Part Seven:
    The lasting legacy of the Great War

    © N° inv. : 12 ART 6.3. Coll. Historial de la Grande Guerre – Péronne(Somme). Photo Yazid Medmoun – English helmet painted with an image of Péronne. This British souvenir helmet was probably painted by its owner and depicts the ruined town square of Péronne, most likely as it looked when the town was retaken by the Australians during the Allied counter-offensive of early September 1918. A souvenir of one local victory which formed part of the broader victory? That would appear to be the message of the laurel wreath which adorns the outer rim of the helmet… Trophy helmets such as this one were common during WWI: helmets captured from the enemy, as well as helmets worn in battle then taken home and painted. Perhaps as a means of immortalising – or even magnifying – one’s personal involvement in this immense collective experience.
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    © N° inv. : 3 ART 4.1. Coll. Historial de la Grande Guerre – Péronne(Somme). Photo Yazid Medmoun – Commemorative clock. This French commemorative clock was crafted using four 75mm shell casings and a great many Lebel rifle bullets. The result is a bizarre, almost obscene object, mischievously appropriating these instruments of mass destruction to create a “masterpiece” of folk craftsmanship. This is a symbolically complex artefact, since the ticking of time is also evocative of death, albeit a more “normal” death. Was crafting this clock an attempt to exorcise the atrocious sense of anomie which hovered over death at the front in the years 1914-1918?
    © N° inv. : 10 MMS 4.2. Coll. Historial de la Grande Guerre – Péronne(Somme). Photo Yazid Medmoun – Articulated metal hand. Most of those who survived the Great War with serious wounds sustained injuries to their limbs, simply because wounds to the head or body left very little chance of survival, and more often than not victims would die immediately on the battlefield. Hence the large number of amputees in need of prosthetic limbs after the war. This example is an articulated hand manufactured by Cauet. The hand is metal but the fingers are coated with cork, for better grip. The straps went around the wearer’s upper arm, and by moving his shoulder blades he could pull upon the cables and thus move the fingers. Many films from the post-war period attempt to promote the supposed efficacy of such prostheses, and even suggest that wearers could return to their old manual occupations.
    © N° inv. : 26 OTR 1.1 et 10 MMS 5.3 et 6.3. Coll. Historial de la Grande Guerre – Péronne(Somme). Photo Yazid Medmoun – Car radiator cap made by the Facial Injuries Union – English facial prosthesis. This “broken face” figure, with a bandage masking the missing nose, is a “mascot” designed to be screwed onto the radiator cap on the bonnet of the car. Profits from its sale went to the Facial Injuries Union, and indeed this object prominently advertises the prevalence of such injuries. In a more discreet register, this English prosthesis (originally in two parts – the nose is not shown here), made of painted aluminium, was intended to hide the wearer’s disfigured appearance. Prostheses such as this one allowed those with serious wounds to face life in public, once they left the protective environs of the hospital. However, many of those with “broken faces” chose not to wear prosthetics, preferring to live with their wounds or else conceal them with bandages. All too often, clumsy prosthetics simply added insult to the indignity of living with such life-changing injuries. In their own way, these items both act as reminders of one of the most dreadful outcomes of the war: thousands of young men were left severely disfigured, obliged to undergo lengthy facial reconstruction surgery (which truly emerged as a specialist branch of medicine in its own right as a result of the war). The results were usually far from satisfactory, and survivors with facial wounds found themselves obliged to build new lives and new identities. They came to be regarded as emblematic of the suffering of the Great War: at the ceremony marking the signature of the Treaty of Versailles, in 1919, the signatories met with a French delegation of “broken faces” with particularly severe injuries. . Their presence was intended as a stinging reproach to Germany, obliged to assume moral responsibility for the war, but also as a reminder of the appalling violence of the fighting and the need to ensure that this really was the “war to end all wars.”
    © N° inv. : 4 DEC 48.1. Coll. Historial de la Grande Guerre – Péronne(Somme). Photo Yazid Medmoun – French enamel memorial plate. This enamelled iron “mourning plate” was probably intended to be hung on the family vault. It is dedicated to the memory of two brothers killed in the war, aged 32 and 23, one bearing the military medal (right) and the other the military cross (left). Joseph and Jean-Marie thus had exemplary military careers, honoured here with the laurel branch of victory which also evokes the palm fronds borne by martyrs. This public display of family grief, commissioned after victory in 1918, also serves as a reminder of how common it must have been for families to be doubly bereaved in this way.
    © N°inv. : 1 OBA 5.3. Coll. Historial de la Grande Guerre – Péronne(Somme). Photo Yazid Medmoun – Scale model of a British war memorial by Charles Sargeant Jagger. Sculptor Charles Sargeant Jagger was wounded twice during the war and received the Military Cross. In this modest memorial – a tribute to a fallen friend – the deep compassion of a man with personal experience of immense heroism and horror is plain to see. In the many memorial sculptures Jagger created for public or regimental monuments, he always put the simple Tommy front and centre: a monument to the fallen, collectively, or to the individual cut down by war?
    © N° inv. : 4 OBA 1.1. Coll. Historial de la Grande Guerre – Péronne(Somme). Photo Yazid Medmoun – Plaster draft model of the war memorial at Crécy-sur-Serre (Aisne), by Carlo The long list of the sons of Crécy-sur-Serre, in the Aisne département, who lost their lives in the conflict is offset by the presence of shells, lions and the neoclassical motifs used abundantly in the 1920s to glorify the victory of the nation and, above all, those who laid down their lives for France.
    © Bronze. N° inv. : 2 OBA 9.2. Coll. Historial de la Grande Guerre – Péronne(Somme). Photo Yazid Medmoun – Statuette, reproduction of a German war memorial. This statuette is a scale model of the monument to the 90th regiment of fusiliers, hailing from Mecklenburg. The monument was created by Wilhelm Wandschneider (1866-1942), a sculptor who produced numerous commemorative statues (of Wilhelm I, Bismarck and others) as well as war memorials. It is typical of the neoclassical style commonly employed for such monuments, at odds with the prevailing modernism of contemporary art. This figure of a steel-helmeted soldier, standing tall with his rifle in front of him, his hieratic gaze fixed on the horizon, betrays the influence of the “steel Hindenburg,” the monumental statue erected in Berlin in 1915 in honour of the architect of the German victory at Tannenberg, and which subsequently proved to be a bestseller for the replica souvenir industry. In this instance, however, the subject is not a great general but rather a simple soldier, a unique and anonymous representative of all those men the regiment lost in the conflict. A physical embodiment of the determination to fight and conquer, this proud image of the “man of steel” of Verdun and the Somme plays up to the myth that Germany remained “unbeaten at the front.” In post-defeat Germany, memorialising the fallen involved a certain amount of denial.
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