Letter To An Unknown Soldier

Geoff Dyer, Writer

Still reading that letter after all the years?  You really must be the slowest reader in the world, buddy. Or is it written in  code? Not really, though  I suppose the bit where she says,  ‘I've fallen  in love with Sam  and we are going to be married’  means, as Dirty Harry put it years later:   You're shit out of luck . Yes, it can take a while for the simplest bits of information  to sink in.    Only kidding.  Obviously   the letter in your hand is really an  ongoing   account of all the responses  to  seeing you   in the long years since  you  took up residence here.  Every time anyone looks at you  they add another line.  So in a sense you were the  original   interactive work  of art.

Speaking personally,  you were the second sculpture I became conscious of. The first was of  Edward Wilson, on the Promenade   in my  hometown of Cheltenham. Wilson  died with Scott  in the Antarctic. And Charles Sargeant Jagger – who made you  –  also did the statue of Shackleton   at the Royal Geographical Society, so  in my mind  you are sort of sandwiched between these  heroic Polar figures. Obviously when  I was a kid,  on the rare occasions when  I  arrived at Paddington, I had no idea that you were made  by Jagger  but I  knew about the war. When I used to  go round to  my friend Gary Hunt’s   house  his granddad would drop his trousers and show us his shrapnel  wounds from the First World War.    Mine was the last generation that could make that kind of claim, who  had that direct   living  connection to the war. The Somme  wasn’t just a historical event. It was something that had happened to people  I knew.

At some point  I started to think of what it would be like to be   you, to  be outside in a storm, wearing a  soaking wet great coat. So it’s good to   know that you're sheltered here   by  platorm1. I'm struck as well by how few people  pay  you any mind.   Maybe that’s about to change  because the war is  coming into view again like  a planet completing its hundred-year orbit round the sun.  The present and the past   – this bit of the   past  – are  about to come into a four-year alignment. But the time when  you  and I were   closest  has passed. That was  nearly 24  years ago.  I was  living in France, in Paris to be exact, waiting for news (of a book I'd published  and another I'd finished, but trust me,  that can be  as    agonising as  waiting on  news of the beloved). It was also, I  realise  now, the year of my   most   intense feelings about sculpture, specifically the  statues    in Tuileries. But then,  as a result of being   in France, I   ended up  becoming very interested in the War and the way it was remembered and  all the sculptures  that were such an important part of  that  remembering.   That’s when I remembered that I'd known you  for as  long as I could remember.

You stand as a memorial to a mistake. So in a way  what    you're   reading is    more than a letter.   You're reading the   lessons of history.  One of which is  that, faced with the same situation,  people would go for it all over again  with exactly the same fervour. Because  who could   pass up the chance   of making  everything that had gone before  seem  like a prelude?  A prelude to what?  First  exuberance and enthusiasm, then  horror, then  understanding. If the price   was high    that only emphasized the value of the lesson learned: that this  was the war to end all wars.   So that was great   –  for about  two minutes. Then  –  oh shit,   the    war to end all wars turned into the peace to end all peace, and  the  end  of  one war actually contained the seeds   of another even  bigger one. So although we had learned the lesson there was  another lesson to be learned which was that the lesson  had not been properly learned  –  and history, if it teaches   us  anything,  teaches   that   we will never stop learning.  So that’s why   you're still   here, still reading after all these years,  still poring over   that  piece of carved  paper.

Anyway,   to revert to the personal  (which, as you     know  only  too well,   is   just the universal  in a particular context)  what I'm saying is what all letters say:  keep safe, stay warm  and    please  understand  if you don’t  hear from  me again.

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