Memorials, War

War memorials have developed throughout time and have varying purposes within different historical eras and societies. Initially the purpose of war memorials was not memorialization at all but to commemorate a victorious leader. This tradition began in ancient times and continued through the early modern era. During the modern era, war memorials began to be constructed to pay homage to particular wars or battles. Contemporary war memorials have become part of the historical discourse of the wars they address and reflect national identity, define collective memory, facilitate traumatic healing, or are locations for ritual ceremonies.

War memorials are generally monuments, which are freestanding objects that serve the singular dedicatory purpose of memorializing war in a designated space that becomes sacred. They can, however, be buildings, locations such as battlefields, museums, or collections of memorabilia, or resources dedicated to sustaining the memory of a particular war or groups or individuals who fought in a war. In some cases, war memorials are placed on the site of a significant or decisive battle or at locations where many soldiers fell. In other cases, memorials are situated on public land within municipalities that wish to recognize the sacrifices of its residents, or in a nation's capitol as homage to incidents of national involvement that occurred elsewhere. War memorials that list or highlight individual deaths caused by war are generally a 20th-century phenomenon due to the perpetuation of some of the most wide-scale wars in human history.

Historic Foundations of War Memorialization

In ancient civilizations, the most attention was paid to the leaders of wars, and soldiers' deaths were marked in a similar manner to the death of any individual at the time. In ancient Greece, particularly during the Geometric period, large ceramic vases were used as grave markers, but those of soldiers were inscribed with distinguishing figures that storied the warrior's funeral. The Dipylon Vase (800–700 B.C.E.), for instance, a vessel over three feet high, depicts registers of schematized horses, soldiers, weapons, and shields with the dead warrior in the center rendered as a rudimentary solid figure laid horizontally amid the procession. A woman raises her arms in an iconic representation of mourning. Like most gravesites and markers in ancient Greece, objects such as the Dipylon Vase were devoted to single individuals, and the sites were used as gathering places for commemorations and feasts to which family and friends returned periodically.

Roman society also commemorated individuals at gravesites or in catacombs, rather than groups of individuals or wars. Victories in the Roman Republic were marked by the emperors themselves, usually through monuments glorifying their real or imagined prowess in leading armies in conquests. The exploits of each ruler are typically recorded on large triumphal arches such as the Arch of Titus (81 C.E.) and the Arch of Constantine (312–315 C.E.). Arches were generally singular like the Arch of Titus, or could be triple, like Constantine's, but all were of colossal size (approximately 40 feet wide and 70 feet high, respectively) and meant to emphasize the victories of the rulers rather than the might of the individuals who comprised the armies that served him. Another form of commemoration was a column, such as the 125-foothigh Column of Trajan (106–113 C.E.), in which the Roman leader had his exploits carved in a spiral around a 13-foot-wide column. Such practices are followed throughout European civilization thereafter, in which leaders are often monumentalized on horseback and without note of the many soldiers who served him.

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