing the most significant operations by the American Expeditionary Force (Figure 6.1), a large monument overlooking the harbor at Brest marking the debarkation of troops, and ten others ranging in size from a moderately sized tower at Sommepy to a small bronze plaque identifying first Army headquarters at Souilly. This program was not invented by some unitary, singular process or group. It was the result of a convergence of a large number of trajectories: the character of the war, considerations of precedent military commemoration, changing objectives on the part of US officials, differing priorities and preferences of government agencies, demands made by US citizens, responses to other nations’ commemorative plans, and so on.

Figure 6.1 American monument at Montsec near St. Mihiel. Photo by authors.

The task of physically marking the actions of US forces was given to the Battle Monuments Board, created in June 1921, by order of the War Department. Later that year, the Board approved the following principles: First, the

Second, “all work [is] to be of [the] highest standard. A few monuments well executed are far better than a large number done in a mediocre way. Monuments must properly represent the United States – be perfect in all respects” (Battle Monuments Board, 1921: 1). These principles arose from growing concern about the number of unofficial (and rudimentary) monuments left by departing military units, erected without any authority, on ground they did not own, and for which there was no provision of future maintenance. The War Department was determined too that any representations of US military action would be historically accurate, something it feared would not occur with nonfederal monuments.

The Board was entering unknown territory when it began its work, and it turned to the only readily available precedent for military memorials: the US Civil War. A delegation of the Board traveled to the Antietam Battlefield and recommended particular styles of relief maps and pedestals, like some they found there. Their recommendations were approved at the Board’s second meeting and established the foundation for the memorials project. The result was a plan to place over 150 bronze relief map monuments along the Front (House of Representatives, 1922: 10). By 1922, the justifications for commemorating the American presence had expanded. As Secretary of War John Weeks wrote to the Director of the Bureau of the Budget:

The Civil War’s influence extended far beyond the relief maps; the Union’s practice of honoring each individual soldier sacrificed in the war was copied by other WWI combatants as well as the United States. In previous wars, nations had buried their dead in mass graves, with individual burials and markers reserved only for prominent men. Following the US Civil War, however, there were pressures to identify and bury individual remains when possible and to honor the missing. From the first engagements of WWI, French, British, and German armies established units “to register individual graves and the names of the dead and to keep lists” (Mosse, 1990: 81); the United States followed suit after its entry in 1917.

Germany and Britain adopted policies of no repatriation, for quite different reasons, while the French, and later the Americans, allowed families to reclaim the bodies with costs of relocation borne by the governments. Repatriation of American bodies was originally opposed by War Department officials, who believed that the presence of cemeteries would serve as a perpetual reminder to Europeans of the sacrifice made by the United States (Budreau, 2010: 36). Domestic political pressure, however, forced the government to allow families the choice of leaving their loved ones in Europe or repatriating them for burial (Sledge, 2005: 136).

In 1923, the Battle Monuments Board was transformed into the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC), an independent agency reporting to the President. The ABMC – chaired by General John J. Pershing – negotiated with the French and Belgian governments for appropriate cemetery and monument sites. It prohibited all nonfederal memorials except those granted approval by the Commission. But it had come to recognize the difficulty of placing so many memorials on French and Belgian soil and sought alternatives to the relief maps plan. Following meetings with the British Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC) in 1924, ABMC commissioners realized the scope of British commemorative efforts, which included hundreds of cemeteries (ranging in size from a few dozen to more than 11,000 burials at Étaples, France) and two giant monuments to the missing in Ypres, Belgium (the Menin Gate) and at Thiepval, France.

The ABMC’s concerns about its planned number of relief maps and about the size of Britain’s commemorative project were to have major influence on the final design for American commemoration in Europe. Instead of more than 150, 14 monuments were constructed; they contained maps but bore little resemblance to the earlier plan. The ABMC took British plans into consideration in decisions about consolidation, location, and enhancements of US cemeteries. The cemetery sites – consolidated to eight from as many as 2,000 temporary burial sites – were selected on the basis of the following: distributions of American casualties, proximity to battlefields, and capacity to render clear statements about the United States’ role in the war and its new standing as an international power. In both the Somme and Flanders areas, the US presence was small compared to the French and British. Nevertheless, the ABMC wanted to make sure that the role played by the AEF was clearly visible; hence its decisions to build fewer but much larger cemeteries in regions likely to receive the greatest number of international battlefield tourists.

The Battle Monuments Board and ABMC were not the only US groups involved in the commemorative program, and occasionally different priorities and goals among collectives gave rise to conflicts, but also to distinctive resolutions. The Fine Arts Commission (FAC) worked with the War Department and Graves Registration Service to design the permanent cemeteries. The FAC, borrowing from the Civil War precedent, proposed that uniform headstones patterned after those in the older sections of Arlington National Cemetery be used in the cemeteries. Public pressure emerged almost immediately, however, to retain the white cross (albeit in a more permanent form) that had marked the temporary graves, press photos of which had been widely circulated.

The public pressure for the cross was successful, and Paul Cret, consulting architect for ABMC, designed a Latinate cross and a Star of David for those of the Jewish faith. The markers were to be carved from Carrara marble and inscribed with each serviceman’s name, rank, unit, date of death, and home state or territory. The headstones for those whose remains were unidentified were inscribed with the phrase, “Here rests in honored glory an American Soldier known but to God.” The use of the cross, simply modified for Jewish soldier dead,

Clearly, the cemeteries were intended to make a series of claims to different audiences. First, as Piehler notes,

Additionally, the construction projects “would reflect the power and prestige of the United States” (Piehler, 1994: 169). As Charles Moore, chair of the FAC, wrote, the cemeteries would express “American participation in the war for civilization.” He maintained that

Figure 6.2 Suresnes American Cemetery. Photo by authors.

To honor the American dead and to convey that sense of power and prestige, most of the cemetery chapels would contain a map that outlined offensive operations in the immediate area where most of those buried in the cemeteries had fought, and a reception area to meet visitors. Maps, both in the cemeteries and at the monuments, reflected the original plan developed by the Board. Additionally, no doubt influenced by the British efforts in Ypres and Thiepval, the ABMC inscribed the names of those whose bodies were not found or not identified on the inside walls of the chapels. Although the British, French, and Germans all had more dead than the Americans, the Americans compensated by having more extensive, park-like landscapes to indicate that the dead were provided with a lasting peace. Headstones were placed farther apart than in other countries’ cemeteries to convey a sense of spaciousness and wealth (see Figure 6.3). Meyer noted that, “The overall effect is one of quiet dignity matched with a combination of cultured taste and implied wealth and power – precisely the qualities envisioned and sought after by those who originally designed these landscapes” (2001: 224). Locals clearly noticed too: “When you see the admirable cemetery for 25,000 Americans at Romagne,” an observer told the [French] national commission, “you will want us to have comparable ones wherever our sons distinguished themselves” (Sherman, 1999: 79).

Figure 6.3 Meusse-Argonne American Cemetery (left); British Cemetery at Tyne Cot (right). Photos by authors.

An important objective for the American commemorative program was to represent the character of the nation state, including its valuing of equality and Christianity. Officers were buried alongside the men they commanded, and all were commemorated by identical headstones. And, in a particularly striking departure from prevailing social attitudes in the United States and from customary practice in American cemeteries, the decision was made to bury the dead together without consideration of race. If the headstones – a large majority of which were crosses – indicated the overwhelmingly Christian character of the nation, the chapels made that statement even more strongly. From the beginning, the ABMC directed the architects that they were to be “nondenominational” yet be “Christian in character” (Budreau, 2010: 124).

In selecting architects to design the cemeteries, the FAC and the ABMC turned to prominent artists trained in classicism. Paul Cret, the ABMC’s consulting architect, believed that the classical design of monuments and chapels could help to “assure the continuity of history across the rupture of the First World War” (Grossman, 1984: 139). As Sherman observes, the invocation of past styles “constructed a lineage, or in Foucauldian terms a descent, encompassing the soldiers of World War I and by implication extending into the future” (1999: 96). The act of commemoration, then, became liminal, marking connections as well as transitions, seeking to overcome WWI’s cultural disruptions and threatened destabilization, while pointing toward new possibilities. The cemeteries and monuments themselves indicated a different and changing world, wherein the United States displayed its role as an international power on the very ground of Europe.

These commemorative sites changed the material landscapes as they turned ground that had been devastated by war into park-like settings honoring the nation and its soldiers. They also changed the trajectories and the stories that could be told and lessons learned. Although initial visitors were fascinated by scenes of destruction,

These commemorative sites were clearly conceptualized in the interwar period as “national” or “imperial.” Yet, that claim, too, must be tempered with the consideration of other forces at work. From the time of early battlefield tours and pilgrimage that allowed visitors both to witness the destruction of war and to pay respects to their loved ones, the landscape changed. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, another undercurrent began to gain credence, that these “sights [sic] provided a lesson in the horrors of war and the need to work for peace” (Lloyd, 1998: 127). The memory of the dead was invoked to assure that such a war would, indeed, be the “war to end all wars.” Sir Fabian Ware, head of the IWGC,

The US monuments and cemeteries are not the same places as in the interwar period; they have been changed by the interventions of subsequent events’ appropriations of the sites. While the goals for which they were established still have force – to remind host nations of the sacrifices made by Americans, to honor those who died, and to represent American values to visitors – the ways those are accomplished have changed because of reinvention of the sites, frequently by interventions of those other than the US government. The most significant intervention that changed the commemorative places was World War II (WWII). Some of the cemeteries experienced damage from shelling and vandalism by German forces, most visible now in the shell hole in the front of the chapel at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery (Figure 6.4).

Figure 6.4 Shell hole in chapel at Aisne-Marne American Cemetery. Photo by authors.

WWII had an even more destructive effect in Brest. The monument erected there to recognize WWI debarkation sites was destroyed by German forces on July 1, 1941, well before the United States’ entry into the hostilities. Following the war, the monument was rebuilt to specification, but with additional information explaining the destruction and reconstruction. The monument is now seen by most people in Brest, a city leveled by fighting in 1944, as a monument to WWII as well as WWI (Figure 6.5).

Figure 6.5 American monument at Brest. Photo by authors.

Some US cemeteries were appropriated during WWII by local citizens as sites of resistance. After the Nazis occupied Paris in June 1940, only four visitors to Suresnes signed the guest book there, until May 30, 1941. On that US Memorial Day, 11 people signed the guest book, listing their addresses as Suresnes, neighboring Saint Cloud, or Paris. No further visits were recorded except on Memorial Days in 1942, 1943, and 1944. The subsequent signatures were recorded on August 28, 1944, three days after Paris was liberated. The Memorial Day visits transformed the cemetery’s rhetoric into one of defiance. Making this use of the cemetery all the more remarkable is its location at the base of Fort du Mont Valérien, where members of the French resistance were executed regularly by German forces. At the St. Mihiel American Cemetery, guest book entries as early as May and June 1943 linked France with the United States and England: “Vive la France”; “Vive l’Amerique et l’Angleterre”; and “Hommage aux soldats americains.” By January 1944, the tone had shifted, anticipating liberation (“Attendons votre retour avec impatience”) and praising Allied forces (“Vive les alliés et la libération”). Not as overtly dangerous a place as Suresnes, such comments still could have had very serious consequences for their writers at St. Mihiel.

The Suresnes and Oise-Aisne cemeteries carry traces of official postwar decisions that changed the sites profoundly. At Suresnes, the decision was made to bury 24 unknown soldiers from WWII among those from WWI, so that ceremonies held on US Memorial Days could honor American dead from both wars and would take advantage of the cemetery’s location near Paris. The 24 unknowns, moved to Suresnes from the battlegrounds of Normandy, are buried in a special plot, their graves laid out in the form of a Latinate cross (Amen, 1949: 1). Additionally, two logia were added to the central chapel at Suresnes, to commemorate the dead from each war.

The decision making was very different at Oise-Aisne. During WWI, US soldiers executed for criminal acts were buried among their compatriots with no indication of their ignoble ends. In WWII, the US government decided that that war’s “dishonored dead” should not be buried in the regular grave plots. They were interred in Oise-Aisne American Cemetery’s new “Plot E,” located in a secluded area behind the superintendent’s quarters, in 94 graves marked only with small, flat, numbered plaques. Plot E remade Oise-Aisne as a cemetery for both world wars, but it introduced an unsavory rhetorical tonality to the place, because of the secretive way in which it was sited and treated by US officials.

Official US decisions may change these places, but so do the uses visitors and host countries make of them. They have been used as spaces of quiet but sometimes articulate protest on current issues. Although a majority of guest book comments through the years have read like thank you notes for the liberation of Europe, some comments have been quite critical of the United States, especially in times of international discord, like the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003. Visitors also use the sites as means to express international amity. Immediately after September 11, 2001, guest book condolences were legion. The cemeteries and monuments became sites of spontaneous shrines for the victims in the US. People left letters, cards, flowers, school drawings, and so on offering comfort and pledging solidarity – usually accompanied by an analog to one or both of the world wars in terms of international alliance.

Other trajectories both reify and remake the claims advanced by the commemorative programs. In many respects, visitors to the sites have engaged with them in ways that affirmed the original goals of their designers. Not only does the presence of others at a cemetery or memorial reproduce the site’s claim of national significance, but so do the rituals that visitors have developed and continue to perform there, such as placing floral bouquets at the headstones of distant relatives or attending ceremonies honoring American dead from all wars on Memorial Day.

Other interventions by visitors remake these trajectories in quite different ways. A poem left by a visitor at an American Medal of Honor recipient’s headstone speaks to the original desire to honor the American dead. But that same poem, found later at the headstone of a German soldier also attests eloquently to the sacrifice of youth, in a way that underscores the international connections among commemorative sites and undercuts an overtly nationalist reading; there is more than a suggestion here of a different public and a different memory. Thus, “the uses to which visitors put memorial sites make, remake, and unmake the imposed structures of power” (Blair et al., 2010: 29). The presence of memory sites of the various combatant nations reinforces the impression of shared loss and the devastation of war, transcending the national imperative. They work to create different publics where the collective story becomes not one of national pride – although that certainly exists – but a reconstituted international public that vows such carnage must never happen again (Graham, 1998: 44).

American commemorative sites are also used as stages for enactments of the past. During the Meuse Departement’s 2008 recognition of the 90th anniversary of WWI’s end, the monument at Montfaucon served as the final stop on a 100-kilometer “illumination,” a marathon that wound its way through villages liberated by American forces during the St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne offensives. Volunteers from local police brigades carried a torch lit at the St. Mihiel cemetery on the overnight run, stopping at the local villages for a brief ceremony. The final ceremonies at Montfaucon included commemoration of the liberation by American forces, accompanied by an honor guard of re-enactors performing French poilus and American “sammies.” A similarly purposed appropriation took place at the Montfaucon monument on two weekends during September and October 2008. A sound-and-light show was staged there recounting a history of the village of Montfaucon, focusing on its devastation in WWI and its subsequent liberation by US forces, and later its liberation during WWII, again by US soldiers. More than 600 local citizens participated as actors, with another 600 providing food, security, and support services. Such events at Montfaucon, and other American monuments, continue to perform – and cement – international alliance and amity.

Most of the devastated Western Front has been reclaimed to productive life. The visits of next-of-kin to commemorative sites are fewer than in the past, and those who visit are of different generations. There are still pilgrimages, but they are of a quite different kind. Tourists keep coming, often by the bus load, seeking not to mourn but to reap in some way an “experience” of WWI. The cemeteries and monuments still do powerful rhetorical work, but they have been changed in important ways because of official augmentations, uses to which they are put by tourists, and subsequent events that have left important traces. They, like all memory places, cannot remain the same, because of the inevitable trajectories that remediate them.

Notes

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