Present arms!

Courtesy of Arkansas’ finest architects

WHO KNOWS what future generations will do when faced by the monuments the current one erects? That question will have to be left to posterity. Maybe the zeal for tearing down monuments will still be flaming, or perhaps future citizens will let them stand as memorials to what ours considered honorable. But whatever the fate of these tributes in stone, there should be no doubt about the talent, patience and style of those Arkansans who designed this most prominent memorial to Americans who served in the First World War — and were themselves honored by having their work chosen over hundreds of others who sought to leave their imprint, literally, on the nation.

There were 350 other entries in this race to design the World War I memorial. And it was Joseph Weishaar, a graduate of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas, who came up with the winning entry. It’s still a ways between concept and execution, and many a hurdle remains before the work begins come the fall—on the 11th day of the 11th month, when the anniversary of the armistice that ended the dreadful struggle is due to be solemnly but proudly observed. And at last all will be quiet on the Western front of that terrible war.

Joseph Weishaar’s concept was declared the winning one by the country’s Commission of Fine Arts, which must approve all memorials in the national capital. And as Thomas Luebke, secretary of the commission, noted: “Getting the concept approval is a very important milestone in the review process. They need the final approval in order to actually start construction.” And before that is won, there are all kinds of details — like the landscaping, lighting, signage and the general lay of the land — to be considered.

Usually designers of monuments in the national capital will have to meet with the seven members of this commission’s board again and again to work things out. By the time all this federal bureaucracy is traversed, the stages that lead to a final decision can be as involved as those maps depicting the offensives, defenses and stand-offs of what was first called the Great War itself. Or as the national commission’s secretary, the aforesaid Thomas Luebke, put it: “We’re designing a monument for the ages so we’re trying to get it right.”

Does getting it right mean honoring our own dead as well as those they fought? With the perspective of the ages, it becomes clearer that the brave warriors of all ages and ideologies are part of a common fraternity of valor and sacrifice. What, not take revenge on our enemies of 100 years ago? Of course not, not now. For “Revenge is Sour,” as George Orwell titled one of his many classic essays. Revenge is an emotion that may satisfy only in prospect, but doesn’t when a civilized nation, or just a civilized human, is in a position to exact it. Orwell was there as the Second World War was coming to an end and described a Jewish officer among the Allies who finally found it was he who could now persecute the Germans. Orwell proceeded to describe the German prisoner, an S.S. officer, at length:

“Quite apart from the scrubby, unfed, unshaven look that a newly captured man generally has, he was a disgusting specimen. But he did not look brutal or in any way frightening: merely neurotic and, in a low way, intellectual. His pale, shifty eyes were deformed by powerful spectacles. He could have been an unfrocked clergyman, an actor ruined by drink, or a spiritualist medium. I have seen very similar people in London common lodging houses, and also in the Reading Room of the British Museum. Quite obviously he was mentally unbalanced — indeed, only doubtfully sane, though at this moment sufficiently in his right mind to be frightened of getting another kick. And yet everything that the Jew was telling me of his history could have been true, and probably was true! So the Nazi torturer of one’s imagination, the monstrous figure against whom one had struggled for so many years, dwindled to this pitiful wretch, whose obvious need was not for punishment, but for some kind of psychological treatment. . . .”

Instead, he took the kicks. Mr. Orwell wondered about the Allied officer heaping the abuse: “I concluded that he wasn’t really enjoying it, and that he was merely — like a man in a brothel, or a boy smoking his first cigar, or a tourist traipsing round a picture gallery — telling himself that he was enjoying it, and behaving as he had planned to behave in the days he was helpless.”

YES, REVENGE is indeed sour. Why fall into its trap? Let us have peace, complete with all its accompanying arts.

Let us celebrate our honored soldiers with this newest monument coming to Washington. Over there, over there! We are fighting a war over there! But in a spirit of freedom and with the grace of the victorious. And all the while knowing that, while the Allies won that war, another one would overtake it in scale and death. But why think on that now? Let’s build this thing and show our pride for our doughboys.

“I think,” says Joseph Weishaar, “for any project that’s in the public realm, let alone within the iconic National Historic Site that is Pennsylvania Avenue … there should be high standards.”

And he ought to know. He’s setting them.