I read today about a new kind of memorial for the First World War. It will be a large scale public artwork, made of words.
Neil Bartlett, an English novelist and theatre-director, and Kate Pullinger, winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, are collecting letters written to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the declaration of World War 1. In London’s Paddington Station, there is a statue of an unknown solider reading a letter. Barlett and Pullinger are inviting anyone and everyone to write him a letter. You can find the project here.
On the website, you can read all the letters that have been contributed and you can also write your own. The website will be open for submissions until 11pm on Monday 4th August, the centenary of the moment when Britain joined the First World War. Between now and then, anyone who would like to can contribute a letter to the unknown soldier. There is such a range of writers: historians, poets, artists, children, students, mothers (it seems like lots of mothers). Margaret MacMillan has added a letter to the collection, and so has Sebastian Faulks. There are so many to read. The letters will later be kept as a collection in the British Library so that future generations might experience something of our imaginative remembering. This letter-writing project is a way of putting our own thoughts and questions directly into the story.
I want you to know about your brother’s funeral. The details aren’t what you’d expect, but then that’s the way things go. It happened fourteen years ago in May on a warm and cloudy day in Ottawa. Our Governor General made a great speech. She’s good at poetry and we appreciated her words. I guess we wanted to witness and to honour. We were happy to have him home at last. Not buried far away with yet another numbered stone somewhere in a French field, but here among us. Buried in our city like a heart in a cathedral.
You would have liked it. There were so many people there to honour him.
Your brother. Like you, he was a soldier. Like you, unknown.
They found him near Vimy and brought him home because they could not bring them all home. He was to be the symbol for everything that was lost in war. They wanted to bury him with honour so they built his grave from granite – twelve feet long, eight feet wide, three feet high. There are people there now everyday. They see his stone on their way to work and as they head home again in the evening. It’s a bright, warm place to sit in the summer, a snowy square when the winter comes. Children chase pigeons there, of course, and tourists stop for photographs. From his grave, you can see Parliament Hill and the big downtown hotels. The canal, the river, shops, cafes and office towers. Your brother is in the thick of city life here, right in the middle of everything. But the granite came from a small town across the river in Quebec. It’s called Rivière-à-Pierre. River of Stones.
I’m afraid that’s what we’ve offered you. You and all your brothers. Only a river of stones. In towns and cities in too many countries, we’ve poured out these stones trying to give weight to your brief lives. We want to remember you, to learn something from the madness you all went through, and we mean to honour you so we stand solemnly beside these stones.
But stones can’t bring life, can they? We can’t plant stones like seeds and expect anything to grown. Not even if we etch the stones with duty, sacrifice and honour and decorate them with a thousand flags. Stones merely remain.
But maybe these letters we are sending you now are something new. We’re imagining you standing in that train station, watching the crowds flow past, and we’re writing out the aches in our own hearts as we imagine the sorrows in yours. Reading through these letters feels a little impolite. Like reading the prayers that people leave in churches. But maybe there’s life in this.
I think that words can bring life and hope and healing. Is that possible?
Did the letters you read in the trenches bring you hope? Did they make you brave? I hope so.
I’m sure they also made home feel far away. You feel far away now. But reading these letters that so many people are writing to you today makes me feel close to those around me.
And that has to be a better river, doesn’t it? Can we offer you that?
