Empires of the Dead

by David Crane

  It must have made uncomfortable listening for the Commissioners because Wolmer was largely right – uniformity was a matter of aesthetics and not principles; nine people of ten would choose their own stone if allowed, the English did not like conformity – and the old alliance of patrician and people was in full cry. ‘I must ask the House to bear with me while I read some of the hundreds of letters I have received from bereaved relatives … who feel most terribly and acutely on this subject,’ he continued – Hansard captures the exchange:

  The hon. Member for Westminster spoke about the voice of the dead. No doubt it may be the case that some of the men who have died would have liked to be buried in the way that the War Graves Commission has decided.

  Captain BROWN All of them!

  Viscount WOLMER … How does the hon. Member know? What right has he to say that? I know of the case of a boy who told his mother that he would ‘hate to be buried like a dog’. Those were the words he used. The boy is dead, and that is how he is going to be treated.

  ‘How does the hon. Member know? What right has he to say that?’ – these were questions to which the Commission had no real answers. There was nobody on Wolmer’s side who would have denied an equal freedom to those who chose a ‘Commission stone’, and all they wanted to know was by what conceivable right – even if the Imperial War Graves Commission party were in a clear majority, even if there was only one mother, one son, one husband who did not want the stone – did a country that had publicly gone to war to defend Little Belgium against the militarist might of Germany now trample over the wishes of its bereaved relatives?

  ‘My hon. Friend in his most interesting memorandum calls it an Imperial memorial for the freedom of men,’ Wolmer continued. ‘What freedom is it if you will not even allow the dead bodies of the people’s relatives to be cared for and looked after in the way they like? It is a memorial, not to freedom, but to rigid militarism, not in intention, but in effect.’ It was not as though it was the ‘country’ speaking, either, Wolmer reminded the House, or as if Parliament had been given a say in the matter, only an unrepresentative and dictatorial coterie of like-minded men without a single representative of any religion on it. ‘I think it extremely unfortunate that the whole scope of the Commission’s activities was not discussed in Parliament,’ he concluded, and while the case against the narrow elitism of the Commission might have carried more weight if it had not come from a member of the extended Cecil clan, Wolmer was on solid ground on at least one point:

  and it is extremely unfortunate that there is not a single woman upon that Commission. I listened with admiration to the Hon member for Westminster when he spoke about the women of England. Why are they not represented upon the Commission? Of the hundreds of letters that I have received the greater part of them come from women. Women feel more acutely upon this question than men. That is only natural. Why are women not represented on the War Graves Commission? We come here, not to ask that relatives should be allowed to display wealth or privilege upon the graves, but only that they may show their love, the love which itself is stronger than death, the only thing that is, that love which makes the churchyards of our countryside beautiful in spite of the uncouthness of many of the tombstones or the lack of taste in particular ornaments … It is that love which will carry mourners to these grave yards in France, and it is to that love to which we as a nation owe a debt which we never can repay and which we ought in a matter of this sort primarily to consider.

  Wolmer’s had been an impressive performance, but for every letter produced against the Commission another could be produced for it, for every report of the Commission’s ‘intolerance and high-handed insolence’ the gratitude of a grateful widow or mother. As Wolmer sat down Asquith rose to declare his support in the shortest and simplest of terms, and one by one Members followed him with their stories and praise for the work already completed in France. ‘I have suffered in this war like my right hon. Friend,’ Colonel Burn, just back from seeing the first completed cemeteries, told the House,

  I know not where my boy’s body is. His grave is not known, and whether he is buried or not is more than I can say, because the Germans came into the trenches where he was killed, and when I looked and saw the grave of a General and on either side that of an unknown British soldier, I felt proud to think that my boy may have been one of these unknown British soldiers.

  ‘Long before there was controversy on this question,’ Mr Thomas, the Member for Derby, took up the theme, he had received a letter ‘which reflected the opinion of humble people’. He had been visiting France shortly after the death of ‘that brilliant young man, Mr Raymond Asquith’ and had seen his grave and near it that of his cousin, ‘young Tennant’. ‘Between them were the graves of humble British soldiers,’ Thomas went on,

  and as I stood there I thought of the … events that had brought the statesman’s son, the peer’s son, and the humble British soldier together, all with the same kind of tombstone, each burial place indicated in the same way … At Derby, later, I was speaking at a meeting of my constituents, and I told them of the incident … [and] a few days later I received a letter from Leicester, and it was something like this effect. ‘I see in the press that you have been near the grave of Raymond Asquith. I lost my only boy in the War. I am blind and his mother is deaf. I was told by some friends that he was buried near the grave of Raymond Asquith, and I wonder whether you could tell me that the grave is well kept.’ The name was Simon. I looked into my book and I found that was the lad whose name I had put down merely by chance. I replied … that not only could I say the grave was well kept, but that I had picked up a leaf from the grave and that perhaps he would like to have it. I leave Members of this House to imagine the reply I got.fn9

  There seemed no reason why the debate should ever stop and no reason why it should go on. Few on either side had wanted to air their bitter divide in the first place but no one now was going to change sides. Something good, though, had come out of it: not an emotional exhaustion, exactly, but a sad-eyed recognition of a universal grief that made rancour and division – emotional or parliamentary – seem somehow indecent. There was more to unite than separate them. Mr Turton would have given all that he had to have brought his only son home from Poperinghe to lie in their own churchyard ‘where Sunday after Sunday we could see the grave’. Colonel Burn found solace in the thought that one of those unknown graves in France was his son’s, but in their common loss was a common call to consideration, decency and humanity. It would, Burn told the House, be an ingratitude and insult to the dead to ‘come to a division’. ‘I appeal to my hon. Friend (Sir James Remnant) with whom I completely sympathise,’ responded Mr Thorne for the opposition, ‘not to force this to a Division. A Division on such a subject would harass every one of us. Our men, officers and men alike, on every stricken field have fallen together. In their death they were not divided. Let us, their fathers, not be divided here.’

  The House agreed. To the bitter end, Lord Robert Cecil promised to fight on but there would be no division.fn10 The War Graves Commission could now go ahead and Churchill, their new chairman, summing up the debate, painted for them the future. ‘The cemeteries which are going to be erected to the British dead on all the battlefields in all the theatres of war, will be entirely different from the ordinary cemeteries which mark the resting place of those who pass out in the common flow of human fate from year to year,’ he declared with his own inimitable and overweening sense of history,

  They will be supported and sustained by the wealth of this great nation and Empire, as long as we remain a nation and an Empire, and there is no reason at all why, in periods as remote from our own as we ourselves are from the Tudors, the graveyards in France of this Great War, shall not remain an abiding and supreme memorial to the efforts and glory of the British Army, and the sacrifices made in that great cause.

  Some decried Lutyens’s Great Stones as meaningless, he went on, but they too were part of this great feat of commem
oration. ‘I have been speaking of periods of 200 or 300 years,’ he concluded,

  but these great stones of which I speak are of Portland stone, weighing about 10 tons … and there will be 1,500 or 2,000 of them on the plains of France alone, and these stones will certainly be in existence 2,000 or 3,000 years hence … [and] even if our language, our institutions, and our Empire all have faded from the memory of man, these great stones will still preserve the memory of a common purpose pursued by a great nation in the remote past, and will undoubtedly excite the wonder and reverence of a future age.

  Now all the Commission had to do was build the cemeteries.

  EIGHT

  The Task

  In all the arguments over principles it is easy to lose sight of the sheer scale of the physical task that the Imperial War Graves Commission had set itself. In the months immediately after the war it was naturally impossible to put a precise figure on the Empire’s dead, but as prisoners returned and the exhumations and discoveries continued and the Gallipoli peninsula was opened, the numbers of dead and missing began to assume something like their familiar, neatly rounded totals.

  There may possibly never be a final figure – bodies are still found, identifications made, the missing given a name and grave, a whole new cemetery constructed – but there would be over 580,000 separate burials before the Commission had completed its immediate task. By the time that another war had added its own grim toll, the Commission had more than 23,000 burial sites under its control, but for all the global scale of its later work nothing in its history can begin to compare with the physical, logistical and administrative feat of burying or commemorating those half a million and more dead of the First World War who have their individual Commission graves.

  These figures need to be put in their wider context of course – France had lost 1,398,000 men, Russia 1,811,000, Germany 2,037,000, Austria-Hungary 1,100,000, Italy 578,000, the USA 114,000, Turkey and Bulgaria 892,000, a grand total of 9,450,000 even before civilian deaths are taken into account – but no country was planning to do quite what Britain was. It should be remembered too that France and Belgium had a devastated country to reconstruct but that also made the Commission’s task harder. They were starting from scratch in a shattered land; they were struggling against a chronic shortage of labour, gardening and clerical staff; they were working in the aftermath of the greatest cataclysm in Europe’s history; they were competing with the rival claims of agriculture and demobilisation, and while numbers conjure up something of the challenge – 580,000 gravestones to be quarried, shaped, incised and lettered, to take just the most obvious example – they cannot remotely suggest the difficulties against which it was met. ‘The Commission itself started its work on the Continent with a staff of only eight operating from headquarters buried in the forests near Hesdin,’ the Commission’s official historian wrote,

  hard put to it to find even basic necessities. Enterprising officers went out on the scrounge returning with quantities of supplies that had been begged or borrowed from the withdrawing army units … Gradually they built up stores, commandeered camps, and built others, and soon they acquired a miscellaneous collection of vehicles.

  It was much the same story in London, where temporary huts had to be erected on the bed of the drained lake in St James’s Park to accommodate a growing Commission staff. But it was the itinerant labour force levelling and preparing the hundreds of cemeteries that stretched like a chain down the line of the Western Front who had it hardest. ‘Life in that wilderness was dismal,’ Longworth wrote of the Commission’s migrant bands of ex-soldier-gardeners, cut off from all outside contact except for the occasional messenger bringing up mail.

  In some ways their existence bore similarities to that of the cattle drovers of the pioneering West. Many went out armed, to shoot rabbits, or any other game that lingered on the battlefields, and towards the end of the week their return to camp would be punctuated by often riotous visits to every cafe or estaminet along the way. But these ‘travelling circuses’, as they were called, did their job, putting as many as 1,375 cemeteries in order in one year.

  The hard physical labour was only part of the task, because for every cemetery that the Commission took over, there was the legal and surveying work to be done, photographs to be taken, preliminary sketches to be made, the Principal Architect to be consulted, designs to be finalised, a horticultural programme to be agreed, Kenyon to be placated and the chastening lessons of the first three ‘experimental cemeteries’ implemented.

  These three cemeteries were all, in the end, designed under Blomfield’s aegis and had inevitably thrown up the need for future modifications. Their enthusiastic reception in the press was all that Ware and Kenyon could possibly have hoped for, but with fluctuating exchange rates and tenders exceeding estimates by anything up to two and three hundred per cent – prices had gone up by two and a half times from their pre-war levels – the costs had come in far above the £10 a grave to which the Commission had tied itself.

  Ware knew the picture was not as disheartening as these first experiments suggested – with the great cemeteries like Etaples or Tyne Cot, economies of scale would automatically kick in – and yet even the imposition of a ‘Unit Cost Schedule’ to keep their architects ‘honest’ was not enough to bring ambition and expenditure into line. The Principal Architects were naturally reluctant to see any of their designs compromised by ‘niggardly’ economies, but with Lutyens’s great monoliths alone costing £500 each it was soon clear that in the smallest cemeteries both the War Stone and the shelters on which Baker had placed such stress would have to be sacrificed.

  It is characteristic that of the three Principal Architects for the Western Front (a fourth, Charles Holden was added in 1920), it was the disarming, incorrigibly joking and punning Lutyens who was least biddable when it came to changes. For all his bluster, Blomfield had been prepared to see his Cross of Sacrifice scaled down where it was suitable, but for Lutyens the integrity and permanence of his Great Stone, with its complex geometry and subtle use of entasis – the corrective use of curved surfaces learned from the Greeks – lay as much in its mathematical and quasi-mystical perfection as it did in the sheer mass of stone that loomed so large in Churchill’s historic imagination.

  The issue for the Commission was fundamentally one of costs, but if anyone had dared raise it there was also an aesthetic case to be made against the ubiquitous use of Lutyens’s stone. In the great formal cemeteries like Etaples, his altar – inscribed with the words ‘Their Name Liveth For Evermore’ – creates a powerful focus, but in even the medium-size cemeteries it can sometimes feel an intrusion, the intellectual plaything of a stubborn egotist, the overbearing extravagance of an Edwardian Timon, or, more charitably, the calculated concession of a secular age to a vaguely religious sentiment.

  Lutyens eventually, and only very reluctantly, agreed to it being assembled in pieces where nothing else was possible, and Baker submitted designs for standardised shelters. The one element that no one was prepared to budge on was the bitterly won gravestone. In an attempt to hold down costs the Commission had been tempted to make the headstone smaller, but with the savings from mass production and the development of a pantograph engraving machine coming to their rescue, they were able to hold to the original proportions and standards that Kenyon’s report had demanded and still keep well within their budget. There was the occasional problem in the mid-1920s, with substandard seams in the quarries and the Middle Eastern and Gallipoli cemeteries bringing their own serious complications, but the astonishing thing is how smoothly the operation went. In the last year of the war, the Commission had taken some early soundings around the building trade, and after an initial 850 stones for the ‘experimental’ cemeteries had been contracted out, headstones were soon being shipped over to the continent at a rate of more than four thousand a week.

  After consultations with the Curator of the Geological Survey Museum, Portland and Hopton Wood stone were chosen for their
durability and cheapness; again aesthetics and economy marched hand in hand. In the different climatic and soil conditions across the world, other stones would eventually have to be used, but the quintessential War Graves Commission headstone is made of English limestone and stands in one of the Western Front cemeteries, 2 feet 6 tall, by 1 foot 3 inches, by 3 inches deep, the head slightly rounded to carry off the rain, its crisp Roman lettering equally legible from above or the sides, the regimental badge unfussy, the incised cross everything, as Kenyon had always insisted it would be, that Christian sentiment could ask: a piece of design that in its perfect marriage of utility, simplicity and dignity has an air of inevitability about it that makes the bitter heartache that preceded it all the more baffling. ‘It is the simplest, it is the grandest place I ever saw,’ a Times correspondent wrote in 1920 when he first visited Blomfield’s ‘experimental’ cemetery at Forceville on the Somme,

  The most perfect, the noblest, the most classically beautiful memorial that any loving heart or any proud nation could desire for their heroes fallen in a foreign land. Picture this strangely stirring place. A lawn enclosed of close clipped turf, banded across with line on line of flowers, and linked by these bands of flowers; uncrowded, at stately intervals stand in soldierly ranks the white headstones. And while they form as perfect, as orderly a whole as any regiment on parade, yet they do not shoulder each other. Every one is set apart in flowers, every one casts its shadow upon a gracious space of green. Each one, so stern in outline, is most rich in surface, for the crest of each regiment stands out with a bold and arresting distinction above the strongly incised names.

  There was the odd niggle from the Commission – too much ornament, the walls at Le Treport far too high to please the Canadian High Commissioner – but Blomfield’s ‘experimental’ cemeteries marked the beginning of an immense programme of building that would redefine the landscape over which Britain’s armies had once fought. For practical reasons the first cemeteries tackled were those situated behind the old front line, but by the spring of 1920, Ware was able to announce the construction of some fifty cemeteries in two waves, an initial group of thirty-one, which made up what he called ‘The First Priority Programme’ and included the 11,000 dead of Lutyens’s great cemetery at Etaples, followed by a ‘Second Priority Programme’ that ranged in scale from the forty-four graves of the Gouy-en-Artois Communal Cemetery Extension to Ecoivres and its 1,725 dead.