HISTORIC WWI EDITION

It’s a profoundly moving highlight of the Armistice centenary: The faces of 28 WWI heroes re-created on our beaches in a tribute led by film director Danny Boyle

ON NOveMBeR 11, 1918, the great tide of blood that had swept Western europe and many other parts of the world since 1914 was at last stemmed by the Armistice. It is a day we have marked every year since. This year, the hundredth, has to feel different. That is why an organisation called 14-18 NOW has teamed up with local arts groups to bring the past into the present and make us freshly aware of the sacrifices of that terrible war.

Across Britain, local communities will be able to watch as their beaches are transformed to reveal portraits of soldiers who gave their lives for their country.

We wanted to suggest a way in which we could all acknowledge those sacrifices together. This was not intended to replace formal ceremonies that will take place at The Cenotaph and war memorials all over the country, but something that could underline the significance of a century and be celebrated alongside them.

Rudyard Kipling’s poem, ‘My Boy Jack’ was written in 1917 in response to the losses in the Battle of Jutland. It also reflects his deeply personal feelings about the disappearance of his son John at the Battle of Loos in 1915: ‘Have you news of my boy Jack? / Not this tide.’

The poem has come to represent, for many of us, our own feelings about the millions of unknown soldiers lost to history.

Kipling’s tide, and the thought of those men and women who left these shores to serve, made me think of the beaches that surround these islands as a possible space where people could come together and commemorate the century since their fight ended: To say goodbye.

THe shoreline belongs to everyone, it is a democratic space, where only the sea rules; at once a personal and public landscape. And these same beaches are where so many soldiers and service people left from. I liked the idea of people coming together in their own way, or with their local community, to celebrate and commemorate, but without too much formal ceremony.

We want to create portraits of some of those who were lost, drawn in the sand between low and high tide. The portraits will be created by specialist sand sculptors as the tide goes out in the morning, and gently erased by the sea as the tide returns.

I can think of no more fitting site, for instance, than Folkestone beach, the port through which ten million men and women passed on their way to and from France.

Some of them, like the poet Wilfred Owen, did not come back. He swam from Folkestone beach the day before he left for the front for the last time in 1918. So we will draw his portrait there.

He, and the other poets, brought the war home in a way that the newspapers and newsreels could not, so — in honour of them — we asked the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, to write a new poem. I have brought my daughters up on the Glaswegian’s work and she remains, for me, one of the blazing talents of english-language poetry.

I like to think Wilfred Owen would have been pleased with the simplicity and beauty of what she has written.

The closing line of her poem, ‘Your faces drowning in the pages of the sea’, has given us the title for this project: ‘The Pages of the Sea’.

So, no speeches, but a simple poem, that can be read silently or aloud, singly or in chorus, on the beach. You can decide how you want to do it.

Please join us on Sunday at the Pages of the Sea beaches to fill the shorelines around the UK, and stand together, as we watch the faces of the dead disappear.

Our beaches are spaces where time is relevant only in relation to the tide; where it’s possible perhaps to imagine standing beside those young expectant folk who cannot imagine what awaits them, and to say a final goodbye and an endless thank you.