Undignified

Published: 14 January, 2011

• THE idea to build a memorial to Bomber Command is important – too often generals are immortalised in statues while our soldiers are forgotten in a blur of statistics.

But the character of the proposed design is all wrong. 

The depiction of four giant airmen giving a salute is crass and adolescent in its naive concept of heroism. It looks as though it’s been commissioned by people who’ve watched too many clichéd Hollywood movies and the placing of a scene of war in a Royal Park is at complete odds with the peace of nature and only further emphasises the lack of emotional and spiritual understanding inherent in the project.

In Great Britain I like to think we do things in a nobler and understated way than this. Think of the Cenotaph on Whitehall – the wisdom of its sombre, heavy, set, echoing the weight of our own spirit as we reflect on its etched words, “the glorious dead”, the sad knowledge that losses from both sides are to be remembered because war is a tragedy for all. 

This new proposal distorts both the dignity of lost lives as well as that of our country.

VALENTINE MONTAGNANI, SW1