The Royal Artillery Memorial at London's Hyde Park Corner is an iceberg of dangerous memories, menacing the traffic that circles its island, forcing unpleasant truths from the past into the present.
They get further away, it sometimes seems, the horrors of war. Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature argues that we live in a progressively less violent world, so peaceful compared with the past that we can't, or won't, believe our luck. There's a lot of truth in that – especially if you compare our century with the years 1914-1918. Nearly 10 million soldiers died in the first world war. That figure is inconceivably higher than today's war casualties, at least as they affect British troops. Among recent conflicts, only the Iran-Iraq war – featuring trench warfare and gas, and claiming up to a million lives between 1980 and 1988 – can even be usefully compared.
The first world war remains a terrible extreme of organised slaughter – a warning to the ages – and this is why its memory must never fade, even as we get closer to the centenary of its almost random beginning with an assassination in the Balkans in June 1914.
For this reason I salute English Heritage which, in time for Remembrance Sunday, has just finished cleaning and restoring the Royal Artillery Memorial. I visited the still-scaffolded monument last week: up close you can see why it needed some work, especially on the reliefs that surround it and depict scenes of artillery warfare.
Created by Charles Jagger and Lionel Pearson, the memorial is a shocking collision of technology and the human body. It enacts in its own form the destructive energies of war. The ambivalence of its style, caught between figurative accuracy and the modernist daring of its age (it was unveiled in 1925) enhances its dreadful power.
A massive Howitzer points into the sky as if preparing to bombard London – but it is carved, incongruously, in stone. After being cleaned by English Heritage, the gun now looks whiter, more skeletal and ghostly than it has for a long time. The rendition of a mighty metal firearm in artfully carved stone is eerie, the conflict between traditional sculptural values and the brutality of mechanised war shocking and grotesque.
The fascination of my visit to the scaffolding, however, was not so much standing on the stone blocks that support the gun as peering very closely at the reliefs below. Each of these scenes might seem, at first glance, a conventional image of artillerymen at work. They are depictions of strength and strain. But the more you look, the more they resemble nightmares conceived by Goya and carved by Donatello. Like German expressionist images of the war, these formidable scenes convey the mess, filth, exhaustion and futility of the western front.
Walking along planks, studying these friezes of desolation, I found myself wondering whose boots lay ahead, poking round a corner. Was an English Heritage stonemason asleep on the job? Then it dawned: I was looking at a dead artilleryman, cast in bronze. From where I stood on the monument, he was like Mantegna's Dead Christ. From any angle he is devastating. This is one of four bronze soldiers posed around the monument. Another, facing the oncoming traffic, holds out his arms like Christ under a shroud-like cape.
