Empires of the Dead

by David Crane

  ‘Covered with snow, as with a sheet, lay the body of a Boche,’ recalled Edwin Vaughan,

  looking calm and, I somehow felt, happy. Yet the sight of him made me feel icily alone. It seemed such a terrible thing to be alone, covered with snow throughout the night, with never a sound until we came along … never spoke, and then went away for ever. It seemed so unfriendly, and for a long time I sat wishing we could do something for him.

  This was a world that nobody wanted to know of during the war – the world that divided the man at the front from the civilian at home – and the surprise would have been if Kenyon’s blueprint had been any different. From the earliest days of the Mobile Unit, grave work had been marked by an instinct of patriotic faith, and if there was ever a time to hold on to the certainties and beliefs that had driven Ware from the beginning, it was the early months of 1918.

  At the end of 1917, the Bolsheviks had effectively brought an end to the fighting in the East, and on 21 March 1918, free at last to concentrate on one front, Ludendorff launched astride the Somme the first of five massive offensives that brought the Allies as close to losing the war as at any time since the Marne in 1914. On that first day alone the British sustained casualties of over 38,000, with 21,000 surrendering. By the twenty-third the Germans had advanced twenty-five miles in a return to the open warfare of 1914 that made all the derisory gains of the intervening years seem more pointless than ever. On 9 April a second offensive was launched along the River Lys, and by the end of the month – almost before the ink on Kenyon’s report was dry – the old battlefields of the Somme and the Ypres Salient, and something like half those cemeteries that Kenyon had visited over the winter, were in enemy hands.

  A third hammer blow in late May along the Chemin des Dames brought Paris within range of German shells, but with that checked the worst was past and Ludendorff’s gamble all but lost. Over the next weeks the offensive continued in the Champagne region until by the middle of July the German army had shot its bolt, a victim of its own territorial gains and overextension, of inadequate logistical support and falling manpower, of stiffening Allied resolve, influenza, incoherent strategy, wavering morale, economic blockade, dwindling production, Allied air superiority and the mounting influence of American troops.

  For Ware and the Commission, however, the offensives had left a grim double legacy, because in addition to another 350,000 Allied killed and wounded from the first two attacks alone, there was the inevitable ravage done to existing graves. In 1916 the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line had been marked by a barbaric programme of destruction, and while Ware found no single case of deliberate desecration of British cemeteries, the subsequent battles and bombardments had more than done Alberich’s work. On that morning of 21 March, in a space of just five hours, the Germans fired 1.16 million shells – over two-thirds of the number fired in the entire seven-day Allied bombardment that preceded the Somme – promiscuously mingling the living, the dead, and the long dead of both armies in one giant charnel house. And with each battle fought, the geological layering of the war grew ever more chaotic. In his report to the Commission, Ware remained confident that their records were detailed enough to reconstruct any cemetery, but as defence turned to attack and the Allied armies advanced again over the same devastated battlefields, the sheer numbers of missing and unidentified that they had left behind on the Somme alone – 73,000 of them – was already pointing to the greatest challenge that the post-war Commission would face.

  It was a challenge, too, that they would be facing sooner than anyone could have expected. Even after 8 August, ‘the black day in the history of the German army’, the Allies’ commanders were still thinking in terms of limited offensives and a 1919 campaign. One hundred days later a war that had seemed interminable was over: the ‘long war’ illusion of 1917 had proved no more accurate than the ‘short war’ illusion of 1914. A summer that had opened with Britain’s armies standing with their ‘backs to the wall’ on the outskirts of Amiens had turned into an autumn campaign that swept them eastward to where it had all started for the BEF in 1914. It was an extraordinary turnaround. Few people reading in January 1918 Sir Frederic Kenyon’s scholarly musings on where and how Britain’s victories should be commemorated, could have thought it the most pressing of the War Graves Commission’s concerns; fewer still, who buried the first British casualties in St Symphorien near Mons in August 1914, can have ever dreamed that four years later the same cemetery would take almost the last of the million dead that the war had cost the British Empire.

  SEVEN

  Opposition

  The real work of the Commission in France and Belgium would only properly begin when the war was over, but it was against this shifting background of retreat and advance that the first tentative steps were taken. There was little to be done on the ground in areas where the fighting continued, but that was possibly just as well because there was still one key issue that Kenyon’s report had left unresolved. ‘I have not considered that question of finance came within my terms of reference,’ he had concluded, before highlighting the awkward balance between economy and quality that the Commission would have to maintain,

  but it is obvious that it has an important bearing on the subject of this report. However carefully the cost of each cemetery is limited, the number of these cemeteries is so large that the total expenditure must be very great. On this ground alone, if on no other, it is essential that the general principles of cemetery design should be determined without delay … It is also essential that the architects employed should make their designs as simple and inexpensive as possible, since extravagant cost must inevitably lead to the rejection of the design. The country needs dignity and refined taste, not ostentation, and then it will not grudge the cost. It surely will not refuse the cost of one day of war in order to honour for centuries the memory of those who fell.

  There was, unusually, no difficulty from the Treasury and none from the Empire – in June 1917 the representatives at the Imperial War Conference agreed to share the costs in proportion to the numbers of their dead – but the problem was that the Commission had no real idea at all as to what those costs might be. At that June conference Ware had produced a figure of £10 per grave; although this was adopted and became the measure of subsequent budgeting, it was no more than guesswork, an arbitrary figure pulled out of a hat by a Commission so ignorant of their business, according to Blomfield, that they needed the meaning ‘of specifications and quantities, and the ordinary methods of obtaining tenders and ordering of building contracts’ explained to them.

  Blomfield was never one to underplay his own role in things, and the Commission had the Office of Works’ experience to call on, but he was only exaggerating an essential truth. The Commission’s remit stretched to every theatre of the war, and in June 1918 they could have had no more idea of what challenges Gallipoli had in store than they had of the costs there might be in East Africa or Mesopotamia. ‘The resting places are in every conceivable site,’ Kipling, the Commission’s literary arbiter and public spokesman, would have to remind an impatient public, ‘on bare hills flayed by years of battle, in orchards and meadows, besides populous towns or little villages, in jungle-glades and coast ports, in far-away islands, among desert sands, and desolate ravines.’

  The graves on the Gallipoli peninsula, in particular, would present the Commission with a problem that could not even be addressed until after the war. For the greater part of the conflict, Britain’s cemeteries along the Western Front had been in or behind the lines, but from the night in early January 1916, when the last Allied soldier slipped away under the cover of darkness from Gallipoli, the makeshift graves and snow-covered corpses of a nine-month-long campaign had been left to the mercy of an Ottoman foe and hostile climate.

  This was distressing enough for relatives who had been forced to live in almost total ignorance for three years, who often did not even know whether or not their son or husband had a grave, and it was exacerbated by
the peculiar associations that had wrapped themselves around the name of Gallipoli. The campaign had been fought by a combined force of French, British and Empire units, but for the ANZAC troops and their governments and populations who had sent them to war in 1914 the peninsula and its landmarks – Anzac Cove, Lone Pine, Chunuk Bair, the Nek – had assumed a significance that transcended the military or strategic to become a proving ground of courage and a mythic part of national identity.

  The 8,709 Australian dead were just the beginning of the challenge awaiting the War Graves Commission – the British had lost 20,000 during the campaign, the New Zealanders 2,721 or almost a third of their troops, the Indian units more than fifteen hundred, even the tiny Newfoundland contingent, bound for annihilation on the Somme, forty-nine – but Ware had no answers to give relatives. In the last days of the campaign, an Australian padre had scattered wattle seeds among the Australian graves and made a rough map of the cemeteries, but when the burials had almost all been at night in shallow, hastily dug holes the chances of identifications were slipping away with every year.

  There was nothing either that Ware could do – approaches through American and papal channels had produced little – and even in France and Belgium the ebb and flow of battle in 1918 had made the most basic reconnaissance a challenge. ‘The cemeteries were often very difficult to find,’ recalled Reginald Blomfield, whose own prior experience of the front had been limited to digging trenches around London with the Inns of Court, ‘as in many cases the roads shown on our maps had been obliterated by shell fire, and we had to leave our cars and wander over what had been battle-fields in search of graves hastily made and planted anywhere.’

  The end of hostilities on 11 November showed too the numbing scale of exhumations and reburials that the concentration of graves into selected cemeteries would entail. For obvious reasons the Commission wished to disturb as few graves as possible, but the figures involved were still staggering: 128,577 re-interments in the first fifteen months of peace, a further 76,073 over the next eighteen months and 38,000 more over the following three years, disinterred by chance and the plough after the official search programme was closed at the end of 1921. ‘The total number of graves in France and Belgium when this work has been completed will probably be over 500,000,’ Ware predicted in March 1920, writing with his Graves Directorate hat on,

  and the number of cemeteries requiring architectural treatment … will exceed 1,200 …

  When the Directorate has completed the marking and registration of the graves in a cemetery, and the cemetery is tidy and in good order, the complete records, after being checked and verified, are handed over to the Commission who then take charge of the cemetery. A survey is then made in order to furnish the French or Belgian authorities with the information requisite for the acquisition of the land.

  Only photographs now – wooden crosses lurching drunkenly on the edge of flooded craters, the pathetic scraps of a body lying beneath a blanket, a fleshless arm jutting out of a buried dug-out, long lines of searchers steadily moving across a morass of mud with that intent air of a police cordon searching for a missing child – can give any faint sense of the reality that lay behind these figures, but after four years of war there seemed nothing that people could not endure. ‘Exhumation was a routine job despite its grimness,’ one Australian officer remembered. ‘The grave would be opened and the body uncovered. The body was checked for identity discs, paybooks, papers or anything else that could be used in identification. Then the body was wrapped in a blanket, sewn up and marked with an identifying tag for future occasions.’

  The work was carried out by soldiers awaiting demob, divided into Grave Concentration Units of twelve men each under a senior NCO, but it was still the forensic skills honed by the successors to the old Mobile Ambulance Unit and Ware’s double identity discs that offered relatives the best hope of reclaiming their dead. For each soldier whom they managed to identify there would be ten who remained unknown, and yet every badge, wedding ring, tattoo or distinguishing shade of khaki that yielded a positive identification saved another family from that ‘dreadful uncertainty’ and unresolved grief that so many, including Kipling, had known since 1914.

  It would be another two decades before the task of commemorating the missing would end with Villers-Bretonneux, but for the Commission’s own credibility and for public morale it was vital that a start was made on the cemeteries as soon as possible. In February 1918, the Treasury had made an initial grant of £15,000 for the construction of three ‘experimental’ cemeteries situated safely behind the lines, and in November 1918 a contract was placed for the first of these at Le Treport, a medium-sized cemetery situated on the French coast.

  Le Treport offered the chance of gaining a more accurate estimate of costs and the physical and logistical realities of the task ahead and it also provided a first test for the whole design system on which the Commission’s work was to be based. Kenyon had learned only too well the difficulties of getting anyone to agree on anything, and in place of a ‘committee of architects or art critics’ he had proposed a solution that went back to the ‘medieval tradition’ of ‘master’ and ‘disciple’ idealised by the Arts and Crafts Movement, with the cemeteries divided into ‘a few large groups’ under a ‘Principal Architect’ and a team of younger architects, ideally recruited from the forces, answerable to him but – within the general principles laid down by the Commission – ‘free to work in accordance with the dictates of their genius’.

  It might have seemed a quaintly medieval solution to death on an industrial scale, but Kenyon’s report dovetailed with both a wish to employ young architects and draughtsmen who had served with the Army and with the personalities the Commission had landed itself with. ‘The Principal Architects had areas assigned to them,’ Blomfield recalled with a degree of smugness that suggests how right Kenyon was to keep the three principals apart,

  The three cemeteries at Ypres, for example … the great cemetery of Lystenhoek near Poperinghe, and several of the more important cemeteries in the Ypres area and the Somme district, and the large and important cemetery of St Sever at Rouen, were designed by me in this way … As far as I can recollect, the cemetery of Le Treport on the coast, which was designed by me, was actually the first cemetery that was completed. It was regarded by the Commission as in the nature of an experiment both as to cost and effect, and Kipling having said some nice things as to its beauty, this cemetery became more or less a prototype for subsequent designs.

  There were difficulties and delays on the ground that are glossed over here, problems with transport and labour and the scale and speed of demobilisation, but these were nothing compared with the troubles the Commission was brewing for itself at home. The Anglican mutterings over Lutyens’s Great Stone ought to have warned them, because while Kenyon’s compromise of two central monuments – cross and stone – had successfully brought Baker into line, there was an intransigent and vociferous element that was not going to be bought off so easily.

  There were other strands of opposition – the people ask for housing and we give them stones, the architect and influential teacher, William Lethaby, complained – but it was the old issues of repatriation, freedom, religious sentiment and the headstone around which the principal opposition rallied. In his original report Kenyon had strongly advocated the plain, simple stone that is now so familiar, but with the end of the war and the public’s first chance to see what was being planned for them, a thin trickle of protest letters turned into a vituperative parliamentary and press campaign against the Commission’s ‘unspeakable tyranny’.

  They were ‘the most heartless and soulless’ of all official bodies … ‘no government would dare to attempt such an outrage … under the eyes of the public’ … ‘desecration’ … ‘monstrous’ … ‘bureaucracy run mad’ … ‘against the custom of all civilised nations’ … ‘Never before in the history of man has a parent or widow been deprived of her right to show their love by a personal memoria
l’ – week in, week out, letters in The Times show the depth of anger at the refusal ‘to allow bereaved parents, widows, and orphans to have any say in regard to the graves of their loved-ones’, and the Commission’s problem was that it was only too true. As a former newspaper editor, Ware was acutely aware of public opinion, yet whenever it came to any specific issue, whether it was the latitude allowed to the lettering on a gravestone, or a request for the Hand of Ulster or the Maltese Cross or school emblem to replace a regimental badge, the ‘Old Milner’ in him would always out. ‘I know how English people dislike (more than ever after these five years of bureaucratic control) any interference with their liberty in any way,’ he wrote to one widow who had been palmed off with the usual official high-handedness, but ‘they do not understand that such committees as this … are really designed to help them’.

  The problem rested in that patronising use of ‘they’ – another relative was breezily dismissed as one of those people ‘who prefer modern translations of the Old and New Testament to the Authorised Version’ – and Lord Wolmer was not lying in The Times when he promised the War Graves Commission a fight. ‘Nothing could put a harsher touch upon the underlying sorrow with which innumerable hearts are now stricken,’ a Spectator editorial lamented, putting its finger unerringly on the weaknesses and subterfuges in the Kenyon Report,

  than that there should be a bitter public dispute over the war graves. That would be a humiliation when everything should be done in the spirit that makes sorrow and sacrifice ennobling … For our part we have read the Report by Sir Frederic Kenyon, whose recommendations have been accepted by the Commission, with a full appreciation of the anxious care which he brought to his task, of his evident sense of responsibility and of his recognition of the dignity and significance which should properly belong to the war cemeteries. But when all has been said, we fear that the recommendations lack just that touch of sympathetic understanding and indulgence which would have made allowance for the almost uncontrollable individual cravings that have expressed themselves and are rapidly growing. On the artistic side we admit there is everything to be said for uniformity and for strict regulations, but this leaves out the question of what is more important than grandeur or austerity of design, and that is the passionate and incalculable longing of the individual – of the wife, the mother, the brother or sister – to express devotion to the dead in his or her own way.