WAR MEMORIALS

Most countries, I suspect, have war memorials. And the majority of those memorials heroize the dead warriors. The British Cenotaph in London, a memorial to the British soldiers and sailors killed in the 1914-1918 war, is emblazoned with the words “The Glorious Dead.” The Marine Memorial in Washington, D.C. remembers those who died in World War II in the image of four Marines struggling to raise a United States flag on Iwo Jima, a small island in the Pacific Ocean.

Trafalgar Square in London has a column at its center, topped with a statue of Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, the victor of the battle of Trafalgar in 1813. At Hyde Park Corner the Duke of Wellington, the British general who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, has a great marble arch dedicated to his memory.

And Hyde Park Corner also has, from a century later, a white marble memorial topped with a large bronze statue of the biblical boy David. It is dedicated to the Machine Gunners Corps of the British Army: “To the Glorious Heroes . . . who fell in the Great War .” And just below that dedication, a perversely celebrative verse from the biblical Book of Samuel: “For Saul has slain his thousands, but David his tens of thousands.”

Nearby, there is an equally perverse statue, allegedly of Achilles. It is heroic in size, more than five meters tall. It represents the Duke of Wellington as Achilles. The Duke was forty-six years old at Waterloo, and lived to be eighty. Achilles, of course, was killed at Troy, at about twenty. The statue represents Wellington-Achilles as a beautiful, muscular young man, with not a blemish on his naked body. For decency’s sake, his genitals are covered by a fig leaf, but his sword is left naked.

There is a war memorial outside Spicheren, on the French-German border near Saarbrücken. In 1870 the French and Prussian armies fought there on a Saturday in early August of 1870. It was a horrible day for both sides. Late in the afternoon, the French retreated to Metz. By then 12,000 young Frenchmen had been killed, and 10,000 young Germans. Today there is a memorial to those 12,000 French soldiers atop the hill, and about twenty yards away another plinth, memoralising the 10,000 Germans who died that day. In between, there is a small circle of light blue gravel surrounding a rectangular stone, three feet high and about two feet square. A small brass plaque in the middle of the top is inscribed “NEVER AGAIN.” It is a European Union marker.

Washington, D.C. is full of monuments. The beautiful and worthy Lincoln Memorial; the monument to George Washington, a slave-owner; the Jefferson Memorial, dedicated to the author of the Declaration of Independence, who later sold his own children by a slave woman. John F. Kennedy. Franklin d. Roosevelt. Others. But not many war memorials, surprisingly. But maybe the United States has already had too many wars for them all to get memorials. The War of 1812, the Civil War, all the nineteenth century Indian Wars, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, Korea, the invasion of Lebanon in 1958, the invasion of Cuba in 1961, Vietnam, the proxy was against Nicaragua, Greneda, Iraq I, Iraq II, Afghanistan.

But there is a Vietnam War Memorial: a black marble wall, with the names of the thousands of American men who died in that shameful war. It isn’t a heroic monument, it doesn’t celebrate anything. It simply remembers.

I have been thinking lately that we should have, in Washington, two Iraq War Memorials, and an Afghanistan War Memorial—even before the Afghanistan War is over, and even though it may already be the Afghanistan-Pakistan War.

For the first Iraq war I would suggest several bull-dozers filling in a sandy trench, burying alive a large number of young Iraqi soldiers, with General Colin Powell supervising the operation.

For Iraq II, I would recommend a big hole in the ground, filled with oil, with the heads of Bush and Cheney sticking up out of it, and the smell of lies and death everywhere around.

And for Afghanistan? Just a very large and deep hole. Or maybe such a hole filled with worthless dollar bills.