In 1997, almost exactly midway between the Gulf War in 1991 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein did the most extraordinary thing.
On the west bank of the Shatt Al Arab, just north of Basra, stood an imposing memorial to 40,660 British and Commonwealth troops killed in Mesopotamia during the First World War, whose graves are not known.
More than 33,000 were Indians, who formed the bulk of the British armies that fought the Ottomans in Mesopotamia. Many were Muslims. The memorial to their sacrifice was unveiled in March 1929 by Sir Gilbert Clayton, British High Commissioner to the Kingdom of Iraq.
Almost 70 years later, the memorial found itself situated inconveniently in the naval base at Maqil and the Iraqis decided it had to go.
Saddam, whose invasion of Kuwait six years earlier had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of a western-led coalition, might have been expected to order the memorial’s destruction.
Instead, he decreed it should be picked up and moved, stone by stone, 32 kilometres along the road towards Nasiriyah, to a spot in the desert where it was carefully reassembled and remains to this day.
What moved the ruthless dictator to this solemn act of respect we will never know.
But perhaps nothing better illustrates the haunting power of such monuments to the dead of war than the curious journey of the Basra Memorial.
The news from the Martyrs’ Families Affairs Office that a memorial is to be created in Abu Dhabi to honour the fallen soldiers of the UAE is a fitting response to the sacrifice of those who have given their lives in the service of their nation.
Such a memorial will provide a much-needed focus for the pride and grief of the families of the fallen, and for the loved ones of those yet to join them, whether their time is cut short in Yemen or in some other conflict yet to sear its name into the national consciousness.
But as vital as such a physical embodiment of a people’s gratitude undoubtedly is, raising a memorial to the UAE’s fallen also serves a broader purpose, marking a solemn waypoint in the coming of age of a nation that has asked its children to lay down their lives in its defence.
A national memorial is a place for sombre reflection, but it is also much more: it is the physical manifestation of the will and purpose of a people who have come together to forge a future defined by common values.
As such, what better location than that chosen – directly opposite the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque and close to the mausoleum holding the mortal remains of the founder of the nation.
But what form could such a memorial take?
The world, sadly, is full of examples, but nowhere more so than northern Europe, the setting for the industrial-scale carnage of the First World War and home to the largest concentration of war memorials in the world.
The creators of a UAE national memorial need not – indeed, should not – seek direct inspiration from designs rooted in another time and culture. But the solemn sense of loss, gratitude and courageously fulfilled duty that emanates from every stone could only help to guide a draftsman’s hand.
Great tracts of France and Belgium, of course, are thickly populated with many of the millions killed between 1914 and 1918. The legions with no known grave are commemorated on numerous imposing monuments.
After the war, the Imperial (later, Commonwealth) War Graves Commission appointed a team of leading architects to create “worthy and lasting memorials” to the dead.
At the time, the decision to democratise the dead – each individual would be treated equally in commemoration, regardless of class or rank – was a radical departure from the norm.
In the Napoleonic wars, for example, “the men would have been thrown into the pits without any lasting commemoration”, says Glyn Prysor, an historian with the commission.
“It was really felt that this war was so different, had seen loss on such a scale, that commemoration really needed to reflect the democratic zeitgeist – that men who had fought and died together should remain together.”
The commission was “determined to have the very best architecture, materials and horticulture. The essence of it was perpetuity – these were places that were expected to survive forever, literally.”
As a result, “to a great extent the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission really established what we expect from commemoration today”.
More than a century after the start of the conflict, the structures still possess the power to awe and move.
Visitors from around the world, many paying respects to their forebears, can still be found every evening beneath the arches of the Menin Gate in Belgium. A vast, neoclassical structure which straddles the main road into the town of Ypres, it bears the names of 54,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers lost without trace in Flanders.
But what makes this imposing memorial especially powerful is a living, human touch, which nightly moves many to tears. At 8pm each night since the memorial was completed in 1927, a local bugler has sounded The Last Post to honour those who died for Belgium's freedom so long ago.
Fifty kilometres south, on high ground overlooking the Douai plain in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region of France and visible for kilometres around, stands one of the most heartbreaking memorials.
The Canadian National Vimy Memorial, unveiled in 1936, is built on the site of a hard-won Canadian victory in April 1917. Rich with symbolic statuary on a grand scale, it commemorates the 66,000 men of Canada who lost their lives in the war and carries the names of the 11,500 who have no grave.
The vast central figure of a weeping, hooded woman, carved on site from a 30-tonne block of stone and gazing down bereft at a tomb, represents Canada, “a young nation mourning her fallen sons”, in the words of the country’s department of veterans affairs. It is the very personification of loss and grief.
Built on land granted in perpetuity to Canada by the French, the memorial also encapsulates the moment Canada came of age. All four Canadian divisions sent to France went into action together, and men from all regions of Canada fought and died side by side. “In those few minutes,” Canadian Brigadier-General Arthur Ross later recalled, “I witnessed the birth of a nation.”
As moving and remarkable as such memorials are, they are of a certain time and place, vestiges of an imperial age that draw heavily on western classical influences.
Though each strikes a note of timeless dignity, perhaps the best lesson they can offer the architects of an Emirati memorial is the importance of being true to a mood and cultural moment in time.
Yet there are some remarkable exceptions to the conformity of classical imagery, employing stonework more akin to modern art than monumental masonry.
One example can be found at Langemark in Belgium, in one of the few cemeteries the Germans were allowed after the war, which holds the remains of more than 44,000 soldiers, many in a mass grave.
They are watched over by a haunting tableau of four statues known as the mourning soldiers, created by German sculptor Emil Krieger in 1956 and based on a graveside photograph taken in 1918.
In the early 21st century, war is not to be glorified, and memorials to the dead need not literally overshadow the living. Built over 150 acres since work began in 1997, the UK’s National Memorial Arboretum at Alrewas, in the central county of Staffordshire, was conceived as “a living and lasting memorial … a place of joy where the lives of people would be remembered by living trees that would grow and mature in a world at peace”.
France, too, has tried to elevate remembrance beyond the ranks of stark, white-stoned gravestones that define the landscape through which the opposing trenches of the First World War once ran.
In November last year, 100 years since the start of the conflict, French president François Hollande stood side by side with Germany’s defence minister near Arras to unveil the Ring of Remembrance, composed of 500 three metre-high panels bearing the names of the 580,000 men who died on the battlefields of northern France during the first war.
Here, French, British and German dead mingle together in alphabetical order, shorn of rank and nationality in a symbolic unity which “emphasises the brotherhood that now exists between the people who did battle in World War One”.
Words, of course, play a vital role in remembrance and one of the earliest known memorials – since lost but replaced by a substitute in modern times – set a tone that has echoed down the ages.
A simple stone tablet marked the spot at Thermopylae in ancient Greece where, in 480BC, a force of 300 Spartans was wiped out after holding a vastly superior Persian army at bay for three days.
One version of the text it bore, attributed to the contemporary poet Simonides, reads: “Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.”
Indeed, many of the finest memorials have been cast not in stone but in words. Many lines penned during the Great War, such as these by A E Housman, have retained their power and relevance:
“Here dead we lie
Because we did not choose
To live and shame the land
From which we sprung”
A rough-hewn stone memorial to the 2,000 British and Indian troops who died at Kohima in April 1944, in a desperate action that turned back the Japanese advance into India, bears a simple epitaph whose eloquent poignancy would serve any nation, in any age:
“When you go home, tell them of us and say,
For their tomorrow, we gave our today.”
Above all, perhaps, the purpose of a memorial is to create a spiritual sense of place that can bring a nation together in grief and remembrance.
Britons from all walks of life, from the monarch down, gather each Remembrance Day on London’s Whitehall at the Cenotaph, designed in 1919 by the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens and echoed since in designs throughout the world.
From the sublime, to the extremely personal. The English writer Rudyard Kipling, whose own son was lost during the Great War and whose body, like so many, was never found, composed the consolatory epitaph found on every grave containing the remains of an unknown soldier: “Known unto God.”
Indeed, perhaps the last word on any memorial should always belong to the families that have given their loved ones in the service of their country.
After the Great War, families were given space on the otherwise uniform headstone for a few brief words.
One message in particular haunts Dr Prysor, who has seen so many of the hundreds of thousands of graves and memorials cared for by the War Graves Commission around the world.
On a trip to Gallipoli, Dr Prysor was standing in Courtney’s and Steele’s Post, a small cemetery that holds the remains of 65 Australians, when the setting Sun struck the headstone of William Henry O’Bree, a 28-year-old lance-corporal in the Australian infantry killed on May 2, 1915.
The golden rays lit up his brief epitaph, which spoke with simple eloquence for every parent or partner who has ever lost a child to war: “We miss him at home.”
Jonathan Gornall is a freelance writer based in London.