The Department of Geography and Environmental Studies Presents:
Dr. David Bennett
on
“Of poppies and poems, crosses and stones: the Western Front, then and now.”
Abstract: This is the working title of a book I am writing about the British Military cemeteries of the Great War, in France and Belgium, focussing on the role they play in the construction of memory and remembrance. The organisation and conceptual framework is provided by Popper’s epistemological theory of objective knowledge as expressed in his notion of Three Worlds, which is used, but not discussed here.
The archipelago of over 900 British military cemeteries and memorials to the missing – Rudyard Kipling’s “Silent Cities” – is the most substantial and widespread surviving physical expression of the Western Front in the landscape. It is, largely, what a visitor looking for the relict Western Front in the British sector in Belgium and Northern France will see. In the simple description of its physicality it belongs to Popper’s World One, the world of physical objects and events. So does the Western Front “then”. But we have no direct access to the Western Front as it was in 1914 to 1918. Nevertheless, it is physically describable using archaeological, documentary, and visual evidence – such as maps, photographs, movies – but only if we hew to a strict naive empiricist viewpoint.
Death was the intended product of the war, and the Western Front produced it on an unprecedented, industrial, scale. For all combatant nations, the dead had to be dealt with, physically and symbolically. The British chose to commemorate and memorialise the dead, not the war nor the battles, by creating a distinctive – if not unique – funerary architecture in the form of military cemeteries designed and constructed to project their creators’ values into the future, where they would be seen as the past – so-called prospective memory. This process belongs to World Two, the world of mental objects and events.
World Three contains the products of the interaction of Worlds One and Two. Herein we find the memories, narratives, theories…. and myths… about the War which in turn have a feedback interaction with World One to modify the possibility of a naive empiricist portrayal of the cemeteries by applying layers of retrospective meanings. They are so pervasive in British culture and everyday discourse that it is nigh on impossible to see the cemeteries except through some sort of lens of values and opinions. This has become especially so in these centenary years.
Today’s presentation is primarily about the Western Front as it can be seen in the landscape in 2015, and the Front’s creation in 1914 and its persistence until 1918. It is an empiricist description of what there is, and what there was, to see, when the view is shorn of the constructions which have come to enjoy periodic temporary dominance, in the years since 1918. It will also identify, but not explore, some of the questions which arise from the planning and construction of the cemeteries and memorials, and the role they play in collective memory and remembrance.
Biography: My original academic interests were established early, at the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1956 – 1963). When I left the RGS my interests were – in declining order of my enthusiasm – History (European, American, and French), English Literature, and Geography.
I read for my B.A. Hons in Geography at the University of Liverpool from 1963 to 1966. After a year of sampling three very different jobs – public and private sector – I returned to Liverpool in the fall of 1967 as a postgraduate student. I completed my Ph.D in behavioural geography and spatial decision-making, combining qualitative and quantitative methods, in 1972, by which time – at the age of 25 – I had emigrated from England in August 1970 to take up a one year contract as a Lecturer in the Department of Geography at Carleton University, to teach Urban Geography, and the first course at Carleton in Statistical Analysis for Geographers. In 1971 I took up an appointment at Carleton as Assistant Professor of Geography. I introduced courses in Quantitative Methods, Population Geography, Medical Geography (subsequently Health, Environment, and Society), the Geography of Social Well-Being), and Philosophy and Geography, which reflected my research interests. I supervised 35 graduate students. In 1981-82 I was President of CUASA. I was Chair of Geography 1988 – 1990, and Associate Director of the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies (2004 – 2005), and Coordinator of Directed Interdisciplinary Studies (2004 – 2007). I retired as an Associate Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies in 2012. My current work combines my original academic interests with my later forays into philosophy.
