Wipers Vipers

As might be expected from a country which has the effrontery to claim Brussels as its capital, Belgium's latest commemoration of Britain's victory in the Great War appears somewhat lacking in rah-rah. It consists of six hundred thousand individual clay sculptures, one for every person killed on Belgian soil; half the funding went to charities in Africa, including Congo to which King Leopold's brave boys had brought so much in the way of civilised values. Weeds are allowed to grow around the sculptures as a symbol of the battlefield's return to nature; and at the centre is a giant egg representing the new world from which would hatch, within a generation, the superb Britishness of Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and the Norway Campaign. Contrary to the healthy precedent set by recent British displays, however, no effort whatever has been made to distinguish between the worthy and the unworthy dead. In Art, as in History and Gratitude, the Euro-wogs of Flanders clearly have much to learn.