Adding to Cenotaphs

This article by Nick Gardiner was originally published in the Brockville Recorder & Times, a Canadian newspaper; it concerns the recent death of a soldier and his addition to the local Cenotaph. What, you might be wondering, does this have to do with European history? Just about every city, town and village in Britain has a Cenotaph, a memorial originally constructed to name and honour soldiers who died in the First World War. Many have additions for the Second World War and, as this article shows, some are still updated today. For the majority of people in Britain these Cenotaphs are simply old monuments, a place where wreaths are laid once a year to honour the dead from nearly a century ago. For these people ‘history’ is something out of date, irrelevant, a lichen covered piece of stone by the bus stop. Both the past, and the sacrifice of the dead, is lost to them. What impressed me the most about this article was that by keeping the Cenotaph in use, by making it an active monument, both the modern war dead and the old were remembered.