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‘Too serio u basiness to be Zefi to mi&tury men I upersoad view of the mi&tury maseam’s roZe toduy

Stephen Wood

Born in 1952. B.A. and M.A., University of Lon- don. National Army Museum, 1971-73. Keeper, Scottish United Services hluseum, Edinburgh Cas- tle, since 1983. His publications include contribu- tions to learned and other journals.

19 SCOTTISH U N I T E D SERVICES MUSEUM, Edinburgh Castle. Part of the displays devoted to the Royal Artillery in Scotland. A typical example of an obscure item of costume accompanied by a caption employing five terms of jargon.

In choosing Talleyrand’s description of war as part of the title of this article, I have deliberately sought to provoke two reactions. By limiting the number of reactions to two, I have assumed that those readers given to judging a book by its cover, or an article by its title, will react in one of two entirely predictable ways.

Some will agree with Talleyrand’s view -a view which might, at first glance, seem also to be mine. Some will disagree, perhaps vehemently. In assuming that something as apparently innocent as the eye-catching title of an article will pro- voke these opposing views, I have similar- ly assumed, by extension, that the subject of the article may likewise provoke reac- tions that are strongly held and, in- evitably, in total opposition to each other. I have assumed that one is either for military museums or against them. I have assumed that military museums provoke a sort of response in the minds of the intelligent and articulate public that can only be expressed in terms of black and white rather than in shades of grey: a kind of cultural apartheid. Fourteen years spent exclusively in the world of na- tional military museums have, sadly, combined to convince me that my as- sumptions are justified. That this is so owes something to the curators them- selves, a little more to their museums and a disproportionate amount to the popular view of the subject itself.

Traditional caricatures take a long time to die. While the high public profiles of the most senior, and-in a few cases- the more distinguished, members of the museum profession in recent years have contributed to a small change in the way in which the general public thinks of the museum curator, I venture to sugggest that the image of the military museum curator remains largely unchanged. He, and it is invariably the male of the species, will be thought of as a retired ser- viceman, probably an officer, given to wearing clothes that are as unfashionable as is possible, without being in fashion once again and to having neatly cut hair and polished shoes. He will exude an air of amateur scholarship tinged with whiffs

of damp dogs, pipe tobacco and properly hung pheasant. The image of the grouse moor will combine with that of the Established Church and that of the politically conservative to round off the caricature. While the picture I have drawn is one recognizably British, I know that all other nationalities have their own versions. I wonder, then, how many ‘civilian’ curators have not had such an image swim before their eyes when a col- league, probably with a delicately poised shudder, has mentioned a military museum. How many know-at least in the context of the United Kingdom’s na- tional military museum - how far such an image is from the reality? That it was not always thus, in the British experience, is shown in the standard of some military museum displays.

The blinkered view

While museums remain the creations of their curators, aided, abetted and an- noyed by designers, it is understandable how frequently museum displays seem to ignore the presence of the general public.

Curators who produce displays such as those illustrated in figures 19-21 have only themselves to blame if the public, as opposed to the enthusiastic visitor possessed of, or - in some cases - by, specialist knowledge, greets their museums with a considerable degree of bemused detachment. Such crowded, jargon-filled, unexplanatory displays are not peculiar to military museums, however. Those botanists, archaeologists and zoologists who masquerade as curators are frequently guilty too; the dif- ference in their cases is that their displays, however obtusely arranged, are not tainted with war.

This brings us inevitably to the subject that is an inescapable part of the brief of every military museum; war, that endemic and apparently incurable human disease created by generations of politicians and fought by generations of servicemen with varying degrees of skill, commitment and enthusiasm. The layman with a preconceived idea of what

‘Too serious U business to be le$ to ?nibitary men’: a personal view of the military museum’s robe today 2 1

to see in a military museum will doubtless expect military museums to be about war and its supposted glories, rather than about the life of the serviceman in the long periods between combat. It is a sad fact that the only occasions on which this layman is likely to be at all disappointed are those when intensive displays of the material culture of the serviceman replace the battle maps and the statistics, the dioramas and the square metres of closely written text. Instead of a description of a battle or campaign comprehensible only to a military analyst-and a patient one at that-he will probably be confronted by military medals used as wallpaper, the arcane impedimenta of the serviceman’s uniform displayed with space-consum- ing, repetitive reverence and weapons spaced as neatly, yet lifelessly, as the oc- cupants of a fishmonger’s slab. All ac- companied by captions intelligible main- ly to the initiated few and all in separate categories, as if they bore no relation to each other or to the men and women by whom and around whom military history is made and written. It is displays of these types, centred on strategy and tactics and frequently giving only the view of the generals, or concentrating in minute detail on every variant in a type of spur or sparking plug, which have given military museums their bad name among their peers elsewhere in the profession. Com- bine these blinkered views of the

minutiae of the subject with the concept of killing, of rape and pillage, of bereave- ment on a grand scale and the curtail- ment of liberty and it cannot be a surprise that one produces an unfavourable reaction.

Contrast, though, this traditional view of military museums, or at least their per- manent exhibitions, with the temporary exhibition 1776: The British Story of the Amencm Revohtion, staged at the Na- tional Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London, in 1976. That exhibition, which was the talk of the British museum pro- fession, remains in my opinion the finest example of what can be done by putting the factors contributing to a period of conflict together and showing the ser- viceman in the context of his time and against the social, political, economic and cultural background that is an in- escapable part of any conflict at any period in any part of the world. Not even the most modern military museum galleries have come close to reproducing in skill, style or presentation what was done at Greenwhich ten years ago, though the new galleries at the Royal Army Museum in Stockholm approach it, if on a smaller scale (Fig. 23). In 1776 material of all types was displayed together in a polymath’s delight and in a manner which appears, sadly, to have defied imitation. It will be interesting to see whether anything of the same stan-

20 SCOTTISH UNITED SERVICES MUSEUM, Edinburgh Castle. Part of one of the large galleries devoted since 1930 to the history of the Scottish regiments of the British army.

... LI SCOTTISH UNITED SERVICES MUSEUM, Edinburgh Castle. Part of the displays devoted to the Royal Artillery in Scotland. A delight for military antiquarians, but an incomprehensible, if symmetrical jumble for most other people.

22 Stephen Wood

dard can be attempted in France in 1989. Figures 2 2 , 2 4 and 25 show the standard of the displays. They were conventional without being dull, yet attractive and eye-catching, and hint at the broad spec- trum of their content, which illustated a surface-scratching attempt to provide an objective overview of one of the most significant events in the history of the world. As such, it was, I feel, entirely suc- cessful. It was also, of course, extremely expensive to stage, generously sponsored by The Times and Szinday Times newspapers and by Barclays Bank, and depended exclusively upon items lent to the exhibition from private and national collections on both sides of the Atlantic. For these reasons alone, it clearly could not be a permanent feature among the other tourist attractions in Greenwich. Yet, as an example of what can be done, given the right attitude towards a com- plicated conflict and the will to make it intelligible to a general public 200 years later, it should, in my view, be imitated far more by military museums in their permanent and temporary exhibitions.

It is this overall view that colours my feelings about the role of the military museum today. In this, I support and en- dorse the view expressed by William Reid, Director of the National Army Museum, London, when addressing the annual conference of the British Museums Association held in Dundee, , Scotland, in 1973. He described his museum as not being a museums foi the British army but about the British army. He implied that, as such, it was a museum which illustrated the history of the British soldier in his chronologi- cal context and against his social background, not one which pandered, unquestioningly, to the glory, prejudices or traditions of the institution which has been an inseparable part of life in Britain since the fifteenth century. Readers of this journal who are familiar with that museum may draw their own conclusions about how successfully this point is made there. If it has succeeded, and in my view the success is partial rather than com- plete, then it is the only museum of its type in my experience where such an achievement can be recorded.

Even in the National Museum of American History in Washington D.C., where a collection illustrating the military history of the United States is displayed sympathetically and intelli- gently, the very fact that it is displayed separately from other categories of historical artefact underlines the pre-

valent feeling that the soldier is a being apart from his fellow-men. This is an im- pression wholly at odds with the facts of American history. From the defeat of a regular military force by one largely com- posed of part-time soldiers, through the trauma of the Civil War-which placed brother against brother in hastily raised volunteer regiments - to the westward march of settlers and the establishment of towns and cities in a hostile environment, with the direct assistance of the United States army, the American soldier has been inseparably involved with the history of his country. Irrespective of whether one approves of the methods for which and by which servicemen have been used, the fact that they have been so employed is a vital strand from of the historical rope which ties us all to the past. To part the strands is to weaken the rope. Curators of military museums need not become involved in value judge- ments, in the separation of right from wrong, or even in the identification of these most transitory of positions. If to understand everything is to forgive everything, then the factual illustration of all the component parts of any given historical process must, if all the known facts are marshalled and made intelligi- ble, aid those who live in the present bet- ter to comprehend the significance of the past.

Is objectivity an impossible object?

This objective is, of course, a difficult perhaps impossible one to attain univer- sally. It is certain, for instance, that no one today is capable of staging an objec- tive exhibition showing the history of the TYehrmacht during the period that the German army bore that title, 1933-45. We are too close and the memory is too painful. But the past will not go away; twelve years of history cannot be ignored and should not be treated in a subjective manner. An exhibition with such a theme would be essentially self-defeating anyway since it would implicitly separate the army from the state and thus lose much of its power while, at the same time, contriving by implication to blame the army for much of what went on dur- ing that terrible crisis of the mid- twentieth century. It is likely that no one reading this issue ofMmezrm in 1986 will see such an exhibition, at least during their working lives, since I cannot foresee that it could be successfully staged until at least the third decade of the twenty- first century. By that time, of course,

while objectivity may be possible, its ef- fect will, necessarily, have been counter- balanced by the establishment of myth as truth and the lack of reliable informa- tion: the oral memoirs of old soldiers and the films and tapes which end their days on the cutting-room floor having much in common in their contribution to the writing and recording of history. The im- possibility of staging such an exhibition during the guilt-ridden post-war years in the Federal Republic of Germany is understandable; objectivity never stood a chance. With the pendulum nature of museum fashion, as delicate and fickle as fashion in the outside world, it is likely that some sort of German interpreta- tion of the Third Reich will have to be produced on a museum basis. The danger now exists, I feel, not that the pendulum will swing too far in the opposite direc- tion but that a kind of self-conscious ob- jectivity will take over and that the urge to confront issues not strictly germane to the story will triumph. While this will be the result of a laudable attempt not to be thought to be covering things up, it may still be as unnecessary as it will be predict- able. Objectivity in military museum display is all very well of course. I suspect it is very rarely-if ever-matched by objectivity in the museum visitor. With certain exceptions, some of which are among the accidents of history, military museums are not always located in areas easily accessible to tourists or other peo- ple with time on their hands. For this reason, military museums are generally visited only by people who want to visit them rather than by people who happen to pass the door and are attracted inside by an inquiring nature or forced inside to escape the rain. Military museums in this category such as the Royal Air Force Museum in Hendon, London and the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum in the Arsenal in Vienna, have a visitor popula- tion largely composed of committed en- thusiasts. Since museums of all types are (or should be, in my view) a scholarly part of the entertainment business, their display should reflect in large measure what their varied public wants to see. Highly specialized displays and captions leaning heavily on jargon or technicalities are to be expected, and even excusable, when the museum is so remotely placed that the obsessions of its audience may reasonably be expected to parallel those of the curators. Such displays are inex- cusable when the museum is more cen- trally placed and therefore in a position to attract a wider and less specialized au-

‘Too serious a business to be left to militmy men’: apersonul view of the mìlìtqi mmei,”s

dience almost by accident and solely because of its position.

The displays illustrated in figures 19-21 are shining examples of almost stereotyped military museum displays yet, for all their crowding and lack of in- terpretation, they would not be out of place if the museum in which they are staged were accessible only to military an- tiquarians. In fact, they are situated in Scotland’s national military museum in the country’s most visited ancient monu- ment, Edinburgh Castle, an historical complex which attracts more than one million visitors each year. They are im- mensely popular with military history specialists, collectors of military anti- quities and the kind of museum visitor who finds predictability, clutter and old- fashioned displays agreeable. They are, I submit, incomprehensible to the vast majority of the castle’s visitors. They ma- jority of these visitors are not even British, let alone Scottish, and they probably find Britain itself sufficiently difficult to understand without being confronted with the massed trappings of a subculture which is itself part of the national mythology of Britain’s northernmost kingdom. While many of the visitors to Edinburgh Castle fall into the coach- party category intent upon ‘doing’ Scotland in three days, and whose time anywhere is necessarily limited, even those not restricted to comprehending

the military history of Scotland in five minutes become visibly concussed after a very short time by the amount of material on display and the conspicuous lack of in- telligible information about it. Since I am convinced that one of the measures of the success of any museum’s gallery is how long people with unlimited time ac- tually spend in it, it is clear that these galleries are unsuccessful. One of the reasons for this is that they are neither the one thing nor the other. It is possible that past curators, aware of the contradiction presented by a specialized museum on a popular site, have attempted to combine what are essentially primary and secon- dary galleries in order to produce something between the two. The confu- sion that has resulted is evident on the faces of the visitors and their bemuse- ment is complete when confronted by captions largely composed of technical terms and military jargon.

For aBd underlying ~oZicy

Thus far, I have concentrated largely upon the best and worst of military museum displays as part of the defini- tion, in my opinion, of the role of today’s military museums. The time has come to consider the message, the underlying policy which I feel should guide military museums today and for the forseeable future. In proposing military museum

role today 23

policy I shall deliberately confine myself to that of national military museums for two reasons. The first is that these are the military museums with which I have been most closely associated and the second is that - for good or ill - national military museums have tended, hardly surprising- ly, to reflect the Establishment view of national military policy. In an admini- strative arrangement whereby national military museums continue to be funded largely by government, however, con- vertly, it would be surprising if their policy on matters of recent and estab- lished military history departed at all from the government view. It is of primary importance that military mu- seums should not preach war. As far as I am aware not one does, but it is a charge constantly levelled at military museums both by people who should know better and by others less well informed but pro- ne to Pavlovian responses to the word ‘military’. The concept of the war museum was an understandable response to the horrors of the First World War. Large scale public revulsion at the enor- mous sacrifice combined with an institu- tionalized attempt at its commemora- tion. In the English-speaking world, this produced the Imperial War Museum in London and, eventually, similarly named institutions in Australia, Canada and South Africa. These appear to have been a particularly phenomenon of British im-

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22

Revolzdon, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, 1976. A lay figure, in

in a British Infantry regiments c. 1776.

1776: The British Story of the Amencm

reproduction costume, of a private soldier

-..

*- i

24 Stephen Wood

23 ARMÉMUSEUM, Stockholm. Part of the gallery devoted to the reign of King Charles XI (1690-97).

perialism since no such museums were established in Germany, France or the United States of America. Of the four countries where self-proclaimed war museums exist, only one, the United Kingdom, implicitly duplicates part of the role of its museum by also possessing national service museums. The duplica- tion is, however, little more than im- plicit, since the Imperial War Museum is more about the abstract concept of twentieth-century warfare than about the history of the services which were, and are, required to participate in it. By no stretch of any but the most fevered im- agination could the Imperial War Museum be said to glorify the business of war in its displays and exhibition. Its motto ‘That the Past may Serve’ in- dicates, with an optimism entirely characteristic of the period of its founda- tion, the reason for its original existence. The fact that the past failed conspicuous- ly to serve in 1939, or 1950, or 1956 or 1982 can hardly be laid at the door of the museum, except by those whose minds are made up before they enter its portals-if indeed they ever do. One of the saddest facts about military museums has little to do with the museums themselves but a great deal to do with the adage that one of the things which we learn from history is that no one ever learns anything from history.

One of the most important parts of the ideal role of the modern military museum should be, in my view, to con- front and, where necessary, refute the popular view of its subject which is marketed in persistently unrealistic yet increasingly violent ways by the makers of films and television programmes. While servicemen in combat are frequently brave, and occasionally even heroic, I submit that the most hardened and ex- perienced warrior, of whatever epoch, would echo General Sherman’s diction ‘War is Hell’. The cause of peace is not served by the concentration on its an- tithesis by films and television program- mes which portray the business of war as a glorious game where soldiers die clean- ly, quietly and quickly and the enemy may be butchered in battalions with com- parative impunity by the clean-limbed young men fortunate enough to be cast as the victors. This is the mythology of war, not the reality and its is the reality with which military museums, on the occa- sions when they deal at all with actual combat, should deal if they are to redress the balance between fact and fiction. This is, of course, to assume that it is a

balance which military museums either want to redress of would be allowed to redress by their masters. It is reasonable, for instance, to suppose that a govern- ment which insists upon maintaining a viable defence capability would welcome displays in one of the museums which it funds that show the effects of combat in the past?

A blood-stained coat taken from the body of an officer killed in a colonial war during the last century will provide a delicious fnkson of horror for bloodthirsty children but will fail conspicuously to put that conflict in its historical context, if displayed as just another exhibit. In these post-colonial days, however, it may just be possible to hint that the reason the coat is blood-stained is because the officer who occupied it was serving his govern- ment who had provoked the war in order to increase the imperial domain.

The bald statement that 60,000 British soldiers became casualties on the first day of the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916 carries, perhaps deliberately, very little impact now. I feel that the required im- pacr would be better assured if today’s museum visitor could see just what 60,000 people look like en masse.

The exflerìence of mi&tary Zge

Military museums possess a unique capacity not only to show their visitors what the past was like for a percentage of their ancestors but, with a little imagina- tion, to enable them to experience it too. No one who has not been a soldier can imagine what being a soldier is like; no one who has not been shot at, or shelled, or lived in a barrack room or been drilled on a parade ground can truly apreciate the experience. It is not an experience that the majority of people would will- ingly seek, which is why many countries still utilize periods of national service and one of the reasons that the British army is traditionally small. In an age when global conflict is relegated to the status of a last resort it is a fact that a decreasing number of people in what is curiously described as the developed world will have had per- sonal experience of long-term military service. and combat. As the first-hand ac- quaintanceship with active military ser- vice, with all its attendant experiences, gradually fades, so the likelihood of the mistakes of the past being repeated in- creases. Military museums can, and I believe should, aid the cause of peace (not peace at any price) by enabling modern and future generations to

‘Too serious a business to be left to militmy men’: a bersonal view of the ?ndìtny museum’s role toduy 25

24 1776: The BriXrh Story of the Amenkan Revolution, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, 1976. ‘Loyalists: Red, White and Black’: a display of North American Indian artefacts.

25 1776: The British Story of the American R e v o h t i o ~ , National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, 1976. Depictions of King George III and John Adams, first American Ambassador to Great Britain, which were accompanied by recordings of two short speeches delivered by The Prince of Wales (for the King) and The Hon. Elliot Richardson, American Ambassador in 1976 (for John Adams).

26 Stephen IVood

understand what past generations of ser- vicement have experienced. Properly run education departments in museums can do this for children, who are, after all, not only the seed-corn but also the cannon- fodder of the future and who are most likely to be affected by daily doses of gratuitous violence on television. Mu- seum education though, however well- run, is one of the many unseen aspects of museum life and its effects will rarely reach the general museum visitor. These are the people who ought to experience military life vicariously through the museum medium. There are a number of ways in which this can be achieved.

Just as there is nothing so useless as a tank or aeroplane without fuel so there is nothing so dull, to my mind, as that same tank or aeroplane without smell or noise. No one who has heard the roar of a rotary engine or smelt burning castor oil will ever, I believe, look at a First World War aeroplane in the same way again; two dimensions suddenly become three as the experience is complete. Similarly, no one who has not seen, or-with luck- performed, the loading and firing drill of a nineteenth-century muzzle-loading musket can ever really expect to under- stand not only how long it took and how hard the muskets recoiled but also how filthy the soldiers who fired them became in a short space of time. It seems, from my personal experience, that there are few military museums dealing to any degree with the western front during the First World War which do not now have their own reconstruction trench. Some are more accurate than others, but all are uniformly clinical and most are un- characteristically quiet. While I would not seriously suggest that these trenches should actually contain waist-deep mud and live rats and be regularly mortared using live ammunition, I fear that the reconstructions lose a great deal in their translation from reality and I am certain, having experienced the use of smells in temporary exhibitions elsewhere, that it is not beyond the wit of an imaginative curator to extend, if only partially, the ex- perience of his viewing public by the bet-

ter use of sound and smell in such reconstructions.

What then is the role of the military museum today? Ifwe can accept the view, as we surely must, that no military museum glorifies war, although many may seem to do so by conspicuously honouring its participants and com- memorating the sacrifice of its casualties, can we assume that many self-consciously trumpet the cause of peace? I think not, and I think that an anti-war museum would be absurd-just as the concept of the war museum is becoming ana- chronistic.

By employing the material culture of the past to illustrate and interpret history, military museums do no more than is done by other museums less associated with warlike or martial matters. If their use of the argot of the services confuses the readers of their captions, then clearly the captions must be simplified, but let zoologists and art historians observe this too and write captions accordingly.

Military museums also need to bridge the gap between their subject and its viewing public. As Dr Richard Holmes, one of United Kingdom’s few military historians to combine perspicacity with intellectual stature and still retain clarity, has observed in his latest book Firing Line: ‘ . . .it is an inescapable fact that the soldier’s primary function, the use- or threatened use-of force, sets him apart from civilians’.

No one who is either a professional soldier or a full-time civilian would dispute the accuracy of that statement. But the soldier was not always a soldier and there have been times, in very recent years, when large parts of the armies of the world were composed of hastily recruited civilians. It is, therefore, a serious mistake for military museums to separate themselves professionally from their civilian peers or to seek to illustrate the history of their subject in isolation from other pigments on the broad canvas of history. This is divisive and destructive and it aids the perpetuation of glib remarks such as that which heads this article.