Memorials and memorialisation are among the ways people confront the challenge of responding to trauma and the contending temporalities it invokes. In this chapter I look at two memorials that are exceptional in that they seem to encircle trauma rather than absorbing it in a national myth of glory and sacrifice – the Cenotaph in Whitehall, London, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (the Vietnam Wall) in Washington. These two memorials both show what I mean by trauma time, as opposed to linear narrative time. In both cases encircling and absence are key motifs.

It is important to remember that ‘commemoration was and remains a business in which sculptors, artists, bureaucrats, churchmen, and ordinary people, had to strike an agreement and carry it out’. There are many different and contesting objectives in the building of memorials and a whole range of views in how these could be realised. The people involved have personal as well as institutional or functional reasons for their contribution, and these strands are impossible to 0disentangle. A well-known example is author Rudyard Kipling and his involvement in the War Graves Commission.