by Peter Parker
The four sets of remains were placed in the corrugated-iron chapel at the cemetery of St-Pol-sur-Ternoise and each draped with the Union flag. Sentries were posted at the chapel doors and Brigadier-General Wyatt, accompanied by one of his staff, a Colonel Gell, selected one of the bodies at random. One story that had wide circulation was that the Brigadier-General was blindfolded, but this would have been both unnecessary and unbecoming to his exalted rank. Once the body had been chosen, it was placed in a plain coffin and, after an ecumenical (though Christian) service the following morning, was taken by field ambulance to Boulogne to lie in the chapelle ardente of the castle there. A French guard of honour stood beside the coffin that night, and the following morning a pair of British undertakers arrived, bringing with them a specially designed casket made of oak that had grown in the grounds of Hampton Court. It was bound with bands of studded wrought iron made in the foundries of Wales, and a crusader’s sword donated from the royal collection at Windsor was held in place on the lid by an iron shield on which was inscribed:
A British Warrior who fell in the Great War 1914–1918 for King and Country
The plain coffin was placed inside this elaborate box, which on the morning of 9 November was taken by horse-drawn hearse, through guards of honour and to the sound of tolling bells and bugle calls, to the quayside. There, saluted by Maréchal Foch, it was loaded on to the destroyer HMS Verdun, which would carry it across the Channel to Dover. The coffin stood on the deck, covered in wreaths and surrounded by a French guard of honour, as the ship moved slowly out of the harbour.
The sight of HMS Verdun emerging from the heavy fog that hung over the Channel as it reached Dover inspired one musical student to compose a tone poem on the subject. Lilian Elkington’s atmospheric Out of the Mist received its first performance at a student concert in Birmingham later that year. ‘The opening is quiet, with muted lower strings, as the ship feels her way through the murk,’ the composer wrote in a programme note. ‘After a pause mutes are removed, the air grows brighter, and the deep gloom upon men’s spirits is somewhat relieved … Gradually the style enlarges and becomes more elevated as larger views of the meaning of sacrifice calm the spirit.’ The final section of the work is marked double-forte ‘as with a burst of sad exultation the representative of the nameless thousands who have died in the common cause is brought out of the darkness to his own’. This description exactly captures the mood of the country when the Unknown Warrior came home. He was greeted at Dover with the nineteen-gun salute usually reserved for field marshals and then handed over by the French to a British honour guard, which accompanied the coffin to the railway station to complete the journey to London by special train. All along the route people gathered to watch the train pass, and assorted uniformed groups stood on station platforms to salute its by now famous, though of course still anonymous, passenger. Even larger crowds, many of them women in mourning, greeted the train when it arrived at Victoria Station, where the Unknown Warrior remained overnight.
Many of these people followed the coffin to Westminster Abbey on the morning of 11 November, tagging along behind the official escort. Draped with a Union flag that had been used by David Railton as an altar cloth at the front, on top of which were placed an infantryman’s helmet, belt and bayonet, the coffin had been loaded on to a gun carriage pulled by six black horses. Marching in front of the carriage were a firing party, and massed bands playing Chopin’s funeral march. Immediately behind came the twelve pall-bearers, selected from among the highest-ranking officers in the land: Earl Haig, Earl Beatty and Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard representing the army, navy and air force respectively, along with three other Admirals of the Fleet, three more generals and three more field marshals, including Sir John French who had commanded the British Expeditionary Force until relieved of his position in December 1915. These men were followed by representatives of the army, navy and air force, selected from all ranks, marching six abreast and all wearing black-crêpe armbands; then former servicemen, in mufti, marching four abreast. The procession made its slow way through the streets of the capital, which were lined with troops posted to hold back the mourners who, dressed in black, thronged the pavements and fell silent as the gun carriage passed.
Eventually the procession turned into Whitehall, where the new Cenotaph was concealed under huge Union flags. Although the proceedings had a more military flavour than those on Armistice Day the previous year, the focus remained on those who mourned rather than on those who had fought and survived. A group of unemployed ex-servicemen had even been denied permission to join the funeral procession, perhaps as a result of the various demonstrations, some of them violent, in which many out-of-work veterans had participated during the two years since the war ended. Apart from a specially allocated block where 130 ‘Distinguished Personages’ waited, the pavements of Whitehall nearest the Cenotaph had been reserved for the ‘Bereaved’, selected by ballot and guarded by a line of servicemen from all three forces. With ten minutes to go to the eleventh hour, the gun carriage stopped beside Lutyens’ shrouded monument so that the King, in military uniform, could place a wreath upon the coffin, salute and retire. A choir arrayed on either side of the entrance to the Home Office building directly opposite the Cenotaph sang the hymn ‘Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past’, then the Archbishop of Canterbury said the Lord’s Prayer. On the first stroke of eleven, the King stepped forward again to unveil the Cenotaph. There followed a two minutes’ silence that was supposedly observed throughout the entire British Empire – though it seems unlikely that those tilling fields or hawking goods under a hot afternoon sun in some of the remoter corners of the Empire could even have known what was taking place in the tiny island kingdom that ruled them, let alone participated in this arcane ceremony. In most countries that had fought in the war, however, silence was observed. A notable exception was the United States, where Armistice Day was largely ignored. A year later the Americans would exhume and bury their own Unknown Soldier and mark 11 November as Veterans Day, but in 1920 people went about their normal business without interruption. Throughout Britain, however, the silence that reigned was as remarkable in its way as the one that fell across the battlefields of France and Belgium exactly two years earlier. At the Cenotaph, the end of the two minutes was signalled by eight buglers playing the Last Post, after which the King and other dignitaries placed wreaths at the foot of Lutyens’ empty tomb, then followed the gun carriage to Westminster Abbey, from the tower of which a single bell tolled.
The nave of the Abbey was lined by 100 men who had been awarded the VC and other high military honours, but following a press campaign and a personal plea from Queen Mary the majority of the public invited to attend the service were bereaved women who had lost either a husband or a son, or (as was all too often the case) both. The Dean of Westminster conducted the brief service, during which the casket of the Unknown Warrior was lowered into the tomb excavated for it in the floor of the nave just inside the West Door. Like the Cenotaph, the grave had been sited where people were obliged to take notice of it, in the middle of a thoroughfare: anyone entering the Abbey would have to step round it. In a reversal of Rupert Brooke’s famous notion of ‘some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England’ because a British soldier was buried there, quantities of earth had been imported from the battlefields so that the Unknown Warrior would lie in the French and Belgian soil over which he had fought.
Once the service was over and the congregation had stepped out into the late morning, the filled grave was covered with Railton’s flag and surrounded by Flanders poppies and wooden railings to protect it from the thousands of people who would visit the Abbey to pay their respects. Here, at last, veterans were given or had somehow achieved priority, and the first people to enter the Abbey after the service had ended were disabled former servicemen, along with their unemployed comrades who had been denied a place in the funeral procession. By 11 p.m., when, an hour later than originally planned, the Abbey doors were closed f
or the night, some 40,000 people had filed past the grave, round which a guard of honour with bowed heads and reversed rifles kept constant vigil. It was clear that the three days originally allotted for the people to pay their respects before the tomb was properly sealed would be entirely inadequate. Huge queues formed long before the Abbey opened again the following morning, and there were similarly long lines of people at the Cenotaph, where it was estimated that 100,000 wreaths were laid within three days of its unveiling. From Trafalgar Square to Parliament Square, people in their thousands waited patiently and moved slowly forward, their places immediately filled as others joined the queues. They came from all over the country, and the queues grew even longer as the time approached for the Abbey to be closed so that a temporary slab could be placed over the tomb. Even the Dean’s revised timetable could not accommodate those taking part in what had been dubbed ‘the Great Pilgrimage’, and it was not until 4 p.m. on Thursday, 18 November, a week after the funeral, that the doors of the Abbey were finally closed so that the tomb could be properly sealed. Once this was done, the pilgrimage continued: when the Abbey opened again the queues were almost as long as they had been in the week following Armistice Day.
‘Wonderful to think of this unknown boy, or man, lying here with our kings, our captains, our prophets, and our priests,’ one commentator wrote. ‘His fame is greater, too; he is Everyman who died in the war. No matter how many mothers believe that he is theirs, they are right; they are all of them right – for he is every mother’s son who did not come home from France.’ This may have been the intention, but everyone knew that the body was not that of any of the thousands who had been lost at sea or in theatres of war other than the Western Front. Even those who were not privy to the negotiations that took place between the military and ecclesiastical authorities about selecting the Unknown Warrior must have realised that the chances that the person they had lost was now lying among the most illustrious of the land were slender. There was also the question of just how representative of the Empire’s million dead the Warrior really was. Although no one actually quite voiced it, the general assumption was that this ‘British Warrior’ was of pure Christian descent. Some idea of the sort of person many imagined he might be was given by Arthur Machen (the creator of the ‘Angels of Mons’ myth) writing in the London Evening News on the day of the funeral. In an article he fancifully called ‘Vision in the Abbey: The Little Boy Who Came to the King by Way of Great Tribulation’, Machen imagined a boy playing in an idealised English countryside. ‘I see the little child quite clearly,’ he insisted, ‘and yet I cannot make out how he is dressed. For all I can see he may be the squire’s boy, or the parson’s, or the cottager’s son from that old whitewashed, sixteenth-century cottage which shines so in the sunlight. Or I am not quite sure that he is not a town-lad come to stay with relations in the country, so that he might know how sweet the air may be.’ What this little boy was clearly not was a member of the teeming immigrant communities of the poor inner cities, many of whom fought and died for their country. He nevertheless grows up, goes to war, is killed, and becomes the Unknown Warrior.
A suspicion that the authorities at any rate did not really believe that the person they had buried in Westminster Abbey, that Christian repository of the great and the good of the land, could be anything other than a son of the Church of England was confirmed when the following year S.I. Levy, Principal of the Liverpool Hebrew Schools, wrote a letter to Dean Ryle pointing out that the tombstone had carved on it the line ‘In Christ shall all be made alive’. As Mr Levy politely pointed out, the religion of the Unknown Warrior was as much a mystery as his identity. Many Jews, he reminded the Dean, had fought and died in the war and were being mourned in Jewish homes across the land. ‘Among the unbounded wealth of biblical inspiration a line could have been selected which would not have offended the living religious susceptibilities of the unknown warrior, whatever his faith may have been,’ Mr Levy suggested, whereas the chosen line did ‘not meet the spiritual destinies of both Jew and Gentile’. Dean Ryle was not accustomed to being challenged and replied testily that given that the Unknown Warrior was lying in a Christian church it seemed only reasonable that one of the five texts selected for his tombstone should carry a Christian message. For all he knew, the Dean added, the Unknown Warrior might even have been a Muslim: ‘We cannot hope to please everyone.’
Exactly who was lying in Westminster Abbey did not in the end greatly matter. The Unknown Warrior was intended as a symbol and largely accepted as one. The element of uncertainty over his identity may, however, explain the otherwise odd circumstance that even after all the pomp and ceremony that surrounded the Unknown Warrior’s burial, it was an empty tomb which remained the main focus of a grieving nation. People continued to lay huge numbers of wreaths at the Cenotaph every week throughout the twelve months following the funeral. These numbers swelled at Christmas, which was unseasonably mild in 1920, and The Times reported that on Boxing Day ‘There were more people there […] than on any day since the Great Pilgrimage came to an end. The base was nearly surrounded by wreaths of evergreen and holly, and the pile reached nearly to the top of the pedestal.’ Even a year later on 11 November 1921, when the Unknown Warrior’s temporary grave slab was replaced by a permanent one of Belgian marble inlaid with brass lettering made from melted-down bullet casings gathered from the battlefields, The Times insisted that ‘It was surely at the Cenotaph that the nation’s undying gratitude to its glorious dead found […] its fullest and most complete expression’. The heavens appeared to agree. Although a mist ‘obscured the vista’ on this ‘perfect November morning’, ‘immediately over the Cenotaph the sky was pure pale blue’.
The commemoration of the dead had certainly gripped the country’s collective imagination, but many of those who had survived the war felt themselves forgotten. Among those laying wreaths that November morning was a delegation of ex-servicemen and their families from Poplar in the East End of London. Some of these wreaths bore inscriptions which ‘the police were obliged to censor as being likely to be objectionable to those who mourned at the shrine’. Among the inscriptions deemed offensive were ‘To the dead victims of Capitalism from the living victims of Capitalism’ and ‘To the dead not forgotten from the living forgotten’. While some of the veterans wore their war decorations, one had pinned to his coat the pawn ticket for which he had exchanged his medals.
TWO
A Nation Remembers? 1921–1939
Have you forgotten yet? …
For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days …
SIEGFRIED SASSOON, ‘Aftermath’
While veterans who faced poverty and unemployment often complained that they had been forgotten, Britain continued to lavish money and attention upon preserving the memory of those who had died. Many felt that in commemorating the dead the nation was neglecting to fulfil its promises and obligations to those who had survived. By the time the Unknown Warrior had been laid to rest in Westminster Abbey, the Imperial War Graves Commission had made considerable progress in the enormous job of providing permanent burial sites for his comrades left behind in Flanders and even farther afield. Most countries in which the war had been fought had followed France’s generous lead in handing over land in perpetuity to the IWGC, which meant that cemeteries could now be constructed in Belgium, Italy, Greece, Iraq, Palestine and Egypt. Similar arrangements would be made with Germany and Turkey.
Once the land was acquired, it was necessary to come to some decision about how the dead should be commemorated. At the invitation of Fabian Ware, Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker (with whom Lutyens had designed a new capital of British India in Delhi before the war) had visited the battlefields in July 1917. Lutyens left a wonderfully touching account of what he found in France:
The grave-yards, haphazard from the needs of so much to do and so little time for thought. And then a ribbon of isolated graves like a milky way across miles of country where men were tucked in wh
ere they fell. Ribbons of little crosses each touching each across a cemetery, set in a wilderness of annuals and where one sort of flower is grown the effect is charming, easy and oh so pathetic. One thinks for the moment no other monument is needed. Evanescent but for the moment almost perfect and how misleading to surmise in this emotion and how some love to sermonise. But the only monument can be one in which the endeavour is sincere to make such a monument permanent – a solid ball of bronze!
Bronze balls were not what Ware had in mind. He subsequently asked Sir Frederick Kenyon, Director of the British Museum, to become an adviser to the Commission. After visiting France and Belgium himself, Kenyon submitted a report laying out the principles upon which he believed the cemeteries should be created. They should be surrounded by low walls, within which uniform headstones would mark individual graves arranged without regard for rank or status. In death all men would be equal, officers and their men lying as they had fought, side by side, the headstones merely recording rank, name, regiment, date of death, and age if known. The details, however, were left to Lutyens and Baker, who did not always agree about the design of the cemeteries. Lutyens wanted to avoid all religious symbolism and so came up with the Stone of Remembrance, a sort of non-denominational altar, or (as he described it) a ‘great fair stone of fine proportions’, raised on a shallow flight of broad steps. Inscribed on the stone were some biblically derived but religiously neutral words chosen by Kipling: ‘Their Name Liveth For Evermore’. The more traditionally inclined Baker felt that something specifically Christian and military was called for and designed a huge stone Cross of Sacrifice standing on an octagonal base and faced with a downward-pointing bronze sword. In the event, both designs were used, the Stone featuring in every cemetery containing over four hundred graves, the Cross in all but the smallest plots. In most cases the headstones would be set into concrete beams, buried invisibly beneath the earth, which would keep them both upright and aligned in proper military order.
