by David Crane
It was an unanswerable argument, and the Commission felt it, but the problems of verification were not to be shrugged off as easily as Mrs Langton suggested. ‘During the past week I received 78 queries from you,’ an irascible Brigadier Edmonds, of the Historical Section, Military Branch, Committee of Imperial Defence, complained to Ware in January 1921, finally snapping under the immense burden that the Commission’s demands were putting on his hopelessly overstretched staff,
they took two experts in classification of the records three complete working days to investigate and answer.
This section exists for the purpose of writing a history of the war … I must therefore finally decline to deal with further queries, unless you can give me clerical assistance in compensation for the time spent on your work by my trained staff …
‘Where [for example] was 10th Battalion, Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders operating on 10th October 1915?’ the Brigadier went on, warming to the task of demonstrating just what each verification request from Ware entailed,
The War Diary for that date reads:
10/10/15 (no place stated) The battalion took over Trench 29 in addition to trenches 27 and 28.
For description of Trench 29 see Appendix 2 attached (Appendix 2 NOT ATTACHED)
The Infantry Brigade Diary was then consulted and the only clue was ‘Nr Ypres’. In this case also the Divisional Diary was then consulted. (Approximate time, half-an-hour.)
Other problems existed, too, in an area like the Ypres Salient where there had been more or less continuous fighting for four years. There were, of course, still graves and burial grounds surviving from 1914, but when even in 1921 so few true battlefield cemeteries in the Salient remained how was that ‘sacred’ connection between death and commemoration to be preserved? What was to stop memorial tablets, split up between the post-war cemeteries, as Kipling put it, looking more like notice boards than anything else? And what of the time factor? Were relatives prepared to wait the five years that the Director of Records reckoned it would take to establish the place of death of each missing man? And would the country wait when the United States and the Dominions were pressing ahead with their own plans for commemoration?
‘Clearly,’ as the Commission’s official historian wrote, ‘some compromise was necessary’, and for a while it looked as if that compromise had been found. If it was not possible to honour Kenyon’s original ‘geographical’ commitment to the missing, then a commemoration based around the eighty-five major battlefields into which the wonderfully named ‘Battles Nomenclature Committee’ had divided the Western Front might offer a practical way forward. More land would have to be purchased and that would take six months, but by February 1921, Ware was reporting better progress than they could have hoped. And to the country at large, as Kipling pointed out, it was the generic names – Ypres, Somme, Marne, Loos – that exercised the strongest imaginative and emotional pull.
The idea of dedicating eighty-five cemeteries to the memory of the missing was a compromise, but then compromise was in the air. An organisation that had been founded on absolutes and fixed principles was learning to bend with the wind. At home, where there was no land law of the kind Ware had negotiated abroad, and no means of compulsion, Kenyon’s insistence that Britain was the proper place for private memorials was coming home to roost. The Commission could acquire plots by private purchase, they could negotiate with churches and local authorities, but they could not insist on their headstone or prevent a wife from being buried in the same grave as her husband. Across the globe, too, politics, religion and climatic conditions meant that anomalies and exceptions were unavoidable. On Gallipoli, the standing headstone would have to be abandoned for a sloping ‘headstone block’ set on the ground. In Macedonia religious hatreds and violence saw the substitution of Blomfield’s Cross of Sacrifice by a great stone cairn. In Iraq, the Army, just as in the Crimea fifty years before, had been forced to obliterate graves rather than see them desecrated.fn12
Even on the Western Front – still, as ever, the focus of the Commission’s energies – experience was throwing up challenges that demanded a softening of bureaucratic rigour. The old embargo on ‘fake graves’ was as strict as ever, but the ‘Kipling memorial’ – an additional, larger stone, carrying an explanatory inscription – would eventually allow individual headstones to men whose bodies had been lost as the war swept over the cemeteries in which they originally lay. In a similar way, common humanity demanded and won a more flexible application of the burden of proof when it came to identification. Many families needed their ‘place’, needed that six feet of France they could call their own, needed to believe that the body in a grave was theirs; and who, as their Director of Records asked, were the Commission to insist on rigour and the ugly, bureaucratic formulation of ‘Believed to Be’ in the face of that?
Compromises then, but compromises of detail that if anything strengthened the Commission without threatening its essential values. Whether, though, that can be said of another shift in policy that the Commission made in the summer of 1921 is a matter of opinion. It represented either a great opportunity seized or the loosening of their most fundamental principles. Either way, it was to nullify the whole previous debate on the missing and define, as nothing else but the individual gravestones do, the work of the Commission and the way that we now remember the war.
NINE
Completion
One of the great tenets on which Commission policy had always rested was a strict demarcation between commemoration and military celebration. As the ‘sole authority’ involved in the control of monuments, some kind of ‘brokering’ role was unavoidable, but from the very first Kenyon had been clear that this was and should be the limit of their involvement. ‘The design of such memorials does not appear to come within the scope of the Commission,’ he wrote of the ‘battle memorials’ that the Army and Dominions would undoubtedly want to mark their ‘most notable triumphs’:
The site of these monuments will not usually compete with those required for cemeteries … ordinarily the battle memorials will be on high and conspicuous spots, while cemeteries will be in villages and folds of the ground which have the air of shelter and of rest appropriate to a place of burial. It will confuse and obliterate the ground idea our cemeteries are intended to embody, if it is attempted to make them serve the turn of battle memorials also.
Kenyon had been right about both the popular demand for public memorials and the proactive role of the Dominions, and in the November of 1919, Winston Churchill, the Secretary of State for War, circulated a memorandum to the Cabinet on the need for government action. In the months since the war, Churchill explained, individual Army units had taken steps to commemorate their own exploits, but if memorials were not simply to be limited to units who could afford them and ‘the dignity of the Imperial Government’ compromised by the Dominions and India it ‘should erect at the public expense general memorials to the Army’ on certain symbolic sites.
Things were seldom quite as easy as Churchill could make them sound, however, and beyond the creation of a National Battlefield Memorial Committee (NBMC) under the Earl of Midleton, six months of departmental rivalries, personal animosities and institutional jealousies had left everything more or less where it was. In the November of 1920, a small subcommittee of Midleton’s NBMC went out to inspect the battlefields, but it would no sooner decide on a suitable site for a memorial – Villers-Bretonneux, where the great German spring advance of 1918 was finally halted or Vimy Ridge – than it would discover that the Australians or Canadians had got in first or that some division had already built its own private memorial.
There was not just a problem with sites, but also potentially with a resurgence of the ‘Little Englander’ attitudes that had dogged Ware in his early days with the Mobile Ambulance Unit. During the negotiations in Paris in 1915 he had done all in his power to prevent Britain turning France into a monumental theme park, but any thought now that their old allies might not want �
��perpetual reminders’ of their indebtedness looming over them from every ridge on the Western Front seemed utterly lost in a surge of competitive national dignity he was helpless to stop.
The generals wanted their own ‘victories’ marked of course, newspaper magnates lobbied for ‘great upstanding monuments that will strike the popular imagination’; Churchill wanted the whole of Ypres kept as a ruin, others, more modestly, merely its great Cloth Hall – the only feelings, in fact, not consulted were French or Belgian but then, as the Midleton committee put it, what was the point of a monument on the Hindenburg Line that ‘only a very few French peasants’ would see? There was a rare cautionary voice from Lord Crawford, the new First Commissioner of Works – a hint to tread carefully in French cathedrals with plans for commemorative plaques, a suggestion that Parisians might not take kindly to a major British monument in the centre of their city – but it was again Ware who came to France and Belgium’s rescue.
The issue at stake was, as ever in these negotiations, one of jurisdiction and from a position of impotence Ware found himself on strong ground. Under the terms of an Anglo-Belgian agreement of 1919, the Commission had sole responsibility for licensing memorials in Belgium as well as France, and when in April 1921 the Office of Works made the mistake of directly notifying Brussels of their plans to rebuild the Menin Gate, Ware stepped in to warn them off his patch.
In the ensuing argument the Foreign Office came down on the Commission’s side, and subsequent discussions made it clear to both sides that the Midleton committee’s plans for battle memorials and the Commission’s scheme to commemorate the missing must either lead to duplication or convergence. On 8 July, the Secretary of State for War circulated a Cabinet memorandum suggesting a fusion of the two schemes, and just under a month later the Cabinet, as Lieutenant Colonel Chettle, the Commission’s Director of Records, ingenuously put it, ‘agreed to abandon all general memorials other than the Commission’s; to regard the National Battlefield Committee as “having completed its functions” … Thus, by general consent, a new and independent duty was laid on the Commission.’
‘Thou hast it now – King, Cawdor, Glamis’, and if there is no suggestion that he ‘play’d most foully for it’ – it is worth remembering that what Chettle is talking about here is not so much ‘convergence’ as ‘takeover’. In the official history of the Imperial War Graves Commission, Philip Longworth conjured up a picture of a passive and almost reluctant Commission, but everything we know about Ware and his methods makes a nonsense of the notion that the whole thing simply fell into his lap.
Given the previous bad blood between the Commission and the Office of Works, it had been as Colonel Lord Arthur Browne smoothly explained, ‘rather necessary to scotch this later serpent’, but it was more than simply another of Ware’s turf wars. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1915 he had spent his time negotiating for this very moment, and he had not successfully fought off opposition in England to see his vision of imperial unity fragment on the continent into 135 private divisional memorials and a plethora of separate Dominion monuments.
The Canadians had voted a million dollars for monuments, the Australians already had two under construction with another £100,000 budgeted for a general memorial at Villers-Bretonneux; South Africa had purchased Delville Wood on the Somme; the Indian government had allocated £10,000 for a memorial at Neuve-Chapelle; the Newfoundlanders were buying at Beaumont-Hamel; the Anzac forces were going their own way on the Gallipoli peninsula – the mounting list of monuments must have made strange reading for Ware, because in one sense this was the future he had seen and preached in his last book before the war. In The Worker and His Country he had pictured a day when the leadership of the Empire would pass from the ‘weary Titan’ to the younger nations of the Empire, but it had clearly never occurred to him that an Imperial Victory would have the centrifugal influence that it had, or that Third Ypres or Gallipoli might add a different note to the Dominions’ burgeoning sense of national pride and self-reliance.
If the idea of Empire was Ware’s motivation for moving in on Midleton’s territory, the clinching argument for a government anxious to placate public opinion and still save money was a financial one. The Commission had already budgeted £5 for every name to be commemorated on their own proposed memorials to the missing, and with ‘at least 200,000 missing in France and Belgium alone’, and a further £100,000 of Empire money earmarked for an Ypres memorial, the saving to the government, as the Secretary for War reminded the Cabinet in a memorandum drafted by Ware, was ‘considerable’.
In a serendipitous sort of way, too, the ‘merger’ fitted in conveniently with the Imperial War Graves Commission’s more limited plans for their memorials to the missing. In Kenyon’s original scheme the geographical link between the place of death and commemoration had been as close as humanly possible, but once the topographical link was snapped there was no argument for eighty-five memorial cemeteries that would not equally apply to the four great monuments that Midleton’s committee had finally proposed for the Western Front.
One of these – the memorial in Paris – died its predictable silent death, but the Midleton plans for monuments at Ypres and on the Marne and Somme offered the Commission not just a way forward but possibly a way out. There had been absolutely no thought in its early days of building on a monumental scale, but as the business of squaring war diaries and casualty lists proved not just difficult but insuperable, the attractions of a chain of a dozen great memorials to the missing stretching down the length of the Western Front from Nieuport in Belgium to Soissons near the Chemin des Dames were increasingly obvious.
Few who have stood beneath the great arch of the Menin Gate at eight on a winter’s night when the Last Post is sounded, or seen Lutyens’s astonishing Thiepval Memorial towering above the Ancre, could wish it different, but it still needs remembering what a volte face this was. For many families it had been hard enough to see their dead commandeered by the state, but this merger of the War Graves Commission and Battlefield Memorial Committee represented an abrogation of the fundamental principle on which the whole work of the Commission had been based.
‘It will confuse and obliterate the ground idea which our cemeteries are intended to embody’ – it is worth repeating Kenyon’s words – ‘if it is attempted to make them serve the turn of battle memorials also’, and that was precisely what the Commission was now planning to do. It could be fairly argued that the temper of the memorials they produced is hardly triumphalist, and yet if nothing else or worse they are a reminder that while the Commission served two masters, its first allegiance, as it had already demonstrated, was always to the Empire and not to the bereaved relative.
The Commission faced a formidable new task, with monuments to build across the globe. If they wanted a preview of the challenges ahead then their first involvement on British soil, with the Royal Navy, was probably the perfect introduction. Under its original Charter, the Commission had a duty to commemorate all the missing of the war, but it was a particularly tough irony that an organisation that had grown organically out of the peculiar culture and circumstances of the Western Front and the Army, should have to cut its new teeth on a service that proudly stood as one of the last great bastions between Victorian Britain and the kind of democratic sentiment that the Commission stood for.
When it came to the subject of memorials, or most other subjects for that matter, there seemed no middle ground for the Admiralty between lordly indifference and a confident assumption that they could do what and where they wanted. In the immediate aftermath of war there had been only the vaguest idea of any commemorative monument at the Admiralty, and yet within the year they had swung from one extreme to another, coolly proposing to an un-amused King that the Army’s Duke of York should be replaced on his London column by Britannia, before making moves to appropriate the whole north side of Trafalgar Square. ‘The [Naval Memorials] Committee … visited Trafalgar Square’ – Admiralty minutes beautifully ca
pture the tone of their deliberations,
The general opinion was that the ideal site in the Square for a Naval Memorial would be that occupied by General Gordon’s statue, but that site against the North parapet of the Square … was practicable and had much to recommend it. The First Lord repeated to the Committee his view that they were inclined to under-estimate the indignation which was invariably aroused by any proposal to move an existing statue from a desirable site, adding that the partisans of General Gordon might be expected to prove formidable.
With their tradition of burial at sea, and a resolutely unsentimental world vision, the Admiralty were no more sensitive to the claims of the missing than they were to General Gordon’s, and they had moved as slowly as possible to meet their obligations. The War Graves Commission had first tried to prod them into action as early as June 1919, but it was another eighteen months of internal dithering and external prompting before they were ready to come back to the Commission with their own inimitably unimaginative solution to the problem.
It was not possible to commemorate the dead of Jutland, say, on the site of the battle – the North Sea was hardly Navarino harbour – and as it made no sense to site a memorial on the nearest landfall on the Danish coast, the Naval Memorials Committee had finally decided on three identical monuments at the three principal manning ports. There were still other plans in the air for a general naval memorial in London, but with Trafalgar Square blocked by the wretched Gordon et al., and an alternative site on the Thames Embankment filched from under their noses by the submariners, it would in the end be these three monuments of Sir Robert Lorimer’s at Chatham, Portsmouth and Plymouth – giant obelisks, with lions couchant at each corner and surmounted by an allegorical confection of globe and winds – that became the chief memorials to the Royal Navy’s contribution to victory.
