“I have raised a monument more lasting than bronze,” wrote the Roman poet Horace. His words, a memorial to the power of poetry itself, and carried on nothing more durable than papyrus, vellum and paper, have proved resilient over two millennia. They are living, liquid, flexible things that later poets from Shakespeare to Edwin Morgan have riffed on, stolen, reworked and recast.
On Friday, many people in the UK, from Lerwick to Snowdonia, from Belfast to Portsmouth, encountered a curious and different kind of memorial. More than 1,500 men, dressed in accurately reproduced first world war khaki, congregated silently in public spaces. To anyone who approached they gave a card, bearing the name, age and rank of a man who had died on 1 July 1916, the disastrous first day of the Battle of the Somme, which cost 19,240 British lives. The men appeared in railway stations, carparks, markets and on the streets. They created a small jolt in the day of the people who encountered them: a moment of reflection, a feeling that the breath of the past had touched them. The memorial came to the people, amid the normal texture of life, rather than the people going to the memorial. The project, which carried the title We’re Here Because We’re Here, was conceived by the Turner prizewinning artist Jeremy Deller, who worked with 27 theatres across the UK, including its national theatres of Britain, Scotland and Wales – the first time that the three have collaborated on a single project. All the participants were volunteers. They had kept the secret of the event until the very hour of its unfolding.
In its inherent modesty and simplicity, We’re Here Because We’re Here was more successful than our still needlessly proliferating martial commemorations in stone and bronze, which so often implicitly reference British victory – or at least an imperial tradition of grandiose memorialisation that we frankly should have grown out of some decades ago. Deller’s work was not so much unheroic, as a work in which the notion of heroism was irrelevant.
Instead, it called to mind a solemn German word – Mahnung, warning. The memorial was a warning about the flesh-and-blood cost of war. Many who came across it felt that the problems of an unprecedentedly turbulent week in British politics, and the immense uncertainty ahead, were put into perspective by it; it was certainly hard to escape, under the circumstances, a plangent reminder about the importance of solidarity, cooperation between Britain and her European neighbours. It worked too because of the sheer pointedness of the emotional appeal. When the first world war is drifting inexorably out of direct memory, all its surviving combatants now dead, Deller’s work brought it back to a human level.
The human level, the power and necessity of direct contact, were also palpable in Saturday’s march against Brexit in London. Peaceful, and yet profoundly sorrowful, the marchers walked in solidarity with each other, and with our European neighbours. They walked to express anger and frustration and fear, and they also walked to be together. They were the human reminder of the statistical fact that 48% of voters wanted to remain. In a world of globalisation and digitalisation, it is the fleeting, the human, the intimate, the intense encounters that matter more than ever.
• This article was amended on 4 July 2016. An earlier version incorrectly listed Anglesey among locations where We’re Here Because We’re Here took place. It was also amended on 5 July 2016 to correct the tense in the quote from Horace in the opening line.
