Howitzer

With a few polished phrases, His Grace the Duke of Connaught unveiled at Hyde Park corner a vast squat howitzer of cut stone, London's War memorial to the Royal Artillery. As it loomed above the traffic that sweeps past St. George's Hospital, Britons felt a crinkly shiver along their spines. Four titanic bronze artillerymen give to the composition a gruesome air of stark reality, making the cold stone of the howitzer seem like colder steel.

Straightway Londoners gave vent to their feelings through the national safety valve, "a letter to The Times." Roundly they berated the noted sculptor, C. S. Jagger, for having produced "a monument which will be interpreted as a glorification of war." Sir Ian Hamilton, onetime (1901-02) Chief-of-Staff to Lord Kitchener, spoke for many when he said, quoting the late Marquis Curzon: "To my mind, the ugliest thing in the world is a gun, with one exception only--the howitzer. The howitzer resembles a toad squatting and ready to spit fire out of its mouth. Nothing more hideous could be conceived."

Added the art critic of The Times: "It has neither the appeal of actuality nor the more subtle and lasting appeal of monumental sculpture. To the eye of an expert artilleryman, there may have been some alterations in proportions, some suppression of details in the various gadgets, but to ordinary observers it is a literal copy of the actual gun in stone, much as might have been made by measurement by any competent stonemason. Artistically, it has less than the merit of a child's wooden locomotive, because in that there is simplification determined by the material."

Commented Lady Oxford, famed as Margot Asquith: "A vast dummy gun is on the fine site opposite the hospital, which would have been glad to receive half the money spent on it and other horrors that we could all numerate to perpetuate the spirit which it should be the privilege of the Church to combat."