Empires of the Dead

by David Crane

  It might have made some difference if Charles Aitken had been anything more than a cipher – ‘a namby-pamby ass’ as Lutyens dismissed him – but with his preference for some utilitarian or educational commemoration dead in the water before they had even left for France, the ring was left to the old sparring partners. ‘The cemeteries, the dotted graves, are the most pathetic thing,’ Lutyens wrote back to his wife, Emily, his egotistical detachment from the war gone in one comprehensive act of surrender to the scale of the sacrifice,

  What humanity can endure and suffer is beyond belief. The battlefields – the obliteration of all human endeavour and achievement and the human achievement of destruction is bettered by the poppies and wild flowers that are as friendly to an unexploded shell as they are to the leg of a garden seat in Surrey … The graveyards, haphazard from the needs of much to do and little time for thought. And then a ribbon of isolated graves like a milky way across miles of country where men were tucked in where they fell. Ribbons of little crosses each touching each other across a cemetery, set in wilderness of annuals and where one sort of flower is grown the effect is charming, easy and oh so pathetic. One thinks for a moment that no other monument is needed. Evanescent but for the moment is almost perfect and how misleading to sermonise in this emotion and how some love to sermonise. But the only monument can be one where the endeavour is sincere to make such monument permanent – a solid ball of Bronze.

  Between Lutyens’s solid bronze – a great, Marvellian ‘wrecking ball’ swinging through his quiet and cloistered retreats, it must have seemed to Baker – and a prettified Bourton-sur-Somme, there was little room for accommodation, and what there was had soon disappeared. By the time they left France, Lutyens had given up on his bronze, but the solution for the permanent memorial he was suggesting in its place only advertised just how far apart they were. ‘I most earnestly advise that there shall be one kind of monument throughout, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa,’ he wrote at the end of August in a memorandum for the Commission, the architectural purist and the pantheist in him in perfect harmony,

  and that it shall take the form of one great fair stone of fine proportions, twelve feet in length, lying raised upon three steps, of which the first and third shall be twice the width of the second; and each stone shall bear in indelible lettering, some fine thought or words of sacred dedication. They should be known in all places and for all time, as the Great War Stones, and should stand, though in three Continents, as equal monuments of devotion, suggesting the thought of memorial Chapels in one vast Cathedral.

  Lutyens’s great monolith – the ‘Stone of Remembrance’ as it came, feebly, to be known – might now have the inevitability about it of an accomplished fact, but between Anglican demands for a cross and Presbyterian objections to anything suggesting an altar, it had a tricky birth. Labour MPs, Jews, Roman Catholics (oddly), Nonconformists and ‘ladies of fashion’ had all come on board, Lutyens cheerfully told Ware – ‘Mon General ’ as he addressed him – but,

  I have not had the courage to tackle a bishop, but do you think it wise if I asked Cantuar [Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury] to see me, he would I think, but if I catch sight of the apron it is apt at a critical moment, to give me the giggles, especially when they get pompous and hold their hands over their knees – Why?

  The Scots could be bought off with a change of name – ‘stone’ for ‘altar’ – the playwright James Barrie had reassured him, but the Anglican establishment was another matter. ‘The first person I saw [at the Athenaeum] was Bernard Mallet,’ Lutyens wrote to his wife four days later,

  I told him of France – he said Cantuar is upstairs why don’t you tell him. So I went upstairs and there was Cantuar and some fellow bishop. I said I want to speak to you, Sir. He said All right, wait a mo’. So I waited a mo and he came up and I told him of my big stone idea as against the cross – the permanency, the non-denominationalism etc. He was very kind and said he was greatly and favourably impressed but would think it over.

  ‘I bearded the Archbishop of C., in this the above Pot House,’ he scrawled a jubilant note to Ware that same night, anxious to share the news of his most important convert,

  and laid with all due humility the Big Stone idea in his apron – and made him a little croquis (French!) thereof … He said he could certainly (my word perform) the sacrament on such a stone, and he should think his R.C. brother of Westminster – as well as our Brer Hindu. Etc. Etc.

  Montagu was pleased too. The Jew.

  Am I behaving properly,

  Votre Toujours Subaltern.

  Lutyens could not have stopped the jokes if he tried – they were a compulsion with him, a kind of comic Tourette’s – but behind them lay a deepening commitment to his ideas for commemorating the dead. He had never bought in to the ludicrous trappings of his wife’s Theosophy, but he had always felt a yearning for some universal truth that transcended the boundaries of creeds and denominations, some substitute, like Ware himself needed, for the faith of his own childhood and his mother’s evangelical fire. ‘There must be nothing trivial or petty where our valiant dead lie in oneness of sacrifice and in glorious community of Brotherhood in Arms,’ he insisted in his memorandum to the Commission,

  All that is done of structure should be for endurance for all time and for equality of honour, for besides Christians of all denominations, there will be Jews, Mussulmens, Hindus and men of other creeds, their glorious names and their mortal bodies all equally deserving enduring record and seemly sepulture.

  There could be no discrimination, he insisted, no exceptions to this equality, no judgments made, no ‘worldly value’ put on the dead. ‘The most beautiful sites should be selected [for Monuments],’ he told Emily the same day, echoing Lionel Earle’s disquiet,

  not where the victories were and all that snobbery, for I hold that there is equality in sacrifice and the men who fell at Quatre Bras are just as worthy of honour as those who fell at Waterloo … They put ‘killed in action’ or ‘died from wounds’, ‘died’. Died alone means some defalcation and shot for it. I don’t like it. The mother lost her boy and it was in the interests of the country and she had to suffer – her boy. Do you see what I mean? But then I don’t fight nor do I fight yet for the seemly sepulture of the Germans when they lie along with our men.

  If he thought, however, that he had ‘Cantuar’ in the bag, his optimism was premature – the more the Archbishop thought about it the more hostile he became – and in Baker, the ‘Cross Party’ had found a dogged champion. ‘Such a rush,’ Lutyens reported again to Emily on 23 August,

  At 12 to General Ware who kept me more than an hour, full of sympathy and fight for the big stone, furious with Baker and almost at breaking point with him and Aitken. Baker’s last idea is a five pointed cross, one point for each colony. India, Ware pointed out, was forgotten, but what does a five pointed cross mean? Ware bids me courage.

  Baker’s slavishly literal use of symbolism would always make him vulnerable to ridicule – ‘Baker must be dotty! … Too silly’, was Emily’s reply – but there would seem nothing ‘dotty’ about the Cross of Lorraine when it became the symbol of the Free French in the Second World War. Baker had, in fact, found his inspiration among the ruins of Ypres, where the sight of such a cross standing unscathed in the cathedral precinct – a symbol of Christian redemption in a city that had itself become the symbol of British resistance to German militarism – crystallised all those ‘sentiments’ and values and associations of place that he wanted to bring to the design of the war cemeteries.

  The future would show that Baker was not just speaking for himself either – Ware, Lutyens and the anti-cross brigade were making a bad mistake if they imagined they were dealing with a bigoted High Church rump – but the argument had become too entwined with personalities to be sensibly resolved. ‘Afterwards went and saw Fabian Ware,’ Lutyens wrote after another six weeks had brought the two sides no nearer and Ware, himself, to the point of throwing in the
towel,

  He was ‘shocked, grieved’ at the Archbishop’s letter – expected a neutral attitude not a narrow antagonistic view. He says the clergy in France are most tiresome – always trying to upset the applecart. But he thinks the ‘stone’ will win yet, and he may chuck the whole thing and let the Office of Works do it all with lych-gates complete. He liked my grave head-stones and did not like Baker’s and was cross at his being so difficult and petty. He said he would consult General Macready and if he agreed would announce that I was appointed Hon. architect to the whole caboodle. He wanted to know if I could afford it.

  It was probably just as well that the answer to that was ‘no’ – Ware knew that he had to take the whole country with him and not just the dissenters, Jews and ladies of fashion – but consensus and committees had never been either man’s preferred route. ‘Lytton said that if a man – like L[ord] Salisbury – who he knows very well,’ Lutyens complained, ‘gets into the chair – with 2 opinions before him – he is bound to compromise and then we should get a stone which is not a cross and a cross which is not a stone – or some such absurd finding.’

  The more opinions were canvassed too, the less consensus they found. Balfour and Buchan were all for the stone, Poynter favoured Victorian sentiment; Reginald Blomfield wanted the Royal Academy more involved, Earle lych-gates and rose gardens and Worrall wrought iron. ‘I see a bell-fry,’ Barrie wrote to Ware with a characteristic mix of imagination and whimsy,

  and I see the bells ringing at some particular moment of the evening. This should go on thro’ the centuries. My idea is not that they should ring quite simultaneously but that one should wake up another (working, say, from north–south). The message each bell is sending to the next is ‘All’s Well’. Almost more impressive than bells would be bugles but when peace time comes they might seem too military.

  The Commission did not make life any easier for itself by bringing in a third architect and former President of the RIBA, Blomfield. The son of a clergyman and grandson of one of Victorian England’s great bully-bishops, Blomfield was about as unlike Baker and Lutyens as they were each other, a hard-fighting, hard-swearing bull of a man, as proud of his cricket or his fast, sliced underhand tennis serve as he was of anything he built, and prouder still of once nearly killing Henry James when he took a wall on his hunter only to find the alarmed old ninny sitting on the other side.

  The triple entente was not helped by the fact that Blomfield thought he should have had New Delhi – Lutyens had asked and then dropped him, he claimed – but architects have never needed much of a reason to hate each other. During their time together on the Royal Fine Arts Commission, the only thing Lutyens and Blomfield ever agreed on was the ‘ghastliness’ of Baker’s South Africa House in Trafalgar Square, but then Lutyens was probably prepared to agree with anyone on anything if it meant doing his old friend and walking companion down: ‘Professional jealousy I have encountered,’ Lord Crawford, the chairman of the Commission recalled, deeply shocked by the violence of Lutyens’s hostility to Baker, ‘but never anything quite so cynical or uncompromising.’

  There was a comic element to it all – ‘you are a werry nice man, but a werry, werry bad architect’, Lutyens told ‘Bloomy’ before deciding that he was not even a nice man – but the comedy was lost on Ware, and with the first meeting of the Imperial War Graves Commission scheduled for 20 November, the only solution seemed to be to bring in an outside referee. ‘The Commission recognised that there would inevitably be considerable difference of opinion on how the cemeteries abroad should be laid out, and what form of permanent memorial should be erected in them,’ Ware later wrote with rather more charity than he had felt at the time,

  They felt, moreover, that a matter of this kind should not become the subject of controversy, if it could be avoided. The appointment of Sir Frederic Kenyon therefore was made with a view to focussing, and, if possible, reconciling the various opinions on the subject that had found expression among the Armies at the front and the general public at home, and particularly in artistic circles. His terms of reference were as follows:–

  Sir Frederic Kenyon’s duties will be to decide between the various proposals submitted to him as to the architectural treatment and laying out of cemeteries, and to report his recommendations to the Commission at the earliest possible date

  1) He will consult the representatives of the various churches and religious bodies on any religious questions involved.

  2) He will report as to the desirability of forming an advisory Committee from among those who have been consulted, for the purpose of carrying out the proposals agreed on.

  There was only one restriction that the Commission placed on Kenyon’s freedom: there was to be no ‘distinction … made between officers and men lying in the same cemeteries in the form or nature of the memorials’. With that proviso, the world was Kenyon’s oyster: and some very large and irritating bits of grit he was to get with it.

  SIX

  Kenyon

  With the sole exception of Fabian Ware, Sir Frederic Kenyon’s was arguably the most important appointment that the Commission made. Kenyon was director of the British Museum when he accepted the job in 1917, a fifty-four-year-old biblical, classical and Browning scholar of great distinction, with ‘the clipped moustache and upright carriage’ of an army officer, the trained and analytical mind of the caricature Wykehamist, and a string of public achievements behind and in front of him that ranged from the funding for T. E. Lawrence’s Carchemish dig, to the purchase of the Codex Sinaiticus. ‘He is an interesting combination, this pleasant, erect Englishman,’ the Chicago Tribune wrote of him,

  the jovial, gentlemanly type of Englishman that is so well liked wherever one finds it, who left his desk of director of the British Museum to come over to France in 1914, with, as he put it, the first army that left Southampton for Le Havre since the expedition of Henry V in 1415 before the battle of Agincourt.

  Kenyon had been brought back from France at the behest of the British Museum’s trustees, but it was as much that military experience as his academic distinction that equipped him for his new task. In the decades ahead, two world wars would make the scholar-soldier a more familiar type, but in 1917 there were few who combined the intellectual and cultural standing demanded of the job – the young Kenneth Clarke, for instance, would eventually be Kenyon’s suggestion for his replacement – with the sympathies and experience that enabled him to mediate between the Army and a tricky artistic community. ‘The first official meeting of the Commission was held in November 1917,’ recalled Reginald Blomfield – who had come to sneer and stayed to admire,

  when Sir Frederic Kenyon … was appointed ‘adviser’ to the Commission, ‘in regard to the architectural treatment and lay-out of cemeteries’. The Commission had the usual English distrust of experts, for Kenyon, though a fine scholar and a very distinguished man, was not an architect, or familiar with that art, and of course we did not fail to shoot our cheerful jibes at ‘the art adviser’. But Kenyon did invaluable work. He at once visited some cemeteries in France, and in January 1918 made a very able report to the Commission, in which he laid down the broad lines of treatment for the cemeteries, and made suggestions as to organization.

  The danger of bringing in a ‘referee’, of course, was that all you would get is ‘building by committee’ – the pursuit of the second class and the attainment of the third, as Lutyens put it – but Kenyon had at least one important factor going for him in the work ahead. The antagonism between the three chief architects was certainly genuine enough, but beneath the endless frictions and jealousies that had brought Ware to the point of quitting, lay a common allegiance to the standards and principles of the Arts and Crafts Movement under which they had all been brought up that would give the cemeteries their unmistakable identity.

  In the end it was this adherence to quality as much as the dominant classicism of the day that would be the hallmark of the Commission’s work in France and elsewhere. In th
e years after the First World War, Lutyens, Blomfield and Baker would all build memorials for the Commission in the grand manner, but if one wanted to identify what it is that gives the cemeteries their distinct feel, what it is that saves them from the bombast and the rhetoric of so much commemorative art or prevents the Commission’s hundreds of cemeteries descending into a repetitive and mechanical uniformity, the answer lies in those traditions of honesty, simplicity and good design that, from planting to the use of materials and sense of place, would inform everything that they built. ‘The cemeteries, carefully tended, will rely for their effect on the dignity of their layout and the beauty of the trees, the grass and the flowers,’ Blomfield would tell an audience in 1920. ‘You may recollect those lines of Andrew Marvell, “He nothing common did or mean/ Upon that memorable scene.” This might, I think, be the spirit inspiring and directing all that is done to commemorate the war and those who have died in it.’

  This spirit, though, needed to be harnessed, and the directives and framework within which the architects and gardeners would work was the task that had been given to Kenyon. He had been appointed to the job just five days after Haig finally called off the nightmare of Third Ypres, and in the lull between Passchendaele and the German Spring Offensive of March 1918 he visited France twice, inspecting every kind of burial ground from the large base cemeteries of Boulogne and Etaples to the little clusters of graves ‘in the squalid surrounding of the mud of Ploegsteert’ and the ‘immense number of single burials’ that lay ‘on either side of the road from Albert to Bapaume. I was able to visit cemeteries along all parts of the front,’ he reported back to the Commission. ‘In the areas of Ypres … Festubert … Arras … the Somme, and also those which fringe the coast … and thereby was able to form an idea of the variety of problems in connection with their arrangement, decoration and upkeep.’