The Popular Memory of the Western Front: Archaeology and European Heritage

The Western Front retains an important place in the ‘collective memory’ of the former combatant countries of Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The conict still lingers in the minds of many, even as the 100th anniversaries of the war approach. In many respects, however, the history and memory of the conict remain constricted by national agendas. In Britain, the battleelds of Northern France and Belgium appear to still haunt contemporary society, as despite erce ghting in other theatres of war, the Western Front is remembered as the Great War (Bond 2002). Indeed, such is the effect of this myopia that the war on the Western Front is often viewed as a ‘private British sorrow’ (Terraine 1980, 120). The poignant hold of the battleelds and the resonance that ‘the trenches’ still possess in Britain can be witnessed in the novels and lms still produced every year (Korte 2001, 120). The images of desolate war-torn landscapes, shattered tree stumps and disillusioned soldiers occupying lthy, muddy, rat-infested trenches still possess the capacity to evoke deep emotion nearly 90 years after the Armistice. Alongside these disturbing images, the conict is recalled with images of apparently peaceful serenity, of the cemeteries of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, where the monumental architecture of Luytens and Blomeld, the uniform headstones and verdant turf were utilized in the immediate post-war period to ‘heal a scarred landscape’ (Heffernan 1995, 293). It is these contrasting images of the battleelds of Northern France and Belgium that serve as the visual frames of reference for the memory of the Western Front.