Conclusiones y recomendaciones para avanzar hacia un sistema

On 20 August 1923, nearly an entire year in advance of the war memorial’s official unveiling on 1 July next, Nangle formally invited Lord (Field Marshal) and Lady Haig to attend the 1924 unveiling ceremony and for the Field Marshal to perform the day’s honour.45 Haig, it will be recalled, was the commander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Force; after the war, he was elected president of the British Legion (London and Edinburgh) and grand president of the British Empire Service League, gaining both presidencies in 1921.46 In his formal invitation Nangle took pains to politely impress upon Haig the immense symbolic and practical value that would obtain from his ceremonial visit. He was thinking specifically of the ex-servicemen’s association

(although unnamed, Nangle must surely mean the GWVA) whose Newfoundland membership had stagnated at two thousand members. If Haig, a staunch advocate of the empire’s veterans,47 performed the unveiling, his doing so would confer public respect upon, as well as revitalize, the ranks of Newfoundland’s moribund ex-servicemen’s association. Two days later Nangle received notice that Field Marshal Haig had accepted his invitation.48

With the Haigs’ visit confirmed, Nangle next extended, first on behalf of Newfoundland veterans, then, again, formally, in the name of the government, an invitation to Rudyard Kipling to attend, as an official guest, the 1924 unveiling.

49

Kipling was certainly acquainted with Nangle’s personal commitment to memorialize

Newfoundland’s participation in the Great War and honour its dead, having some two years earlier agreed to draft, at Nangle’s request, the text for a memorial tablet that

had once more prevailed upon him to exercise his literary gift in commemorating

Newfoundland’s Great War participation by asking him to compose an inscription for the very war memorial whose unveiling ceremony he was urged to honour with his

presence.50 Nangle’s bid was unsuccessful, however, with Kipling, albeit reluctantly, claiming an already overextended schedule.51 Invitations to the unveiling were also issued to Brig.-General A. F. Home and Captain Simson of the British Empire Service League, who would represent all British veterans, as well as to Lt. Col. J. Forbes- Robertson, Border Regiment.52

A full six years in gestation, the Newfoundland national war memorial was finally unveiled by Field Marshall Haig on 1 July 1924, the eight anniversary of the near

annihilation of the Newfoundland Regiment at Beaumont-Hamel. Along parallel lines, The Veteran reported in April that caribou memorials were already erected at the Gueudecourt (1922, Fig. 54) and Masnières (1923) sites; meanwhile, a caribou bronze had been crated and shipped to Courtrai, where it would be installed shortly.

53

Memorial site preparation, however, was still underway at both Monchy-le-Preux and Beaumont- Hamel, with the former of these two battlefields being “the only one which has not yet been tackled seriously.”54

A parade preceded the memorial’s unveiling. Its military, civilian, and musician marching parties, the former representing various branches of the Newfoundland, imperial, colonial, and allied forces, congregated at the railway station, their departure point. The parade route — Water Street — was, The Veteran reported, thronged by “tens of thousands”

55

of spectators. En route to the memorial the parade participants briefly paused at the Court House, where, at ten o’clock sharp, Haig took the salute. The parade

then resumed, terminating at the memorial. There, the ceremony’s presiding officials and invited dignitaries had already assembled to await the arrival of Haig and Governor Allardyce. The playing of the Recessional heralded their appearance, after which the chairman of the War Memorial Committee invited the governor to formally receive, for all Newfoundlanders, the National War Memorial. Allardyce, in accepting the memorial, delivered a brief address, which was followed by prayers. Following Haig’s speech, unusual only in its statement that the Battle of Masnières exemplified the Regiment’s gallantry, but otherwise extolling both the sacrifice and service of Newfoundland’s sailors and soldiers during the Great War and expressing sympathy for the relatives of the fallen, the memorial was unveiled (Fig. 55). Haig was then joined by the governor and together they laid the first wreaths. Other wreath-layers, including Newfoundland’s prime minister, St. John’s mayor, naval representatives, and other organizations and citizens, followed.56

Three flights of granite steps with iron railings ascend from Water Street to the monument in its platform: a semi-circular, partially walled terrace upon which is erected the memorial itself. Its height appears flush to the eye, with the two-storey buildings that line Duckworth Street its bustling backdrop (Fig. 56), but from which it is physically separated by ornamental metal fencing. This fencing, as well as the memorial’s perimeter landscaping, both demarcates and segregates this monumental space from its competing urban surrounds, if not sounds. Surmounting the memorial’s central granite pedestal, upon which is prominently engraved a cross, lending this stone shaft the uncanny (and probably deliberate) appearance of a massive tombstone, is the imperious female

in her right hand clenches a sword, albeit lowered non-aggressively. Beneath her, standing before the cross and side by side in symbolic unity of duty are the figures of a Merchant Marine, garbed in the traditional waterproof oilskin cap, jacket, slacks and rubber boots of the Newfoundland fisherman, warily scanning the horizon, and that of a strapping Forester who appears to take a moment’s repose from his labours, his axe casually raised but resting against his right shoulder. Upon the pedestal’s two sweeping side arms kneel, poised in perpetual battle readiness, (on the left-hand side) a Royal Naval Reservist, spyglass in hand, and (on the right-hand side) a fully armed Soldier. This sculptural tableau of four stalwart, roughly life-size figures of Newfoundland Great War servicemen blends verisimilitude of uniform with idealized physiognomies and a generic handsomeness of appearance. The inscription of the memorial’s dedicatory plaque reads:

To the glory of God and in perpetual remembrance of one hundred & ninety-two men of the Newfoundland Royal Naval Reserve, thirteen hundred men of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment, one hundred & seventeen men of the

Newfoundland and Mercantile Marine, and all of those Newfoundlanders of other units of his Majesty’s or Allied forces who gave their lives by sea and land for the defence of the British Empire in the Great War, 1914-1918. For enduring witness, also to the services of the men of the Island who during that War fought not without honour in the navies and armies of their Empire. This monument is

erected by their fellow countrymen and was unveiled by Field Marshall Earl Haig, K.T., G.C.B., O.M, etc. First of July 1924.

Let them give glory unto the Lord and declare His praise in the islands. Isaiah 42.12

Three years after the unveiling, a general-interest pamphlet about the war memorial was drafted for publication.57 A half century later, in 1977 and 1980, plaques honouring the service and sacrifice of Newfoundlanders in the Second World War and those of Canadians (Newfoundland having joined confederation in 1949), as well as

United Nations forces during the Korean War, were added to the memorial (Fig. 57, 58), each an allied form of symbolic accretion in Owen Dwyer’s coinage. For stylistic

cohesion, both of these plaques were modelled after that dedicated to the Newfoundland dead of 1914-1918.58 The erection of the Newfoundland national war memorial at King’s Beach was not arbitrary, for this was a site freighted with mutually reinforcing historical associations: the foundational and the martial. Thomas Nangle, in convincing the War Memorial Committee of the location’s emblematic appropriateness, emphasized that it had served as both the embarkation and disembarkation points for Newfoundland’s fighting forces in the Great War. The memorial’s surrounding streetscape is, now as then, a heavily populated one, with an abundance of pedestrian and vehicular traffic. This high- traffic environment accords the memorial, which is situated between two major urban arteries, its necessary civic prominence. The memorial, of course, occupies its own space, signalling that its grounds, whilst public, are reserved for contemplation and

commemorative activity and thus stand separated (but not removed) from the commerce and cars that lie just beyond its physical confines. Here, site and rite coalesce in

ceremony, where, each Memorial and Remembrance Day, commemorative observances are held.