Memorialising the War

From It Was the Nightingale, pp. 52–3.

England had paid a terrible toll of the most English of its youth. In Notre Dame there was – there still is – a small tablet not much larger than a sheet of The Times of New York or London. It was surmounted by the pretty royal arms of England and her Dominions and announced that it was there to the glory of God and to the memory of more than a million British dead who lay for the most part in the fields of France .... It is a fine piece of English swank that that solitary tribute should be so small and so restrained. It is the fitting tailpiece to the Scrap of Paper speech,22 and if England had compassed nothing else she would be justified of her national and emotional rectitude. For myself I never come in the shadows on that lettering and those symbols in gold, azure and vermilion without feeling more emotion than – even in shadows – my British upbringing will let me express ....

‘Years After’ (1929); unpublished typescript: Cornell.

On Sunday afternoons – and at this time of year mostly at sunset and in the light falling through the great inimitable rose-windows to the West – I see a little pretty tablet on a column of Notre Dame. It is little and pretty – no other adjectives will describe it, for it is not very much larger than a pocket handkerchief and it is in bright reds, blues, yellows, gilding, with pretty lions, leopards, harps and lettering. It commemorates... ‘One Million British Dead’ who lie ‘for the most part in France’.

And that, as far as I know, is the only memorial in Paris, which is in the heart of France, to all those million who died and to all

22 The German Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, referred to the treaty of 1839 guaran-

teeing Belgian neutrality as a ‘scrap of paper’ when he responded to the British ultimatum of 4 August 1914.