/ YOU WILL DIE AS HEROES /
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Otto Dix opens his series of etchings entitled War with a half-opened grave in no man's land. This first etching is followed by another, entitled “Buried Alive”, and this one by “Gassed to Death” and so on. Death, dirty, pestilent, disgusting is what defines the battlefield, but that is intolerable for a social order founded on the Nation. Somehow the homicidal madness must be tidied up, turned into something else.
For centuries, the only ones who had the right to memory were the lords. The proletarians exterminated in the struggle were buried in mass graves scattered along the various fronts. The bodies of the soldiers did not matter much. But the nationalist mystique of the 20th century made things change. The dead for the fatherland began to be traded on the rise. It was after World War I that the first monuments to the unknown soldiers were erected. The anonymous sons of the people who had given their lives for the greatness of the nation acquired their place in history. And with the monuments, military cemeteries appeared in which a sufficient number of human remains were deposited to testify to the authenticity of the suffering.
All military cemeteries follow a similar structure: thousands of crosses lined up in rectangular formation, as if they were regiments in formation, are distributed around the main monument, usually a chapel with a significant sculpture. It is in that chapel that the defining signs are concentrated: patriotic verses, flags at half-mast, angels with national insignia, etc. A certain platonic, geometric austerity dominates the whole. In the ossuary of Douamont, France, a building with the volume of a bunker and a central tower reminiscent of a shell, the bones of 130,000 German and French soldiers collected in the camps around Verdun are mixed together. In front of them, 16,000 others remain buried with their names and crosses. The order transfigures the memory of horror into metaphysical reverie. A huge French flag in the middle of the cemetery makes it clear who was the victor.
But if there is a country that stands out in the funeral iconography of the homeland is the United States. Its military cemeteries shine above all others, they have a mark of their own. There is nothing in them that evokes the decadence that one expects to find in these sites and that serves to remind us that this is a place of transit to the other world. No angels corroded by humidity, no wilted flowers or visible bones as in Ossuary of Douaumont. In the videos of the American Battle Monuments Commission, the dead do not fade into a slow and inexorable oblivion. Central chapels include instructional maps explaining the strategic and tactical advances of the troops buried there. Some of the enclosures even offer a small war museum. The tombs are individual, the crosses are made of white marble and the lawns remain neatly trimmed. In one of the videos, the one corresponding to the cemetery of the fallen in Holland during World War II, we are informed that such is the kindness of the place that the locals have taken the habit of adopting graves, to which they bring bouquets of flowers.
Far from the terrible engravings of Otto Dix, the military cemeteries have returned this bank of the river Lethe to the murdered among the shit and the mud. Named heroes all, they now know a second existence as pets in the sad Sundays of petty-bourgeois families. If the dead of the Odyssey craved the blood of the living, here it is the living who feed on the ashes of the dead.
You will die as imbeciles,
you will die as heroes,
while they in shelters
Will watch you on television.Medals are tin plates.
Flags are colored rags.
In war you will die for their money.
In war you will die for their interest.La Polla Records