In the small village of St Juliaan (formerly St Julien), just a few miles north of Ieper, there is a monument that has entranced visitors since it was unveiled on 8 July 1923. Designed by Frederick Chapman Clemesha, it commemorates the Canadian soldiers who fought and fell while repulsing the opening German assaults in the Second Battle of Ypres. As the British official history of the war points out, ‘the 22nd April was a glorious spring day’, but many soldiers failed to see the sun that morning as a green-yellow cloud of chlorine gas enveloped them. It was the first use of gas on the Western Front: another horrific weapon had been added to the Great War’s arsenal of killing technologies.
In Clemesha’s St Juliaan memorial for the Canadian Battlefields Memorials Commission, days of terror, chaos and misery are compressed and transformed into icy, grey-white silence through a simple granite obelisk from which the shoulders and head of a helmeted soldier emerge. No visitor to St Juliaan ever leaves unmoved by this sight which is achieved by its contrasts. First, there is the approach and the transformation between the everyday world and the memorial space. Standing at a crossroads, the memorial is in the midst of life as lorries and tractors thunder past, and yet as soon as that great architectural exclamation mark cum warning finger is seen silence descends. The roar of the living world suddenly hits a barrier of spatial silence. Second, is the effect of hard, solid stone giving way to the vulnerability of the human body. Third is the soldier’s stance which is that of a sentinel with head bowed and rifle reversed, the traditional military salute to the dead.
Often referred to as ‘the brooding soldier’, the term is apt, for the face that looks down from under the rim of the helmet seems fixed in a moment of deep contemplation which demands that we respect this space, it challenges us to try to understand what occurred here, it overwhelms us and makes silence the only fitting response.
Somewhat ironically, Clemesha did not design this memorial for this specific space or event, rather the Canadian Battlefields Memorials Commission decided to place it here, and the artistic aptness of that decision brought a historical anomaly, for no Canadian soldier who fought in the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915 would have been wearing a steel helmet. Precise authenticity becomes irrelevant when confronted by so profound a statement in stone.
