Empires of the Dead

by David Crane

  They remain more than that, too, because if Auden and his ‘horizontal man’, Sassoon and his ‘sepulchre of crime’, Owen and his ‘old lie’, will always be waiting in the wings, Ware had come as close as any man to making his vision a reality. ‘He was called Legion, or nothing,’ Edmund Blunden wrote of the fate of the common soldier before Ware and the Commission changed it for good,

  He was merely the means by which someone else pursued the glory of a name. It has been the faith of the Commission that those who fought and died in 1914–1918 were – what we know them to have been – several and separate personalities, each in human measure ‘the captain of his fate’, each claiming individual comprehension. We well remember our old friends as cooperating without thought of personal advantage in the main cause. But their characteristics are clear, as various as their number; and so it is entirely laudable that the Imperial War Graves Commission has carried out its task with a vivid sense of the individual grave.

  The Menin Gate … Villers-Bretonneux … the Canadian Memorial at Vimy Ridge, with its two immense pylons, symbolising Canada and France towering over the Douai Plain like a giant stone tuning-fork … Beaumont-Hamel and Captain Basil Gotto’s bronze Caribou, high on a rock outcrop, looking out to the lone tree which marked the farthest advance of the Newfoundlanders … Chunuk Bair, on the Gallipoli peninsula where the New Zealanders had fought so desperately – from one end of Europe to the other the proof of Ware’s success is there to see but nothing would be less true to him or to the battles he fought than to leave his story on such a note of bland affirmation. For more than thirty years he achieved what he did in the teeth of bitter opposition, and if he finally carried a country and Empire with him – so finally that we are now incapable of seeing ourselves in any other way but his – there is one grave above all others that serves as a reminder of the bruising struggle and compromises that lay behind that victory.

  It is ironic, in fact, that the most imaginative and influential expression of the Imperial War Graves Commission’s principles should lie in a grave that at first sight seems the denial and negation of everything they had set out to do. From the early days of the war Ware had set himself against the idea of repatriation on grounds of equality, and the policy was firmly and publicly enshrined among the Commission’s post-war principles when, in the August of 1920, the Reverend David Railton MC, a former Army Chaplain and now the vicar of St John the Baptist’s, Margate, wrote to the Dean of Westminster with the suggestion that three months later would lead to the ‘creation’ of the Unknown Warrior.

  The idea had come to him four years before in France when, returning from a burial service in the line, he saw a single lonely grave dug in a tiny garden near Armentières. ‘At the head of the grave,’ he recalled,

  there stood a rough cross of white wood. On the cross was written in deep black-pencilled letters, ‘An Unknown British Soldier’ and in brackets beneath, ‘of the Black Watch’. It was dusk and no one was near, except some officers in the billet playing cards. I remember how still it was. Even the guns seemed to be resting.

  ‘How that grave caused me to think,’ David Railton remembered, and four years later he was still thinking over that unknown soldier of the Black Watch. Towards the end of the war he had almost written to Douglas Haig proposing that the body of an unidentified soldier should be taken home to represent all the Empire’s dead, but in Herbert Ryle, the Dean of Westminster, he had found an altogether more likely candidate. After a certain amount of royal and official scepticism had been overcome, Lloyd George’s Cabinet unanimously agreed to set up a committee under the chairmanship of the Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, to supervise the ceremonial details.

  The appointment of the superb Lord Curzon might seem an odd choice to oversee the burial of the ‘common man’ but that only reflects the ambivalence that still surrounded the idea. ‘I attended a large luncheon party at around this time,’ one senior Army officer remembered, ‘and at it I was asked what I thought of the proposal to bring over a body. Only one person out of twenty-four agreed that it was a wonderful idea. The rest said it would never appeal to the British.’

  The story has been often told – with the details, appropriately for an event of mythic transformation, different in almost every telling – but probably the most authoritative account is that left by the officer commanding the Army in France and Flanders at that time, Brigadier General Wyatt. On 7 November 1920, four small burial parties armed with shovels and sacking left the Army Headquarters at St Pol for four of the great battlefields of the Western Front, and there exhumed four – sometimes six – unidentified bodies from the earlier battles of the war and brought them back to a hut that had been turned into a temporary chapel for their reception.

  The battlefields were those of Ypres, Arras, the Somme and the Aisne, the bodies, ‘mere bones’ beyond identification, and the burial parties who had carried out the exhumations, ignorant of what they were doing. From the start the whole operation had been marked by an odd lack of paperwork and absolute secrecy, and as each body was brought in and placed on a stretcher in the hut that secrecy was maintained, with no party overlapping another and no one able to say from which of the battlefields the bodies came.

  At midnight on the same day a Colonel Gill, and Wyatt – blindfolded in the more poetic accounts – entered the chapel where in silence Wyatt placed a hand on one of the sacks of bones. The remains were placed in a plain English deal coffin, the chapel locked, and a guard placed on the door. The next day the three other bodies were taken away for reburial in a nearby cemetery and after a simple prayer returned to the obscurity from which they had been plucked; meanwhile the extraordinary metamorphosis of the fourth had already begun.

  The timing was tight, the arrangements hasty, but the performance faultless. At noon a joint service was held in the hut over the body, and then the coffin, accompanied by a military escort, was carried in a ‘somewhat battered’ ambulance to Boulogne where a temporary chapel had been prepared in the castle library. There the body lay under guard of a company of the French 8th Infantry Battalion until the morning of the tenth when two British undertakers arrived to place it in a heavy coffin of Hampton Court oak, banded with iron work, and inscribed on the lid in an elaborate Gothic script with the text, ‘A British Warrior who fell in the Great War 1914–1918 for King and Country’.

  At 10.30 a.m., as all the bells of Boulogne rang out and bugles and trumpets played ‘Aux Champs’, the Unknown Warrior, as he now was, coffin draped in a tattered Union Flag, the military wagon on which it lay pulled by six black artillery horses and escorted by a detachment of the 6th Chasseurs of Lille, set off in a funeral cortege a mile long to the Quai Gambetta where Marshal Foch and HMS Verdun were waiting.

  ‘11.17’ reads the ship’s log, ‘Embarked coffin of “Unknown Warrior”,’ – the quotation marks nicely capturing the residual unfamiliarity with the phrase – and at 11.29 the Verdun slipped from her jetty and began her brief passage for Dover. As she left Boulogne harbour an escort of French sloops joined her in a last act of Allied respect, and then at 12.40, with a final nineteen-gun salute, fell astern to leave the Verdun and her six accompanying destroyers of the Royal Navy’s 3rd Flotilla to mourn the Empire’s dead alone.

  Flags and ensigns at half-mast, another nineteen-gun salute from the castle, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, a teeming quayside, a guard of Connaught Rangers – nobody had known quite what they were doing or what to expect when they took up Railton’s idea but by the time that afternoon that they ‘Disembarked Coffin of “Unknown Warrior”’ they were beginning to see. The response of the French in Boulogne must have given them their first inkling of the scenes that lay ahead, and as the body made its way up to London in the same railway carriage that had brought home the murdered Edith Cavell and Captain Fryatt, the country prepared to receive the son and husband, brother, father, that Ware and the Commission had denied her. ‘The train thundered through the dark, wet, moonless night,’ wrote th
e Daily Mail,

  On the platforms by which it rushed could be seen groups of women watching and silent, many dressed in deep mourning. Many an upper window was open, and against the golden square of light were silhouetted clear cut and black the head and shoulders of some faithful watcher … In the London suburbs there were scores of homes with back doors flung wide, light flooding out and in the garden figures of men, women and children gazing at the great lighted train rushing past.

  At 9.20 the following morning – Armistice Day, 11 November 1920, the day chosen for the official dedication of the now permanent Cenotaph in Whitehall – a bearer party of Coldstream Guards entered the Cavell carriage at Victoria Station where the coffin of the Unknown Soldier had rested overnight. Drawn up outside was the gun carriage and six black horses to take him on his final journey to Westminster Abbey, and as the flag-draped coffin was lowered into position, the guns of the Royal Horse Artillery roared out their salute from Hyde Park and the armed services’ twelve senior officers took their place in a great funeral cortege of service detachments, mourners and massed bands. ‘Admirals Meux, Beatty, Jackson, Sturdee and Madden,’ – whatever its poetic inaccuracies, Ronald Blythe’s evocation of that day cannot be bettered,

  Field Marshals French, Haig, Methuen, Wilson … Generals Horne and Byng … Air Marshal Trenchard. The day was gentle and fair. The soot-encrusted buildings were rimmed in the gold sunlight and late leaves rustled in the gutters. It was curiously quiet everywhere, not so much silent as hushed and muted. Although the West End pavements were packed with a vast multitude it was a subtly different crowd than the authorities had seen before. What had happened was that this most stately public show was being observed with an intense private emotion. The dead man who had set out without a name, a voice, or a face only a few hours before was being invested with a hundred thousand likenesses.

  With the massed bands playing Chopin’s Funeral March, and to the sound of muffled drums, the gun carriage began its slow journey towards Constitution Hill, then eastwards along the Mall and through Webb’s Admiralty Arch into Trafalgar Square and Whitehall, where the King, the Royal Family and the country’s leaders were waiting at Lutyens’s Cenotaph.

  After the dedication of the Lutyens empty tomb and a two-minutes silence – a silence that was honoured across the country, even in prison cells and in the court-room dock – the cortege continued on the last short journey to the Abbey. Inside the west door a guard of a hundred holders of the Victoria Cross flanked the nave where, at its west end, the Unknown Warrior’s grave had been prepared. The service was brief and simple – ‘the most beautiful, the most touching and the most impressive … this island has ever seen’, The Times called it – and to the words of ‘Lead, Kindly Light’ the coffin, a crusader sword given by the King now resting on it, was lowered into the grave. ‘The reckless destruction of young life over four mad years and the platitudes which sought to justify it were momentarily engulfed by the tenderness flooding into the tomb of this most mysterious person,’ wrote Blythe. ‘The formal programme broke down into a great act of compassion and love … The authorities had made certain that it would be dignified; they never dreamt it would be overwhelming. They had intended to honour the average soldier and instead they had produced the perfect catharsis.’

  Blythe was right, it was a catharsis. Over two hundred thousand filed past the open grave that day, half a million within the month, and all superimposing their own image on this symbol of national grief. But where among all this outpouring compassion and love were Fabian Ware and the War Graves Commission, who for years had struggled with the Empire’s million dead? It is extraordinary that in the official history of the Imperial – then Commonwealth – War Graves Commission there is not a single mention of the burial of the Unknown Warrior, but then on the face of it a ceremony overseen by Sir Lionel Earle and the hated Office of Works, centred around a coffin designed by the Office of Works and holding a body exhumed against the stated trend of Commission policy, might seem the negation of everything their work stood for.

  It took the egotism of a Lutyens to see it all – Chasseurs, nineteen-gun salutes, destroyers, escorts, Abbey, King – as an elaborate Church conspiracy to steal his thunder at the unveiling of the Cenotaph, though he did have a point. There was, as he said, ‘some horror in Church circles’ at the flagrantly pagan classicism of his austerely elegant pylon, and if the tomb of the Unknown Warrior was not the deliberately contrived ‘rival shrine’ that he imagined, it spoke a different language and offered different consolations to the empty tomb he had given the nation.

  To the paranoid, in fact, every detail of the ceremonial trappings – the archaic Gothic script as opposed to the lucid War Graves Commission lettering, the ancient crusader sword instead of rifle and helmet, the numinous feel of the Abbey nave against the harsh, cold light of the public space, the sacred against the profane – might seem a calculated challenge and a year later the Dean himself came to add a certain substance to Lutyens’s suspicions. The grave had been originally closed on 18 November with a slab of dark Tournai limestone carrying almost the same inscription as the coffin, but for the first anniversary, Dean Ryle had it replaced with a new stone of black marble, inscribed in gold with a prolix dedication that makes one pine for Kipling, and five texts chosen by the Dean himself.

  If it was a deliberate provocation, he did not have long to await the backlash. ‘Very Rev. Sir’, the Principal of the Liverpool Hebrew Schools wrote to him on 22 November 1922,

  At the foot of the new stone over the Unknown Warrior’s grave in Westminster Abbey there is the line, ‘In Christ shall all be made alive’. Beneath the stone rests the body of a British Warrior unknown by name or rank. Unknown also was the faith of the Unknown Warrior. Heavy was the toll of Jewish life on the battlefields of France. In many Jewish homes today a missing son is mourned. The line, ‘In Christ shall all be made alive’ does not meet the spiritual destinies of both Jew and Gentile.

  Among the ‘unbounded wealth’ of the Bible, he insisted, it could not be hard to find a neutral text, but not even an appeal on behalf of mourners’ religious sensitivities was enough to move the Dean. ‘On a gravestone containing five texts,’ he replied, ‘it is not unreasonable that one of these should contain the Christian resurrection hope’ and besides – the Church Militant in full cry, not to be denied his victory – for all Mr Levey knew, the man ‘might have been a Moslem … or a Mormon’.

  It was the old argument in miniature, the ‘headstone versus cross’ in caricature form, and not for the first time their opponents made the Commissioners’ point for them rather better than they did themselves. The intemperance of Dean Ryle perfectly underlined the humanity and inclusiveness of the Commission’s stand and for anyone who could see beyond the trappings and accidents of ceremony, the burial of the Unknown Warrior advertised the debt that Britain and her Empire owed to the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission as nothing else could.

  A war that had started with The Times printing casualty lists of officers only had ended with a nameless, rank-less, classless soldier enshrined ‘among Kings’ in the ‘Empire’s parish church’, and for that Ware and his fellow Commissioners were largely to thank. And if Lutyens suspected sabotage Ware was astute enough to see the greater victory. Twenty-two years later, in the middle of a total war that claimed civilian and service casualties indiscriminately, he would write to another Dean of Westminster, proposing a new roll of honour for the Abbey. ‘The symbolic significance,’ he told the Dean, of ‘the admission of these civilian dead to the adjacency and companionship with the Unknown Soldier … would give a right inspiration’.

  ‘Adjacency’ and ‘companionship’ – these are not words anyone would use of France’s Unknown Warrior, exhumed from one of the nine battlefields that had taken the lives of 1,398,000 Frenchmen and buried in lonely pomp beneath the Arc de Triomphe on the same Armistice Day as Britain’s – but they are right. There had been something touchingly ‘domestic�
�� about the Abbey service for the Unknown Warrior – it was essentially a ‘family affair’ of Empire – and from behind their simple protective walls the Commission’s cemeteries exert the same emotional ‘tug’ of the familiar and the communal. The Unknown Warrior ‘belonged’, in different ways, to every person who filed past his open grave but he also ‘belonged’ to the country.

  The same is true of every gravestone that the Commission raised. Anyone who wants to know what the Great War did to people, what politicians, generals and nations could consciously and deliberately do to their own people, should go to Verdun, and peer through the grime-smeared portholes of Douaumont’s monstrous ossuary at the millions of fragments of shattered bones and skulls: anyone, though, who wants to know who those people were need only go to a British cemetery. Each headstone preserves an individuality – the ‘E. W. T’, the ‘W. J. C’, the ‘A. G. V’ whose memory and uniqueness Blunden yearned to rescue from the obliterating anonymity of death – but each makes a claim and recognises a debt. ‘He’ is the E. W. Tice who went to Christ’s Hospital with Blunden, and he is also an officer in the Royal Sussex Regiment. ‘He’ is the Wilfred Haeffner commemorated by his family – German-speaking intellectuals, models for E. M. Forster’s Schlegels, pilloried during the war for their German ancestry – in the stained glass of Hampstead’s parish church but he is also Lieutenant F. W. Haeffner of the Royal Artillery, killed on the seventh day of the Somme and buried in Cerisy-Gailly Military Cemetery in France.

  The ‘individual’ and the ‘collective’ – the great battleground of Ware’s life, the battleground around which swirled all the arguments and the bitterness of the Commission’s early years – nowhere do their rival claims come closer to being reconciled than in the grave of the Unknown Warrior. He is not the refutation of the Commission’s work but the fine point and justification of it. Between Ware’s Mobile Ambulance Unit and the Armistice Day service of 1920 there is as direct and unbroken a line of connection as there is between the unknown soldier of the Black Watch in the little garden near Armentières and the tomb in Westminster Abbey. He is what Ware spent his whole life fighting for.