Empires of the Dead
Page 9
Not for the first time in this story, there is something deceptively anodyne about the official version that disguises not just Ware’s role in the whole process, but also how much blood was left on the carpet. It is a nice question whether it was character or policy that dictated his show of modesty, but behind the graceful fiction of the Prince of Wales’s initiative and the easy, consensual move to an imperial solution lay a familiar, dogged campaign of lobbying and departmental manoeuvring.
The issue was in part simply one of power and control – a battle between Ware and his alter ego, the bruising and immensely able, German-Jewish empire-building Alfred Mond – but beneath it lay Ware’s determination that the care of the Empire’s dead would be the Empire’s responsibility. It was vital to get this right. Ware had briefed the Prince, so that,
the Empire will be spared the reflection that weighed on the conscience of the British nation when, nearly twenty years after the conclusion of the Crimean War, it became known that the last resting place of those who had fallen in that war had, except in individual instances, remained uncared for and neglected.
When Ware talked about the Empire he was invariably talking about himself of course, but in this case the moral argument and the mood of the country were both on his side. The Office of Works was prepared to offer India and the Dominions an ‘advisory or consultative’ role, but after Gallipoli and Delville Wood and Beaumont-Hamel and Neuve-Chapelle it was hard to see why the Empire should fall for the ‘old bait’ – as Ware called it – that Mond dangled in front of them. ‘In looking forward to the time when peace may be restored,’ a well-drilled Prince wrote to Lloyd George,
the thoughts of all turn instinctively to the honoured dead who rest in many lands across the seas and to whose memory the Empire owes a duty which must never be forgotten. Future generations will judge us by the effort we made to fulfil that duty, and I hope that in undertaking it it will be possible to enlist the representatives of all those who came forward to help the Empire in the hour of need.
The creation of the IWGC was, as the Commission’s official historian Philip Longworth claimed, an historic moment: ‘the first organisation charged with the care of the dead in any war … the only permanent institutional reflection [pre-1965] of a common spirit in the Empire, of an equal partnership of nations’, and it would be churlish to see it in the first place as anything other than Ware’s triumph. It is possible that Mond and his Office of Works possessed the physical resources to carry out the job, but it is hard to see how any government department, committed to its own architects, hierarchies, internal ideologies and ‘baggage’ – not to mention monitoring room temperatures in Winchester House – could ever have risen to the challenge in the way that a new and more widely based body could do.
The Commission inevitably included the usual suspects – and, predictably, no woman (what an addition Gertrude Bell might have made!) – but one look at the first list of ex-officio and non-official members appointed by Royal Warrant in October 1917 shows a maverick breadth of representation that reflects Ware’s influence. The Prince of Wales remained president with the Secretary of State for War as its ex-officio chairman, but then alongside the First Commissioner of Works and the Secretaries of State for the Colonies and for India are names that one would never have seen if Mond had had his way: the representative for Newfoundland and the High Commissioners for Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa; the architect of Egypt’s irrigation system and stalwart of the Red Cross, Sir William Garstin; the former Thames waterman and trade union leader, Harry Gosling; the great weaver of imperial dreams (and future arbiter of all Commission inscriptions) Rudyard Kipling; and there, finally, nestling humbly at the foot of the list, below his old ally Macready and an ageing relic of pre-Fisher naval days, Admiral Sir Edmund Poe – ‘Major-General Fabian Ware, CB, CMG (Vice-Chairman)’.
The War Graves Commission was fortunate that in these first, crucial years it could call on men of such varying abilities and influence. In the propaganda battles ahead the industrial muscle of Harry Gosling and the pen of Kipling would be equally needed, and in such early chairmen as Churchill and Milner, and Empire representatives of the calibre of William Schreiner – the brother of the novelist and campaigner, Olive Schreiner, and a former Cape Colony Prime Minister of great intellect and probity – it had men with the experience, authority and vision to make sure that government and Dominions shared the same agenda.
There would be internal strains and disagreements – Sir James Allen, the dourly formidable New Zealand High Commissioner after the war, could never be bullied into anything – but both the personnel and the powers invested in them perfectly reflected Ware’s ambitions for the Commission. As the heir to the defunct Prince of Wales’s Committee, it inherited all the legal authority defined by the French law of 29 December 1915. In addition, Ware had sought and got a remit that extended beyond France and Belgium to the care and maintenance of every imperial grave on land or sea of those who had died on active service,
to keep alive the ideals for the maintenance and defence of which they have laid down their lives, to strengthen the bonds of union between all classes and races in Our Dominions, and to promote a feeling of common citizenship and of loyalty and devotion to Us and to the Empire of which they are subjects.
The Commission had been invested with all the powers that went with these duties – the acquisition and care of land for cemeteries and memorials, the keeping of records and registers, the maintenance of isolated graves, the limited purchase of land in Britain, the administration of funds voted it by the Empire’s legislatures – but it was its ‘policing’ role that crucially defined its future. In the long negotiations of 1915, Ware had been as determined as his French colleagues to prevent a commemorative free-for-all, and enshrined in the Charter was a clause empowering the new authority to prohibit or permit ‘the erection by any person other than the Commission of permanent memorials’ in any cemetery under its control.
Ware was lucky in his timing in so much as the creation of this powerfully authoritarian and centralised body coincided with the growing interference of the state in the private lives of the individual. The average law-abiding citizen in 1914, as A. J. P. Taylor once memorably pointed out, could have lived out his life more or less ignorant of the state’s existence, but three years of war, the Defence of the Realm Act, economic intervention and – from 1916, conscription – had intruded the state into every aspect of public and private life from the bedroom to the grave.
In the growing industrial and party political turmoil of the pre-war period, Ware had privately toyed with the notion of a Cromwellian dictatorship under Milner to put the country to rights, and war had come very close to delivering him his wish. The formation of a coalition government in 1915 had effectively emasculated a Parliament that had already outlived its elected term, and the replacement of the consensual Asquith by Lloyd George further accelerated the trend towards autocracy, concentrating effective power in a small War Cabinet and reinforcing the doctrine that, as one economist in early 1917 insisted, ‘the freedom of the individual must be absorbed in the national effort’ if Britain was to survive.
It is one of the ironies of the war, in fact, that the liberal democracies were prepared to watch the erosion of their civil liberties in search of victory. In the years after the war, Ware would face a backlash against the Commission’s authoritarianism, but in 1917, when only the brilliant Canadian action at Vimy Ridge and the Battle of Messines offered fleeting hopes that the lessons of 1916 had been learned, the country was, as one future War Graves Commissioner put it, prepared to out-Prussian the Prussians if that was what it would take to beat them.
It was perhaps not surprising in such a climate that the Hesse-born Milner – the ‘Prussian’, as the American President Woodrow Wilson dubbed him – should again find himself at the centre of political life as one of the five-strong War Cabinet. The British public would never really forgive Milner his German
grandmother, but his administrative abilities were not in question, and with the Kindergarten’s Philip Kerr as Lloyd George’s Private Secretary, John Buchan his Director of Information, Leo Amery Assistant Secretary to the War Cabinet, and Robert Brand an influential figure in Washington, Ware’s old South African friends had never been closer to real power or – momentarily it seemed – the fulfilment of their imperial dreams.
‘Democracy is not going to win this war or any other,’ F. S. Oliver, another imperialist intimately associated with Milner and the fall of Asquith, had insisted, and in a year of unrestricted U-boat activity and massive shipping losses, of continued military stalemate and failed peace feelers, of growing disillusionment and exhaustion, of Caporetto and Passchendaele, Ware for one needed no convincing. There were moments in the summer of 1917 when even he would succumb to the general exhaustion, and yet there are few things more remarkable about the Imperial War Graves Commission than its dedication to the future at a time when any future favourable to the Allies seemed a remote possibility.
Against the backdrop of an ever-swelling graves register – a quarter of a million casualties and another 70,000 dead by the time Haig called off Third Ypres in November 1917 – Ware and the Commission began to plan for their post-war task. The Charter that brought it into existence had only been signed by the King towards the end of May, but within less than a month Ware had taken soundings among London’s art establishment and in the July of 1917 a small advisory committee, consisting of the director of the Tate Gallery, Charles Aitken, and two of the Empire’s leading architects, Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker, was on its way out to France to report back on the future treatment of the war graves.
There was a case that nothing, or at least as near to nothing as was compatible with the decencies, should be done to them and, oddly, that case was never so superficially compelling as it was in that summer of 1917. ‘When I visited the region [the Somme] in July 1917,’ Arthur Hill, Kew’s advisor to the Commission, recalled in a lecture to the Royal Horticultural Society after the war,
the whole of that desolate shell-hole region was transfigured and glorified by the common scarlet poppy, and the sight was more beautiful than any words of mine can express.
Picture to yourselves a vast undulating landscape, a blaze of scarlet unbroken by tree or hedgerow, with here and there long stretches of white Camomile and patches of yellow Charlock, dotted over with the half-hidden white crosses of the dead.
Smaller patches of Charlock were often conspicuous, and these usually marked the more recently dug graves where seeds, doubtless long buried, had been brought to the surface.
In no cemetery, large or small, however beautiful or impressive it may be, can the same sentiment be evoked or feelings be so deeply stirred. Nowhere, I imagine, could the magnitude of the struggle be better appreciated than in that peaceful, poppy-covered battlefield, hallowed by its many scattered crosses.
There was something profoundly seductive in Hill’s pantheism – the same vague paganism would predictably attract Lutyens – but neither national sentiment nor political realities were going to leave the Empire’s dead to nature. The French authorities had been immensely generous with their gifts of burial land to Britain; this, however, was not the vast solitude of the South African veldt, where Thomas Hardy’s Drummer Hodge could safely be left to lie beneath the strange constellations of the southern skies, but a continuous line of cemeteries, burial grounds and individual graves that stretched from the Ypres Salient and the coalfields of northern France to the rolling arable lands of the Somme and beyond to the Marne. ‘The Commission recognised the existence of a sentiment in favour of leaving the bodies of the dead where they fell,’ Ware would later explain,
but in view of the critical conditions regarded it as impracticable. Over 150,000 scattered graves are known in France and Belgium … Either they must be removed to cemeteries where they can be reverently cared for, or they must be ploughed up with the soil. The Commission felt that the latter course would be excessively painful to relatives and discreditable to the country, besides being unspeakably revolting to the cultivators of the land.
There might not have been anything that could compete with the poppies and the camomile, but if Ware had set out to make life difficult for himself when he chose Baker and Lutyens he could hardly have done better than send out the two men who had just fallen out so bitterly over their work on New Delhi. As young apprentices in London, Herbert Baker and Edwin Lutyens had shared the same architectural ideals, but in their early twenties they had gone their separate ways, Baker to South Africa where his magpie eclecticism – Cape Dutch, Roman, Greek, Mogul – combined with sound Empire opinions to make him Rhodes’s and Milner’s Imperial Architect of Choice, while Lutyens remained at home to create a series of English country houses that would inextricably link his name with a doomed world and the dying culture of Edwardian England.
From his earliest days there had been an intellectual quality beneath the charm of his houses, but even when he moved towards the more disciplined language of the Italian Renaissance, he remained so ineluctably English in his feel for material and place and the organic quality of country architecture, that it was easy to be blinded to the rigour and deep seriousness of what he was doing. ‘There is in art that which transcends all rules,’ he wrote to his Theosophist wife in 1907,
It is the divine … To short sight it is a miracle, to those a little longer sighted it is Godhead, if we could see yet better, these facts may be revealed before which the [V]ery Godhead as we conceive him will fade dim. It is the point of view that ought to ring all arts, Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Literature and Music etc. into sympathy and there is no ploy that cannot be lifted to the divine level by its creation as an art.
Lutyens has eclipsed Baker’s reputation so completely that it is hard now to remember that Baker was the man with the track record, and Lutyens the imperial novice, when the decision in 1911 to move India’s capital from Calcutta to New Delhi at last gave Lutyens his chance to build on the grand scale. In later years Baker would claim that he had been brought out to India to keep Lutyens in check, but if that was the plan it gloriously failed to prevent his rival producing, in Viceroy’s House, a fusion of East and West that in its originality and boldness seemed a dazzling reproach to everything that the British Raj, institutional mediocrity or poor Herbert Baker had ever dreamed of. ‘For its character,’ Robert Byron wrote of the great dome that crowned Lutyens’s masterpiece when he first saw it in 1931,
is so arresting, so unprecedented, so uninviting of comparison with known architecture, that like a sovereign crowned and throned, it subordinates everything within view to increase its own state, and stands not to be judged by, but to judge, its attendants.
The Secretariats, remarkable buildings in themselves, exist only in relation to it, and in as much as they administer to its success.
It cannot have been an easy thing for Baker – the architect of Groote Schuure, the Rhodes Memorial (the finest thing done since the Greeks, Lord Curzon reckoned) and the Union Building in Pretoria – to take, and Lutyens was not the man to play down the distinction. Baker had always been generous and clear-eyed enough to recognise Lutyens’s greatness, and yet it must still have been galling to have to play the Salieri to his buffooning Mozart and watch a man who hated the Oriental’s ‘slimy mind’ produce an intuitive but classically disciplined response to the East that made a mockery of his own earnest and deeply researched symbolism.
Vanities and jealousies played a part in the subsequent drama, but if there had been friction between the two men before they reached India it was New Delhi that brought them to a head. In his original plans, Lutyens had seen his domed central palace rising high above Baker’s flanking Secretariats, but when in some baffling moment of inattention he agreed to a levelling of the hill that effectively obscured the view of his own portico from the ceremonial approach route, it sparked off a feud that would rumble on for years.
The two men had infinitely more in common, in fact, than either of them would have cared to admit – their shared roots in the Arts and Crafts Movement, a facility with classical forms, a deep-felt ‘Englishness’, an ability to give physical expression to abstract ideas – but they had brought India to France with them and the War Graves Commission would pay the price. ‘I realised from experience at Delhi that there would be a conflict inherent in our different natures and outlook,’ Baker later wrote of their journey to inspect the cemeteries,
that he would be propelled towards abstract monumental design, and I would place more importance on sentiment; and sentiment, the association with English traditional burial places, I felt, should be a prevailing factor in the design of the Shrines of the Dead … An English churchyard was always the idea in my thoughts – from a humble ‘Stoke Poges’ to a Cathedral precinct like Canterbury or Winchester, its trees and gardens surrounded by stone walls with an arched gateway and chapel, perhaps, and covered cloister walks. This sentiment seemed better to express the British feeling for their honoured Dead than the intellectual Grand Manner, or its converse, an unordered towering mass of masonry ill-set with sculpture and undisciplined by the Mistress Art … My answer to Ware’s invitation was that, while it would not be wise to attempt any close collaboration in design, I would willingly serve as an independent architect with Lutyens on the Commission.