Empires of the Dead

by David Crane

  We sent for our padre … and I went to the funeral in a little British cemetery near a ruined farm not far from our firing line. It was a regular Sir John Moore burial as our guns were thundering at the time and while we were at the grave the Germans sent over several shrapnel and high explosives … which burst unpleasantly near.

  There were regiments, of course, who never relaxed their pre-war standards – Duff Cooper might have found himself in an unusually dangerous bit of Mayfair when he arrived at the front in 1918 for all the difference war made to his social life – but the old hierarchies were never so unashamedly honoured as in these early days. ‘Dear Miss F. Robertson,’ one former servant, now ‘Private Young, 4 Company, Divisional wiring, c/o Head Qrs’, wrote back in pencil from Ypres to his previous employer’s family,

  Yesterday I visited the Town Major’s office for the purpose of locating Mr. Lewis’s grave, the plans of the city were handed to me and with the address you gave me the exact spot was easy to find. After making my way through the ruins of the convent I came to the grounds which are badly damaged by shell fire. I cannot express to you how glad I was to find the grave in perfect order, except for weeds, brick and various other articles lying around, the bottom of the cross is damaged by shrapnel, however I will get to work right away, and make a new cross, which can stand behind the old one, also rearrange things and clear all rubbish away. While I am here you can depend on me to see that the grave is kept in good order. I have ample time on hand and can spare an hour or more work every day it is no trouble to me whatever I am only too glad, that the little service I hoped for, for months, has at last been fulfilled. If there is any plans you would like me to carry out, just mention them, I will be only to [sic] delighted to be of what little service that is possible for me to do. Must conclude in haste, I am quite fit and happy. Sincerely yours, D. Young.

  The arrival of the first Territorial battalions in November 1914, Sir Nevil Macready, the Adjutant General in France, recognised, had made this sense of ‘family’, with its attendant psychological complications, all the stronger too. Among the old regulars the response to a death might be no more than a few ‘words of rough regret’ and ‘a determination to get their own back’, but for the closely knit Territorials, bound together by every social tie of peacetime life, the brutal shock of seeing ‘hundreds of their comrades … swept away’ in battle would cause ‘a great wave of grief and depression’ which would take days to overcome.

  It was a pointer to the future, and to the damage that whole communities would suffer when the Pals’ battalions went into action, and in such a climate the work of the Mobile Ambulance Unit took on a significance that probably caught even Ware by surprise. From the first he had issued instructions against the taking of undue risks, but he knew as well as his men that nothing added more to the prestige of the unit than the fact that they shared the dangers of the front-line troops. ‘It is fully recognised that the work of the organisation is of purely sentimental value, and that it does not directly contribute to the successful termination of the war,’ General Haig wrote to the War Office in March 1915, blithely unconscious of just how big a butcher’s bill he would finally be presenting to the nation,

  It has, however, an extraordinary moral value to the troops in the field as well as to the relatives and friends of the dead at home. The mere fact that these officers visit day after day the cemeteries close behind the trenches, fully exposed to shell and rifle fire, accurately to record not only the names of the dead but also the exact place of burial, has a symbolic value to the men that it would be difficult to exaggerate. Further, it should be borne in mind that on the termination of hostilities the nation will demand an account from the Government as to the steps which have been taken to mark and classify the burial places of the dead, steps which can only be effectively taken at, or soon after, burial.

  If Haig’s letter is a sure sign of the impact Ware’s unit had made it seems all the more extraordinary that it had been eight months in coming. In many ways the BEF had been the most professional army the country had ever sent abroad but when it came to the question of its dead and the accurate registration of burials, it might as well have been back in the Peninsula for all the planning or provisions that had been made.

  There were excuses – Treasury reluctance to spend money on anything that did not directly contribute to victory – but it was not as if the men in command had no first-hand experience of the distress and confusion that previous failures had caused. In the aftermath of the Boer War, the Loyal Women’s Guild had done its ‘admirable’ but ‘unsatisfactory’ best to fill the gap, but ‘a lot of trouble over soldiers’ graves’, Sir Nevil Macready, another old South Africa hand, later told a War Office committee, ‘would have been avoidable had a proper organisation been created to meet the need at the commencement of the war’.

  In the failure of the authorities to provide their own organisation, however, Ware saw his opportunity and it could not have come at a better moment. In the first months of the war he had been determined to keep the Army at arm’s length, but his men in the field had always found the absence of military rank a disadvantage and with the scale of work expanding all the time – by May 1915, 4,300 graves would be registered – and Ian Malcolm and the Paris office of the International Red Cross still operating to the south in the Marne and Aisne areas, the point had been reached at which Ware’s independence could best be preserved from within the Army rather than from without.

  The Army needed no persuasion of the value of his work – distressed relatives’ letters in the newspapers at home were reminders that there would come a reckoning if they continued to do nothing – but what Ware wanted was a monopoly of it and in late February he secured himself an appointment with the Adjutant General to make his case. ‘Into the old-fashioned French bedroom which served as my office came a spare, dark individual, dressed in the uniform of the French Croix-Rouge,’ Nevil Macready recalled,

  He explained that he had been working with the French, and was at that moment with General Conneau’s cavalry, but wished, if there was an opening, to give his services to his own countrymen. We chatted for some time, and I found that he had considerable administrative experience and was a fluent French scholar. His memory was better than mine, and it transpired that some forty years before, when we were both small boys, he had been present at a meeting house of the Plymouth Brethren, to which I had been taken by an aunt, and when I got into some difficulties over the ritual, an episode which had evidently impressed him. Before he left my room I had booked him to create an organisation to [find] and record the names of our soldiers.

  There can have been few First World War generals who had been bounced on Dickens’s knee as a child, but then a son of the great Victorian actor-manager Charles Macready and the great-grandson of the artist Sir William Beechey, Nevil Macready was hardly typical in the first place. As a young boy growing up in Cheltenham he would have preferred the stage to the Army, but his father was having none of it and after Sandhurst, and a brief and bloody baptism at Tel-el-Kebir in Egypt, he had gravitated into staff work as if born to it, rising quietly and seamlessly from an appointment with the military police in Alexandria to be Assistant Adjutant General and Chief Staff Officer for Cape Colony at the end of the Boer War. If the thespian in the fastidiously elegant Macready never entirely died – it is no surprise that he was the first to take off his moustache when he lifted the injunction against clean-shaven officers in the Army – the role he always played best was that of the brusquely efficient administrator. During the South African war he had seen more than his fair share of fighting at Ladysmith, but his real métier remained the staff and it was back at the War Office with responsibility for the deployment of troops in aid of the civil power that his talents came fully into their own.

  The years immediately before the war were not good ones for soldiers, years of widespread industrial violence and looming civil war in Ireland that drew the British Army into a policing rol
e, but Macready was one of the few men to come out of them with his reputation enhanced. In 1910 he had taken command of operations in South Wales during the bitter miners’ strikes, and the name he made for himself there marked him for the top at a time when his qualities of judgment, firmness, and political impartiality had never been at a higher premium.

  With their Plymouth Brethren connections, Milner’s South Africa and even political sympathies in common – Ware, a social radical in conservative clothing, Macready, by military standards at least, the next thing to a Bolshevik in uniform – the two men might have been made for each other. The result was the creation of a Graves Registration Commission (GRC) with Ware at the helm. ‘At the beginning of the present war,’ Macready later told a War Office Committee, smoothly glossing over the turf wars and bloodletting that lay behind its birth, he had,

  talked over the matter with the … Chief Engineer, BEF, and decided to create an organisation to deal with the graves question. Certain members of the Red Cross Society at the time were in a spasmodic way interesting themselves in the matter and expending their energies in different directions. But there was no control and, to cut a long story short, [I] obtained the services of … Ware, and put him in charge.

  Although in some ways the new GRC remained a curiously hybrid, semi-detached sort of unit – the Red Cross continued to supply men and vehicles, while Ware was given the local rank of major (with two captains and seven lieutenants under him) and the Army took on the costs of crosses, rations and fuel – the crucial thing for Ware was that the GRC had the monopoly he had wanted. In the first months of the war he been obliged to share power with the Red Cross’s Paris office, and with Macready now behind him, he moved swiftly and ruthlessly to take control of the work being done in the Aisne/Marne district by Ian Malcolm and bring it under a single unified command.

  He was right to do what he did – unauthorised individuals had become involved, vital identification evidence removed, questionable exhumations carried out – but it was unmistakably the old Ware of South Africa and Morning Post days who had ruthlessly squeezed out Spenser Wilkinson. In the earliest days in France he had often found the Red Cross were actually ahead of him in their work, and yet if Malcolm imagined now that that would count for anything he was in for a sad awakening. ‘There is not, of course, much in the personal point,’ Malcolm pleaded with Lawley,

  though I am bound to say I feel rather aggrieved at being completely passed over and superseded in my own area where I have worked so hard for five months [but on public grounds, to avoid replication]. Would it not, therefore, be well if the A.G., or Fabian Ware … could entrust me with their official programme? Can you not help to arrange this?

  ‘It would be a matter of the greatest disappointment to me if all this were suddenly taken from out of my hands,’ he wrote in the same plaintive vein to Ware on 11 March, ‘and I should feel sure that it would be far from your wish that it should be so.’

  He did not know his man, and within the week all his maps, lists and cemetery concessions were on the new director’s desk, as Ware began the business of putting their old grave work on a more organised footing. At the outset Ware still had all the problems of a volunteer workforce and a War Office that ‘neither cares nor understands’, but by the middle of August 1915 plans had already assumed a ‘definite’ enough shape for him to be able to describe the organisation in a report to Macready that shows just why he had been the right choice for the job.

  Ware had divided the Commission into two parts, with seven distinct sections to carry out the field work and a headquarters responsible for the compilation and update of two registers. The first of these was a registration of graves with the names of officers and men listed by regiment, with details of any existing cross or inscriptions where the sites were accessible, and a note of who had reported them where they could no longer be reached, along with a record of any outstanding enquiries.

  The second, complementing the regimental lists, was a geographical register. ‘By means of this,’ Ware explained, with all the breezy confidence of a man who still did not know what lay ahead,

  it is possible to state at once how many burial grounds are in existence, how many graves are in each, and in what units they belong. The register also enables crosses destroyed by shell fire or otherwise to be replaced, and it is practically impossible for any grave once located to be lost sight of.

  All enquiries, half of them from France, half from home, were also dealt with at their chateau headquarters at Lillers, but the real spade-work, as it were, was carried out by the sections. In the first reorganisation Ware had envisaged that there would be four of these, but by the August of 1915 those four had swelled to seven – ‘A’ and ‘G’ at Bethune for instance, ‘D’ at Aisne and Marne – with the officer in charge of each district responsible for marking and reporting burials to headquarters, tracking down and verifying old graves, collating daily returns from chaplains, units and hospitals, and finally preparing and erecting wooden crosses with their machine-punched metal identification plates.

  In tandem with this work, often carried out under conditions of great risk, as Haig noted, went a growing number of local enquiries, and the first rudimentary improvements to the appearance of cemeteries sparked off by a torrent of requests for photographs from families back in Britain. Macready had already exempted the Graves Registration Commission from the prohibition against photography, and with funds from the Joint War Committee of the Red Cross and St John Ambulance a separate department was set up and three ‘first-class’ professional photographers put to work over the summer months to begin the task of photographing all the graves.

  Six thousand graves photographed, 800 photographs despatched to families in England, 18,173 graves registered, it was an extraordinary workload that had been completed by the middle of August. However there was a limit to what even Ware could do. In the first days of the GRC he had wanted the old Mobile Unit to continue its ambulance duties, but with his resources stretched to the limit by the expanding GRC work it was probably as well that a rare breakdown in his relations, and an even rarer show of offended dignity from Ware, forced his hand.

  It was a sad end to a fertile partnership, but it cleared the way for Ware to concentrate on his graves work. It also foreshadowed another equally inevitable development in the story of the GRC. Macready and the Old Army – with memories of the chaos in South Africa – had never been entirely comfortable co-operating with the Red Cross and a change of status was needed. With the volume of work growing by the day, and a volunteer manpower inadequate to the task, the existing compromise made no sense. ‘I saw the AG the other day,’ Sir Arthur Lawley wrote in mock outrage to Ware at the end of August,

  who hinted at an act of Piracy so audacious that I am still dumb with horror at the mere suggestion.

  He proposes to swallow at one gulp the GRC and all its merry men.

  Could you ever endure to be torn from the sheltering arms of the Red Cross?

  ‘Now!’ I hear you say.

  I will do all I can to save you.

  Within weeks it was a faint accompli. On 6 September, Macready recommended to the War Office that the GRC should ‘be placed on a proper footing as part of His Majesty’s forces’, and a month later its old hybrid existence came to an end. It marked the end of the first phase of Ware’s life work. The enduring, impressive and controversial aspects of that work – the questions of repatriation, commemoration, permanence, uniformity, imperial involvement and authority – still lay ahead but without the Mobile Ambulance Unit none of it could have happened.

  ‘I am sorry and at the same time glad that it should be so,’ Lawley wrote again at the end of October, after the Army’s ‘piracy’ had become official,

  sorry of course that we can no longer look upon your achievements as ‘our’ work and claim a share in its reflected glory; glad on the other hand that the excellent quality of your work and its value has received the flattering recognition which
is manifested by the Army’s absorption of your entire organisation.

  It was a rightly generous tribute to the work that had been done, and a sober recognition of what lay ahead. The war had changed and the Army with it. By the end of 1914, the four infantry divisions and the one cavalry division of the BEF who had crossed the Channel in August had almost trebled in size to a force of two armies and a cavalry corps of more than 270,000 men. By the spring of 1916 this would rise to a million and a peak in the summer of 1917 of 1,721,056 men. Already a newly arrived officer like Cameron Highlander Ian Mackay, who only reached France in the spring of 1915, could look back with a sense of awe on the achievements of the BEF at Mons and its aftermath as if they belonged to a wholly different conflict. They had been ‘marvellous’, he told his mother – the perfect answer ‘to the crokers who lamented the decadence of the race. No troops in the world could have done what they have done.’

  Mackay’s war, until it ended in an unmarked grave in 1917, would be very different. The romance, the pride, the glamour, the professional elan of the early days had died with the Old Army and all that was left to their successors was to endure. From the Channel coast to the Swiss border, an unbroken line of earthworks, stretching for 475 miles, marked the front line. This line would define Mackay’s experience of France as it still largely shapes the collective memory of what the war was like. It would also be the phase of the fighting that projected the work of Ware and his men on to a scale that makes the world of orchards, farms and solitary and scattered graves that Broadley and his colleagues searched in late 1914 seem to belong to an unimaginably remote past.

  THREE

  With an Eye to the Future

  There were possibly any number of administrators who could have put the work of the Graves Registration Commission on an efficient footing in 1915, but how many could also have dealt with the political complexities and negotiation that went with it is a very different matter. In the early spring of 1915, Ware had begun talks in Paris with the French government on the status of British war graves, and over the next weeks and months he was in constant contact with the different government departments involved, assuaging cultural differences and repairing real or imagined slights with the finesse of a born diplomat and the political savvy of an old newspaperman.