The Dead and their Spaces (original) (raw)

2021, Conflict Landscapes: Materiality and Meaning in Contested Places

Landscape is complex and slippery, a concept rather than a single place in historical time, a cultural image as well as a physical location (Daniels and Cosgrove 1988: 1). It is, fundamentally, a palimpsest of multi-vocal overlapping layers possessing different meanings for those who choose and engage with an aspect important to them. Each layer represents a physical engagement with space and time, and thus a world of social experience and imagination. Landscapes possess memory-making and memory-evoking qualities that connect to our cultural, emotional, and spiritual lives (Basso 1996), and so can serve as sensuous metaphors of identity. In this sense, every landscape embroiders the past with the present. How much more so for landscapes of modern conflict, those bloody markers of industrialized war, the defining human activity of the twentieth century; created by the suffering and death of those whose remains have become part of the terrain-sometimes indistinguishable from, and at one with, the shattered earth and debris of war. These landscapes possess arguably the most intense and enduring legacies of pain, suffering, redemption, sacrifice, and in a world of materiality, of broken objects large and small. Such places are not simply the fossilized remnants of battle-space, but rather volatile dynamic entities, constantly changing their shape and significance for successive generations who engage with them in new and often unpredictable ways. Conflict landscapes are proactive, stationary yet ever-changing, and open to many kinds of interpretation and representation. As Schäuble (2011: 52) observes for the Second World War Partisan landscapes of the Croatian-Bosnian borderlands, The land does not allow its inhabitants to forget and is in turn also not allowed to forget as the people of the region persistently charge the territory 1 THE DEAD AND THEIR SPACES Origins and meanings in modern conflict landscapes Nicholas J. Saunders 4 Nicholas J. Saunders with commemorative meaning and erect monuments and religious shrines to that effect. Volatility is a characteristic here-for while in the immediate aftermath of the conflict the dead haunted the memories of the living, 'since the 1980s the living seem to haunt the dead in an attempt to secure them as allies for their changing political endeavours' (ibid.: 53). Here, I explore modern conflict landscapes from the perspective of the First World War as the event which created and perpetuated the idea and the reality of such places, so different in intensity and scale to the landscapes of pre-twentiethcentury conflict. I do so in part because the legacies of 1914-1918 include the effects which the multidimensional nature of that war have had on many if not most subsequent conflict landscapes (e.g. González-Ruibal 2008; Garfi 2019), of which, as I write, the area around Idlib in northwestern Syria is the most recent (Anon. 2020). I do not deal here with other kinds of First World War landscapes-those focused on military training, the Home Front of munitions factories and other economic wartime activities (Saunders 2010: 202-212; Brown 2017; Cocroft and Stamper 2018), and cemeteries, though these are equally the result of modern conflict. For my purposes, I deal with battle-zone landscapes and draw mainly on the evidence of three case studies-the Western Front (France and Belgium), the Italian Front (Italy and Slovenia), and the Middle East (Jordan). Each of these reveals distinctive elements which illustrate the complex and enduring nature of historically recent conflict landscapes and their infinite capacity to shape-shift meaning, significance, emotion, and cultural and political resonance. At once physical and metaphysical, all landscapes are made by and for people, and those of the First World War still conceal many of the individuals who created them between 1914 and 1918, either as undiscovered bodies, body parts, or millions of microscopic bone fragments. In such places, literally and figuratively, human beings and landscape have become one. Lying sometimes just centimetres beneath the modern land surface, these landscape makers sometimes return, bursting forth into the modern world by virtue of urban construction, motorway building, accidental explosions of ordnance, and sometimes archaeological excavations. Here, time, space, history, memory, and chance intertwine, most notably (and emotionally) perhaps when families who had forgotten or never knew of their First World War ancestors are informed that they have been found. At such times, a paradox is born-absence becomes presence with a phone call or email, a name is erased from the list of the missing, and temporal and geographical distance collapses (see Saunders 2017). The human cost of creating First World War landscapes was often described day by day, sometimes hour by hour, in memoirs and regimental (and private) war diaries, producing what must be some of the most exhaustively documented, personalized, and spiritualized locations ever to be considered for archaeological, anthropological, and historical study. Despite this, the remains of those who