World War I memorials

The fighting was mechanised and conducted on an industrial scale; existing weapons, such as machine guns and artillery, were combined with the innovative deployment of aircraft, submarines and poison gas.

In Canada, for example, the distinctions between the English, largely Protestant, and French speaking, predominantly Catholic, parts of the country become increasingly apparent, with conscription becoming a major political issue.

[29] In part, there was a rupture or dislocation with the pre-war norms of how memorials should look and feel; communities sought to find new, radical ways to mourn the millions of dead, killed in an essentially modern conflict.

Local Australian groups erected small monuments, such as drinking fountains and stone pillars, to the point where the government became concerned about the expenditure on them and passed a law in 1916 to control their numbers.

[65] Former servicemen occasionally felt that their opinions were excluded from the formal processes, while in other cases complaints were made that the wealthier members of the community were given a disproportionate role in decision-making.

In Romania, most memorials in the early 1920s were initially erected by local communities; in 1919 the royal family created the "Societatea Cultul Eroilor Morţi" (The Cult of the Fallen Heroes Society) to oversee commemoration of the war more generally; the organisation was headed by the Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church.

The civil memorial contained numerous monuments offered by the allied nations: France, Italy, United Kingdom, Romania, Greece, Poland, Russia and Spain.

[89] Utilitarian memorials were intended to commemorate the dead by having a practical function and typically include projects such as libraries, small hospitals, cottages for nursing staff, parks, clock towers or bowling greens, although in Britain and Canada, large-scale urban redevelopment projects were also proposed, including rebuilding the centre of Westminster, to form a huge war memorial complex and building a subway under the Detroit River.

[109] They were built around lawns, without flowers or other decorations, intended to highlight acceptance of the tragedy and avoid the expensive and pretentious sentimentality that the German VDK felt Allied cemeteries invoked.

[128] It was finally closed by the Bolsheviks in 1925 and turned into a park; subsequently, possibly on the orders of Joseph Stalin, the Eastern Orthodox church building and the headstones were systematically destroyed until almost no trace of the cemetery remained.

The main Italian war cemeteries were not finished until 1938, and their positioning in some cases carried special political meaning, emphasising Italy's right to claim important, but ethnically diverse, border regions.

[148] Resources and funds were needed to construct most memorials, particular larger monuments or building projects; sometimes professional services could be acquired for nothing, but normally designers, workmen and suppliers had to be paid.

[150] The sheer volume of work encouraged industrial innovation: carving the inscriptions into the many thousands of British memorial stones had to originally be undertaken by hand, for example, until a Lancashire company invented an automated engraving process.

[118] In Britain, voluntary subscription, rather than funding from local or central government, was considered the only correct way to pay for a war memorial, although it was disputed whether active proactive fundraising was appropriate.

In part, this was a response to the practical problem of commemorating such large numbers of dead, but it carried additional symbolic importance; in some ways, the physical presence of a name acted to compensate for an absent body.

[185] The British Prime Minister David Lloyd George decided that a similar but non-denominational memorial should be built in London, despite ministerial concerns that a cenotaph was an inappropriate, Catholic form of monument, and that it might be desecrated.

[186] The victory marches went ahead; French political leaders had the memorial in Paris removed immediately after the parade, on the basis that it was too Germanic in appearance, but the London cenotaph proved very popular and hundreds of thousands flocked to see it.

[188] A new, permanent cenotaph designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens was commissioned and unveiled on Whitehall on Armistice Day 1920, effectively turning this part of London into a memorial to the war; over a million people visited the site during November that year.

The US constructed a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in 1921; while the idea was clearly a foreign concept, it proved very popular with the American public and by 1936 was attracting over 1.5 m visitors a year and acting as an informal national monument to the war.

[230] The Ossuary at Verdun was the centre for many veterans pilgrimages in the 1920s, one of the better known groups being the Fêtes de la Bataille, which travelled to the site to undertake a vigil, processions and lay wreaths.

In Italy, these involved large, state-influenced organisations, and the government steadily discouraged private visits or unofficial groups from taking part in alternative ceremonies at these sites.

Those who supported the war were keen to see the ideals of justice and freedom embodied in the designs; those who opposed the conflict sought memorials that would convince people to avoid future slaughter.

[247] In Britain, the religious differences between Anglicans, Nonconformists and Roman Catholics were frequently played out at a local level in arguments over the location and symbolism to be used in memorials.

[77] The Fascist leader Mussolini was less enthusiastic, however, about the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which he felt was associated with the former regime; he discouraged its use, although remained sensitive to its symbolic importance to various parts of Italian society.

[300] Where dead soldiers were shown, they were depicted in an image of serenity and peace, often physically distanced from the viewer on a high platform, the entire effect reflected by the silence that traditionally surrounds ceremonies at the Cenotaph.

[314] In Germany, the totenburgen usually looked to the past for their style; Tannenberg, for example, was heavily medieval in appearance, resembling a castle, albeit combined with a huge cross and mass graves.

[311] The style was actively promoted by a number of extant artistic and architectural institutions and groups, such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Arts and Crafts Movement and Gothic revivalists.

[322] Realism and early modernist principles were applied in Britain to produce a critique of the conventional classical approach and the concept of a "beautiful death", most notably by Charles Jagger.

[337] The Romanian Societata itself was abolished in 1948, pilgrimages to the memorials ceased and the focus of the Communist government was almost entirely placed on commemorating the sacrifices of the Soviet army during World War II.

[347] In Russia, the Memorial park complex of the heroes of the First World War was built on the site of the former Moscow City Fraternity Cemetery after the fall of Communism, opening in 2005 at a cost of 95 million roubles.