Empires of the Dead

by David Crane

  If he had made little mark on the Army alive, his death was another matter. By the time Gladstone was killed the Joffre ban on exhumations had been in force for almost a month, but the news had no sooner reached Hawarden than the social and political cogs began to turn. ‘It was the earnest wish of his mother that the body should be brought home,’ Will’s uncle blandly recalled,

  and Henry [another uncle] took prompt and effective action. He communicated with the Prime Minister, and by permission of the King, the War Office gave the necessary instructions for the ‘King’s Lieutenant’ to be brought home … Henry received every assistance from the military authorities, and in the early morning of 22nd April, arrived with Will at Hawarden. The body was placed in the Temple of Peace. The funeral on the following day showed how deeply and widely Will’s loss was felt … With full military honours, Will was laid to rest by the side of his father in the quiet churchyard of Hawarden.fn3

  ‘I notice Gladstone’s body has been sent home,’ Robert Cecil wrote wearily to Ware four days later, ‘and I understand that this was done in obedience to pressure from a very high quarter. It is from the point of view of administration perhaps a little unfortunate.’

  It might have seemed unfortunate to Cecil, it was anything but to Ware. He had never been happy about exhumations, though it was probably quite enough that it was Ian Malcolm who was carrying them out, and he saw in this Old World exercise of privilege the ‘cause’ he had been looking for. In Kitchener’s New Army what place was there for this kind of social discrimination? In a war where men of every class were giving up their lives in their thousands why should only the rich be able to bring their dead home? And if Will Gladstone was everything that the politician and old dissenter in Ware disliked – anti-Milnerian and pro-free trade, anti-war and pro-United Ireland, socially conservative and High Church – then so much the better. ‘CONFIDENTIAL’, he wrote back to Cecil on 5 May, scenting blood,

  There is possible trouble ahead about some exhumations at Poperinghe. I entirely agree with your remark about Gladstone’s body. Incidentally, the exhumation was carried out by British soldiers under fire. Fortunately (?or unfortunately) nobody was hit. The impression it has created among the soldiers out here is to be regretted. The one point of view overlooked in this matter is that of the officers themselves, who in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred will tell you that if they are killed would wish to be among their men.

  The death and repatriation of Gladstone had highlighted a conflict between freedom and equality that would define the battleground of Ware’s life for years to come. On the face of it the abstract proposition that all should be treated equally seems unarguable; however if the death of Will Gladstone underlines anything it is that there was nothing ‘abstract’ about Ware’s work. Gladstone was not a statistic in the GRC’s swelling register – another 27,000 names over the summer months of 1915 – but an individual with all the rights, ties, obligations and history that the word implies. And where did the body of William Gladstone belong if not in a grave next to his father in their own parish church? How could the proper resting place of so reluctant and inept a soldier – a man to whom the whole idea of war was ‘detestable … alien from his mind and soul … repugnant to his whole moral fibre’ – be the mud of Flanders? By what order of precedence should the fleeting camaraderie of the trenches take precedence over the deeply felt and shared community of Hawarden? Who else but his mother and sisters should say where and how he should be commemorated? By what moral or legal right beyond the question of hygiene could or should any organisation override those wishes? By what overweening extension of state power or political will should the country presume to claim the dead as its own?

  These were all questions that Ware would eventually have to address, but in the short term the fortunes of war had delivered him a trump card in the shape of the Eton and Oxford Gladstone. The only privilege that an Etonian could claim at the front was the high probability of dying, but the intervention of the King and the suggestion of political influence enabled Ware to recast as an issue of privilege what was at bottom a matter of individual freedoms that held as true for a private in a Pals’ battalion as for a lord lieutenant.

  It also disguised – for the moment at least – a contradiction that lay at the heart of Ware’s grave work. The impetus that drove men like Broadley to hunt down every grave they could find in the first weeks of the war was one of simple piety. They wanted to record and honour each individual who had died and preserve that individuality. Their loyalties, unarticulated but strong, were to the families whose dead they were recording. How, though, could that be squared with death on the unimaginable scale that the war was now unfolding? How could it be balanced against a new and democratic demand for equality of treatment? Were individualism and equality any more compatible beyond the grave than they were this side of it?

  These were no longer questions that could be ducked. Ware’s successful negotiations for the permanent sepulture of Britain’s dead on French soil meant that the future had to be considered. Already, private speculation was rushing in to fill the official vacuum. ‘Here the Germans are almost on three sides of us,’ one young officer, Douglas Gillespie, whose brother Thomas, a Gold medal-winning Olympic oarsman, had already been culled in 1914, wrote home in June 1915, just four months before his own death,

  and the dead have been buried just where they fell, behind the trenches. There are graves scattered up and down, some with crosses and names on them, some nameless and unmarked – as I think my brother’s grave must be, for they have been fighting round about the village where he was killed all through these last eight months. That doesn’t trouble me much … but still, these fields are sacred in a sense, and I wish that when peace comes, our Government might combine with the French Government to make one long avenue between the lines from the Vosges to the sea, or if that is too much, at any rate from La Bassée to Ypres … I would make a fine broad road in the No Man’s Land between the lines, with paths for pilgrims on foot, and plant trees for shade, and fruit trees, so that the soil should not be altogether wasted. Some of the shattered farms and houses might be left as evidence, and the regiments might put up their records beside the trenches which they held all through the winter. Then I would like to send every man, woman and child in Western Europe on pilgrimage along that Via Sacra, so that they might think and learn what war means from the silent witnesses on either side.

  The makeshift solutions of 1914 were no longer acceptable. There was ‘much to be desired’ in the state of the cemeteries, Sir Arthur Lawley told Ware in July, offering Red Cross funds for a rudimentary programme of gardening to make them ‘less miserable and unsightly’. From the Dominions, too, letters were coming in asking what was being done to particularise the graves of the Empire’s dead. ‘I believe that you occupy the lugubrious post of controller of all graves in France and Flanders,’ the Secretary of the Overseas Club wrote to Ware over the suggestion that maples should be planted around Canadian graves, ‘and I should like to get your views on the subject. Judging by the manner in which the idea has been taken up in Canada, I believe it would appeal to Canadian sentiment extraordinarily if we could manage to do this.’

  This was music to Ware’s imperialist ears. It is never easy to be sure where he is responding to public opinion and where he is shaping it, but he and the zeitgeist were one. Public opinion across the Empire demanded action and he had in place the legal structure, organisation and experience to respond. The work in France and the other theatres of war required not just an undertaker but a leader and an overriding philosophy. And in a field where the interests of the individual and the community needed to be weighed, who better than a man who had spent the last pre-war years of political ‘exile’ attempting to square that particular circle?

  FOUR

  Consolidation

  If ever a man’s philosophy emerged out of the needs of his own idiosyncratic personality it was Fabian Ware’s. As a young boy growing
up in Clifton he had been imbued with both the autocracy and the idealism of the Brethren, and his whole life was, in one shape or another, an attempt to resolve the tensions between his own unbending individualism and the communitarian dream.

  Ware was a profound believer in individual and political freedoms – both for the person and, within the organic structure of the Empire, the separate nations that made it up – but he was at heart a collectivist. ‘Collectivist, individualist, collectivist, individualist,’ he had written in his 1912 ‘manifesto’, describing the organic ascent of the individual to an ever wider and deeper sense of community life that would subordinate the interests of the individual to a higher collective ‘good’:

  such is the life of man. Throughout, each tendency struggles for supremacy; and in the flower of his age they balance one another, producing that equilibrium which is perfection and which, because it is perfection, may not, until freed from the laws of nature endure. At this stage, when his powers have reached their zenith, the individual is merged in the family … the family in the nation … And so the nation, in mature consideration of its individuality [in] the highest attainment of human collectivity which the world has yet seen … the empire.

  Everything that Ware did with the Imperial War Graves Commission flowed out of this larger faith. For most of those who worked for him their focus remained the graves, and yet for Ware the work was a means to a political end, with every detail of it subordinated to this overarching imperial vision. ‘To Fabian Ware,’ Violet Markham, an educational reformer and imperialist in the Ware mould, wrote in 1924 as they looked back together over his war graves work, ‘it had been a great opportunity no less than a great mission … “Think [he told her] what this organisation of ours means as a model of what Imperial co-operation might be”.’

  Like many another good communitarian, like his old boss, Milner, in fact, Ware’s idea of co-operation was the rest of the community doing what he wanted it to do, but that did not make his vision any less compelling. There would always remain a streak of Pope’s ‘Atticus’ about him – a determination ‘to bear, like the Turk, no rival near the throne’ – and for those who shared or responded to his idealism, energy, and sheer personal magnetism he was an irresistible force.

  The thing that had most struck the Red Cross’s Colonel Stewart, when he visited Ware’s men in the autumn of 1914, was the ‘keenness of all the Unit and their loyalty to their chief’, and that would remain a constant of Ware’s working life. ‘Vitalisers are few and far between in the drab world,’ Violet Markham wrote admiringly after seeing Ware for the first time since the heady days of the Morning Post more than a decade earlier,

  and Fabian Ware had, I remembered, a gift all his own of raising any subject on to a plane where the dross falls away and only gold remains …

  Here was … a man without illusions, who saw the chaos, but whose vision of ultimate realities remained serene and unclouded … The fine head – gay, humorous, sensitive – had lost none of its quality. We create in a large measure what we will and desire, and in this Rupert of the pen and sword, teacher, administrator, editor, [soldier] the spirit of high adventure shone forth unquenched. To sit by such a fire was to relight the candles of one’s own doubting spirit.

  The loyalty and enthusiasm Ware could inspire in those who worked for him was vital, because as 1915 drew to its grim conclusion and Millerand’s land expropriation bill finally became law, Ware was freed to concentrate on the larger picture. The law of 29 December had given the British everything they could want, but in providing for the creation of a ‘legally constituted body’ with sole responsibility for everything to do with the graves, Ware had potentially allowed a rival cuckoo in the uncompromising shape of the formidable Sir Alfred Mond, industrialist, financier and First Commissioner at the Office of Works, within his jealously guarded nest.

  The problem was that in the past the Office of Works had been responsible for the upkeep of British cemeteries abroad, notably the Crimean, and Mond was no more than Ware a man to give up power willingly. The scale of the work facing the GRC in France and the Middle East clearly required a new organisation, but what Ware wanted was an arrangement that would simultaneously reflect the growing national and imperial importance of his task and squeeze Mond and his faceless government department out of any share in the real power.

  It was a turf war that would rumble on for years to come (they would still be at it in the thirties) and in the battle of the mastodons Ware got his way, with the old GRC fully integrated into the Army as the Directorate of Graves Registration and Enquiries (DGR&E), retaining responsibility for the duration of the war, and a ‘sleeper’ committee set up to plan for the future. ‘With such examples [the Office of Works’ Crimean cemeteries] as a warning,’ Ware recalled two years later, as deft as ever at invoking the mood of the nation when it happened to coincide with his own,

  the Army towards the end of 1915 proposed to the Government the appointment of a National Committee for the Care of Soldiers’ Graves, which would take over the work of the Directorate after the War. It was felt that the nation would expect that the government should undertake the care of the last resting places of those who had fallen, but at the same time that relatives would consider that work of so intimate a nature should be entrusted to a specially appointed body rather than to any existing Government department … As a result a Committee was appointed by the Prime Minister in January, 1916, and His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales was graciously pleased to accept the presidency.

  The National Committee for the Care of Soldiers’ Graves was every bit as dormant as Ware intended, and as the legally recognised association required by the French law of 29 December it forms another link in the evolution of the Imperial War Graves Commission. It would be difficult to point to anything it actually did during its short and harmless life, but its mere existence under royal patronage was the final imprimatur on the work that had begun so modestly and almost accidentally in the autumn of 1914 among the orchards and farms of northern France.

  From the first meeting the membership of the committee reflected this new status, with the Directorate of Graves Registration and Enquiries, the French, the British Army and all the relevant government departments represented. However it was only when Empire representatives were added in September 1916 that Ware had the body he wanted. The Dominions had come into the conflict automatically on the King’s declaration of war in 1914, and by 1916 there was not a theatre of war from the Pacific to Ypres and from Mesopotamia to East Africa where British cemeteries were not already full of the Empire’s dead.

  Almost nine thousand Australians and three thousand New Zealanders at Gallipoli alone, heavy Canadian casualties at Ypres during the first gas attacks, the Newfoundlanders virtually wiped out in a savage hour at Beaumont-Hamel, Delville Wood engraved on the South African psyche, the Indians at Neuve-Chapelle – even before Vimy Ridge was added to the Empire’s battle honours – new narratives of nationhood were being forged and it was clear to Ware that any new body must reflect this imperial reality. ‘He had heard rumours of a Committee being formed in Canada,’ Macready, as ever singing from the same song sheet, told a meeting that for the first time included representatives of the Dominions and the government of India, ‘and we were anxious to see whether we could not come to a modus operandi by which the wishes of the Dominions and Colonies would all come up for discussion in the Central Committee which would then speak with the voice of Empire.’

  It is possible that after the tragedy of Gallipoli, where Australian losses gave birth to a new sense of identity that was from the first conceived in opposition to a ‘class-bound and incompetent’ Britain, the Empire would never speak with a single voice, but no one was better equipped by his natural sympathies to reconcile a central authority with the legitimate and diverging aspirations of the Empire than Ware. Over the previous summer he had kept in close touch with Dominion forces in the field, and he had come to this first meeting armed wi
th cemetery plans, photographs and planting schemes to show what was already being done to meet the different national sensitivities.

  For Macready this was simply a matter of practicalities, but for Ware himself, the significance of the meeting was as much political and symbolic as it was narrowly about his graves work. For most of his adult life he had argued and campaigned for closer imperial unity, and here at last, at a meeting in the War Office of government and Empire representatives with their own varying concerns and agendas, was a chance to realise the dream of an un-federated Empire of Equals that had, in one form or another, inspired him since his South African days.

  The stamp of royal approval, the support of the Treasury, the backing of the Army, ‘the voice of Empire’ speaking as one, a largely dormant committee – it was Ware’s idea of heaven. And if all that was not enough, a letter to an old friend, Philippe Millet, shows how little in practice had changed. ‘I am sending you confidentially,’ he wrote to him at the beginning of July 1916, one week into the Battle of the Somme and almost six months after Millerand’s bill had become law,

  (1) A copy of a letter I have written to the French mission and (2) a copy of a letter that the Foreign Office has sent to our ambassador in Paris. My object in doing so is that you should see that at last I have got our lazy people to acknowledge in something like fitting terms (as I am responsible for the draft I cannot say more!) the action of the French Nation in providing land for the burial of British Soldiers …

  While one does not want to say that the Prince of Wales is responsible in any way (we have to shield our Royalties from all responsibility in this democratic country!) he does take a very great interest in the matter … and very deeply appreciated the sympathy which has been shown by the French Nation in this matter.