In a contemporary account of his travels through France, Italy and England during the First World War, American journalist William Allen White makes the following observation about the “different reactions of personal loss upon the different nations:”

France expresses her loss in mourning; she relieves her emotions in
visible grief. Italy does this also; but her losses have been smaller than
the French losses and Italy’s sorrow is less in evidence than is the woe
of France. But England’s master passion in this war is pride. ‘In proud
and loving memory’ is a phrase that one sees a hundred times every
day in the obituary notices of those who have died for England.”

The English view White describes is today generally thought of as anachronistic. In our own age we tend to dismiss what we think of as the naïve and unquestioning nature of such convictions, seeing them as all too bound up by the blind fervor of patriotism and war fever. We see ourselves as more enlightened than that, not so easily duped by moralisms and appeals to national feeling.

But are we really more clear-eyed than our forebears about the costs of war? Or have we merely grown cynical about the causes which compel us to make war? Have we grown too accustomed to an unyielding individualism that insists upon the comforts attendant upon its unquestioned primacy? Do we suffer from a blindness of our own: an unwillingness to acknowledge the occasional necessity of sacrifice?

One memorial here, it seems, emphasizes the bottomless tragedy of sacrifice – the pointlessness of loss and the pitilessness of darker human forces set against purest innocence. The other recognizes that loss, but points implicitly to something beyond grief, to something larger than the individual, to something past immediate wants, to an innocence regained through the pursuit of something beyond the self while remaining knowledgeable of the moral ambiguity of human action.

As with so much else in German vs. Anglo-American memorial culture, the one depicts an empty hopelessness and despair while the other offers a glimpse of future hope. Mankind, fully aware of its humanity, inevitably embraces hope and rejects hopelessness.