"Action without a name, a 'who' attached to it, is meaningless...The monuments to the 'Unknown Soldier' after World War I bear testimony to the then still existing need for glorification, for finding a 'who,' an identifiable somebody whom four years of mass slaughter should have revealed. The frustration of this wish and the unwillingness to resign oneself to the brutal fact that the agent of the war was actually nobody inspired the erection of the monuments to the 'unknown,' to all those whom the war failed to make known and robbed thereby, not of their achievement, but of their human dignity" (HC, pp. 180-1).
Such a monument to me evokes two thoughts: a) whoever lies within the tomb has been defaced, destroyed and decayed beyond recognition after the effects of warfare; but b) whoever individual a) might be, that one represents so many others who shared a similar fate and thus, to make a monument for each would require a field as large as the original battlefield. In other words, there have been too many other soldiers whose bodies have been desecrated by warfare that picking simply one and calling it good will honor all of the embarrassingly high number of extremely-and-forever unknown troops. In this respect, its ostensible honor detail merely covers the shame of warfare that reduces individual soldiers to an ignoble end.
Instead, I wish the words of the poet could be inscribed on a marker and placed near the tomb in order to smear out for good the lie maintain by the Honor Guard: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/dulce-et-decorum-est
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