Empires of the Dead

by David Crane

  There were the usual ‘us and them’ gripes – the War Office were ‘blighters’, he told Milner, and their clerks should be shipped over to the trenches for a week – but as ‘the sole intermediary between the British Army in the Field and the French military and civil authorities on all matters relating to graves’ he had the complete authority he wanted. In the earliest days with the Mobile Ambulance Unit his work had inevitably been essentially reactive, but here, for the first time, was a chance to think and plan for the future on a scale appropriate to his energy and vision and to the growing magnitude of the Allies’ sacrifice.

  It is impossible to do much more than guess what the Army had in mind when it placed Ware in charge of the negotiations. They knew that in Ware they had found a man with the experience and tact to smooth over difficulties, but if they imagined that they were taking on a kind of glorified Undertaker General to the Forces to put an acceptable face on Death for the benefit of a disturbed public back at home, then they had hopelessly underestimated their man.

  He would certainly do that for them – no one in the history of warfare has transformed the horrors and suffering of a battlefield into oases of peace like Ware – but from early in their alliance he and the Army had different objectives in view. There was nothing stupid or blinkered about a man like Nevil Macready, but where he saw a problem Ware saw an opportunity; where the soldier and administrator simply recognised a failure in procedures that would come back to haunt the Army, the visionary saw the glimmer of an answer to all those pre-war dreams of unity and equality he had preached. One of the most intriguing questions that the history of the war graves poses, in fact, is when Ware first realised precisely what he was doing in France. There is an element of self-congratulation in the traditional accounts of the War Graves Commission that makes it all sound inevitable from the start, but if there is certainly a retrospective logic to its history that links the Mobile Ambulance Unit and its various reincarnations to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission of today, it owed as much to chance and opportunism as it did to vision or principle.

  Ware was without question a visionary and idealist, but the real quality that enabled him to achieve things was an eye for the main chance, a politician’s instinct for popular movement, an intuitive sense of the zeitgeist, and at no time was that more obvious than in the summer of 1915. Over the late spring and early summer of that year there would be two decisions taken in France that were absolutely seminal to the future of Britain’s war graves, but if anyone other than Ware so much as glimpsed the implications of them or the social and political transformation they foreshadowed, then he kept very quiet about it.

  Ware could not possibly have seen the future or even the full consequences of all the decisions he was taking, but then who in 1915 could be sure that there would be a future? In the popular consciousness the year forms a muted intermezzo between the high hopes of 1914 and the horrors of the Somme, but for those who lived through it this was the year of Neuve-Chapelle, German gas and Loos, of the naval and military disasters of Gallipoli, the year in which even the sinking of the Lusitania and the Armenian Massacres failed to shake Woodrow Wilson’s high-minded neutrality – the year that ended for Britain with the silent evacuation of one beaten army from the beaches of Turkey, the hopeless and disease-ravaged rump of another besieged in the Iraqi city of Kut, and any hopes of an Allied breakthrough on the Western Front looking more delusory than ever.

  For Vera Brittain, for Rudyard Kipling and his wife Carrie, for the relatives of the 11,500 dead of Aubers Ridge who had died for nothing, of the 16,500 of Festubert who at least had their thousand yards to show for it, of the 43,000 lost at Loos, the greatest battle yet fought by a British army – it was the year that the world stopped and for the volunteers of 1914 it was their welcome to Erich Remarque’s universal enemy, Death. ‘The dug-outs have been nearly all blown in,’ Roland Leighton, Vera Brittain’s fiancé and one of the brightest of those golden youths who had sat listening to Uppingham’s headmaster only a year before, wrote bitterly home,

  and in among the chaos of twisted iron and splintered timber and shapeless earth are the fleshless, blackened bones of simple men who poured out their red, sweet wine of youth unknowing, for nothing more tangible than Honour or their Country’s Glory or another Lust of Power. Let him who thinks War is a glorious, golden thing, who loves to roll forth stirring words of exhortation, invoking Honour and Praise and Valour and Love of Country with as thoughtless and fervid faith as inspired the priests of Baal to call on their own slumbering deity, let him but look at a little pile of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull and a shin bone and what might have been his ribs, or at this skeleton lying on its side, resting, half crouching, as it fell, perfect but that it is headless … and let him think how grand and glorious a thing it is to have distilled all Youth and Joy and Life into a foetid heap of hideous putrescence!

  Leighton himself would be dead by Christmas, shot through the stomach, but if this year of disillusionment and rising casualties brought home the grim paradox at the heart of Ware’s steady rise up the military ladder, that only made him the more resolved to ‘stick to it’. ‘I told you in my last letter I regarded things then as on the knees of the Gods,’ he wrote to Milner at the end of April, just a week after the first gas attacks against French and French African troops north of Ypres.fn2 ‘Well the work is going well (touching wood, very well). Macready is very pleased … I am absolutely persuaded of the importance of the work out here.’

  There were any number of sensitive and potentially divisive issues that fell within his new remit – cremations, exhumations, the proliferation of unauthorised private memorials – but at the centre of Ware’s negotiations was the key question of land expropriation for the burial of the Allied dead. Initially it had been possible to deal with these matters at local level, but as the cemeteries and churchyards immediately behind the front line filled, the problem of acquiring new land and establishing rights over old burial grounds had become a matter for the state and not the municipality. The kindness and gratitude of the French people had been a constant theme of Ware’s early letters and reports, and in the crisis summer of 1915 their government followed suit with an inimitably Gallic elan, claiming for France not just the duty but the right ‘to adopt as her child and to honour … every soldier who has fallen on her soil for justice and the freedom of the nations’. It would be the best part of a year before Ware’s negotiations finally bore legislative fruit in an ‘expropriation bill’, but in all the complex and often fractious wartime dealings of the Allies, it would be hard to find a more signal act of friendship and imagination than France’s response to the British dead.

  There would be difficulties and frustrations ahead, delays and amendments in the bill’s committee stage, rumblings in the Senate, legal questions and unease over the effective appropriation of French land by a foreign government, but Ware was at least determined to make sure that his own side did not make things worse. ‘I have warned the Press to tell their correspondents to be on the lookout for M. Millerand’s speech,’ he wrote to his deputy Captain Messer at a crucial stage at the end of June, when the French Minister of War was ready to move the bill, convinced, as ever, that if he did not tell people what to say and when to say it, then no one – not the Army, the Paris Embassy, the politicians at home, the newspapers, not even the Royal Family – could be trusted to do or say the right thing at the right time, ‘and I have also been privately promised that the Prime Minister will make a suitable reply in the House of Commons to M. Millerand.’

  Could the Adjutant General put some pressure on the Embassy to be a little more gracious? Could a telegram of thanks from the King be sent at the right time? Could Britain not be more generous with her decorations to French civilians? It was the old Ware of the Morning Post again, prodding and cajoling, dropping a ‘hint’ to the Times editor here, soothing a minister’s vanity there, and if there was a touch of megalomania in it all, it clearly worked.
By September, Millerand’s bill had been carried through the Chamber of Deputies on the back of an emotional appeal from the Rapporteur, and in December at last became law in a form that enshrined all the most disinterested intentions of the original bill with the addition of one crucial clause that would give Britain control over the future upkeep of its war graves.

  Ware never did anything more important in his life and that last clause had a lot to do with it. ‘The law of 29 December’ was all and more than he could have hoped for – ‘perpetuity of sepulture’ for Britain and her Empire’s dead, the cost of all lands to be borne on the French budget, but it was this last provision for a single ‘properly constituted’ British authority to supervise and finance the maintenance of the cemeteries that proved the key to their enduring character.

  It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of this provision and difficult to imagine what Britain’s war cemeteries would have looked like without it, because in relieving France of the financial burden of their maintenance, Ware had secured control over every detail of their future. At this stage of the conflict it remained a largely theoretical concern of course, but the concession guaranteed that when the time came there could be no conflicts of authority over decisions that up until this point had been matters of chance and private initiative.

  It would be hard to say who Ware saw as the principal danger to this future – British units who seemed bent on turning France into a giant memorial park or French advocates of giant ossuaries – but another issue had already underlined how vital that control was. In the early months of 1915 the rising numbers of unidentified dead had presented the French authorities with an almost insuperable problem, and in the middle of June, a scientific committee set up to explore alternatives to burial, had released a report that had sent Ware scuttling around the Ministries of the Interior, War and Hygiene in panic.

  The solution proposed by the committee was for a continuous chain of plein air crematoria, a hundred metres square in size, and sited between the front line and the artillery parks at ten-kilometre intervals along the whole length of the front. Around the perimeter of each area the committee had recommended that a portable canvas screen two metres high should be erected, and at the centre of the field a large pit dug in the shape of an inverted and truncated pyramid that could be layered for cremations – ‘in the simple manner of Indians’, the report adds with an engagingly Rousseau-ian note – with successive strata of wood and naked bodies. Fifty crematoria in all, petrol or tar to expedite the process, ready access to wood and transport, twenty-five gravediggers to each site, twenty woodsmen, twenty carriers, one doctor, one engineer officer, several NCOs, one priest and, ‘if possible’, one rabbi ‘to provide for the satisfaction of every religious sentiment’: death on an industrial scale met death as gloire in a final exhortation that blended French swank, Enlightenment rationalism and a proto-Nazi thoroughness in a way peculiarly designed to disquiet John Bull.

  ‘In all ages from the earliest times up to our own day cremation has been practised in time of war,’ the report had declared,

  The hot weather is approaching. It is in the spring that epidemics develop with the greatest vigour … Myriads of worms swarm in the corpses … myriads of flies will alike sow those germs of death sprung from the dead … Great evils need great remedies. We have only just time to act …

  Soldiers sacrificed their lives without hesitation. They behaved like heroes. But with the sacrifice of their lives let them and their relatives sacrifice their bodies also. Let us honour them as the ancients honoured their heroes by burning their bodies and thus rendering their cinders imperishable. The whole of the country will be their tomb. Let us free ourselves from the prejudice of the old customs which under existing conditions may be fatal … Let us not shrink from any sacrifice for those who fight.

  It was a proposal that in the end died of its own technocratic afflatus, but Ware’s negotiations had crucially guaranteed that no similar threat hung over the future of Britain’s war cemeteries. The liberality of the French authorities had made some kind of settlement a formality from the start, but it was Ware who had created a treaty that would be a model for every subsequent agreement, Ware who had picked his way through the legal obstacles, Ware who had the tact and journalistic nous to mobilise establishment opinion, Ware who protected France from an uncontrolled rash of British monuments and – above all – Ware who had the foresight to recognise cultural differences in attitudes to the dead that all the Francophilia in the world was never going to bridge.

  If the law of 29 December shows one side of Ware, however, the second seminal development that makes 1915 the crucial year in the history of Britain’s war graves shows the other, opportunistic side of his character. In the early months of the war a number of private exhumations had been carried out by families who wanted their son’s or husband’s bodies home, but at Ware’s prompting the Adjutant General, Macready, had written to Ian Malcolm at the end of February spelling out a new stance for the BEF. ‘As regards the question in general,’ Macready told him,

  of exhuming bodies either for the purpose of identification or for removal to England, the Commander in Chief has issued instructions that this shall not be done, and it is never allowed in the British area … if it is carried out it must be distinctly understood that it is not done with the approval of Sir John French.

  There was no abiding principle involved in this, no sense that the embargo would stretch beyond the duration of the war, and when two weeks later General Joffre issued a proclamation banning all exhumations on French soil, that too was done on health grounds. In late 1914, Malcolm had carried out the exhumation of a mass grave that revealed more than sixty identifications, but while Ware had never been happy about this, it was not until the death of one particular officer more than a month after Macready’s letter that unease hardened into a principle that would become one of the battle cries of the Imperial War Graves Commission.

  The officer in question was a twenty-nine-year-old lieutenant in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers who had only been at the front a matter of days when he was killed. He had sailed over to France on 15 March, and after a week at base camp at Le Havre had joined his battalion in the Ypres Salient on the twenty-first. Two days later he had his first experience of German shells. ‘The noise is just like the tearing of calico,’ he wrote home to his mother, the enclosed, feminine world of his childhood still lingering comfortingly on among the miseries of the Salient. ‘It grew louder and louder,’ he went on, ‘until the explosion ends the rending sound.’

  From there his story unfolds with a poignant inevitability that makes it a minor classic of its kind. He had never wanted to fight – ‘Heaven knows, so far from having the least inclination for military service, I dread it and dislike it intensely,’ he had written on volunteering – but oddly now that he was with his battalion he seems to have felt no fear at all. ‘I am very glad and proud to have got to the front,’ he wrote again, Christian faith and sense of duty girding him against what he seems to have known from the first was going to happen. ‘It is not the length of existence that counts, but what is achieved during that existence, however short.’ And short it was. ‘We have been definitely informed that we go into the trenches tomorrow night,’ he wrote again on 10 April, ‘I rather dread the work, because I am so unfamiliar with it, and one will omit things through innocence which are essential to the safety of one’s men … but I am delighted to get at the real thing at last.’

  He was as inept a soldier as he feared. On the night of the eleventh he was welcomed to the front trenches by the ‘whistle of stray bullets’ from the German line ‘about the length of the terrace away’, and had his first, brief experience of a subaltern’s night duties. ‘I thoroughly enjoyed it,’ he wrote reassuringly the next day,

  scrambled out over the parapet to my two groups, fell prostrate over the barbed wire, was duly found by the now thoroughly awake listening post – nearly stepped into an old deep trench full of
water, and eventually got to sleep at 2.20 – only to be awoken at 4 A.M. by the order to stand to, i.e. ready for an attack at dawn – everything was cold and miserable, and after such a short sleep one did not feel whether one was on one’s head or feet – (I must now break off for a purpose, which I will tell you about tomorrow).

  For William Glynne Charles Gladstone MP, the twenty-nine-year-old grandson of W. E. Gladstone, master of Hawarden Castle and Lord Lieutenant of Flintshire, there would be no tomorrow. Across the bottom of this letter is a note in his mother’s hand. ‘This unfinished letter was his last to me,’ she wrote. ‘I found it in his writing-pad among his things returned to me from the front.’ Genetic inheritance, in a fatal combination of physical and moral attributes, had claimed another victim. A strong, family sense of duty had brought him to France and his mother’s Blantyre genes finished him off. Like his maternal grandfather, the 12th Lord, William Gladstone was very tall, and he had been shot by a sniper while standing, head exposed, behind a collapsed section of parapet that he had been detailed to repair on his first arrival at the front. He had been warned by his company commander ‘to be careful’, his uncle was later told,

  but Will said he could not always be crouching, his men would think he was funking … All his men loved him [and] thinking that Will had a chance of life, and it being impossible to get him along the twisting trench, the doctor called for volunteers to get out of the trench and run the risk of taking him back across the open – the distance at that spot between the German and British lines being only one hundred yards.