Identities Lost and Found in the Commemorative Landscapes of the Great War

By their very nature, national building programs legitimize and ennoble some groups and exclude and silence others. This is underscored in commemorative architecture, which visually amplifies messages of communal belonging or separation. In the First World War, the burial and sacrifices of soldiers in the Indian Expeditionary Forces and those employed in the Chinese Labor Corps were subsumed into a topography of a British remembrance practice. This article addresses the ways in which the British narrative has been modified looking at the iconography of these additions to the Flemish landscape, analyzing both placement and reception.