Empires of the Dead

by David Crane

  I think it possible that they may not have distinguished the Red Cross at that distance … I have never been in such a scene of desolation – it was like nothing on earth but the pictures one saw in one’s childhood of the Last Day. The place was so ruined that they couldn’t recognise the streets and there was a minute when I thought that we should go round and round and never find our way. All the time we were going towards the guns! … We stopped at the remains of a corner to ask a man the way, but he wouldn’t stay long enough to do more than point down a street and then run off … We found the house, and a woman with two dear little children came up from the cellar, and crying her heart out told us the girl was dead.

  Ware was no more immune to the frisson of danger than his men – ‘the thought that [the shells] were meant for oneself brought rather a sporting element in to the thing’, he reported – but as an old newspaperman he also knew good copy when he saw it and was not going to be slow to pass it on. ‘The strong and able had been able to quit long before,’ he wrote of another rescue from among the shattered ruins of a nursing convent, proffering it with the suggestion that the Red Cross might think about exploiting the story for fundraising purposes,

  and these poor helpless, old souls, cared for so kindly by the Sisters of the Convent, alone remained perforce. Could any request to members of our Society be more fitting? Would not every member at once go forward and rejoice at having this opportunity?

  The utter desolation and destruction baffles description; let it suffice to explain that below were over fifty women of ages varying from 70 to 95 years – many bedridden for years and others too infirm to help themselves …

  Five dead were removed from this awful debris, others it was impossible to extricate. Of those who lived some had limbs shattered by the cruel missiles of a heartless enemy … all bearing an expression of awful terror, such a scene only seen on the field of war …

  It was 4 p.m. when we had finished our work at Ypres, but what cared members of the Red Cross for the incessant cannonading or for the constant and deafening explosion of bursting shells. We knew we were carrying out the work of some of those generous subscribers at home by making such use of their ambulances, and if any of them could have seen and understood the expressions of relief and gratitude in the faces of those we saved he would indeed have felt that his money had been well spent.

  A streak of genial cynicism in Ware and an unashamed gift for self-promotion make it easy to forget that they were only the accidental trappings of a deeply romantic attachment to France and her people. In the letters and memoirs of the British soldier one glimpses a very different world, but in the Panglossian France that Ware inhabited – a France in which everything was for the best even in the worst of all possible worlds – nothing is ever allowed to darken the sunlit landscape or shake the faith and love of his Paris youth.

  There are no defeatists in Ware’s France, no meanness, no ugliness, no deep-rooted suspicions, no resentment of Albion, no offending calvaries, no truculent farmers, no haggling women, no syphilis, none of the stock French characters with their ‘monkey’ language and monkey habits and monkey morals who fill the British Tommy’s memories of this time, but only a country of devoted doctors and tireless curés, of debonair cavalry generals and saintly bishops, of grateful faces, ‘delightful camaraderie’ and stoic courage in which none but the Hun is vile.

  The remarkable thing about Ware, though, was that he was one of the few men connected with the BEF in France with the charm and the language to turn this dream of France into something approaching reality. There is no reason to believe that the reports he sent home offer anything more than a highly subjective truth, but in these early months with the Mobile Unit, the only cloud on his horizon was one that had bubbled up on the other side of the Channel. ‘It is good work out here,’ he insisted in a letter to his old chief, Lord Milner, on 13 October,

  Of course we can be crabbed for working for the French only, but everybody so far who has come to crab has ended by begging to be allowed to join us and the search for the missing is going on.

  If only I had time to write a letter to The Times on this:- an extraordinarily fine French priest who I have met once or twice with the wounded & become friends with put his hands on my shoulder the other day as I was [showing] an English paper to one of my men for its prominent account of a football match, & said in an inexpressibly pained but friendly way ‘mais, mon commandant, ce n’est past le moment pour le football’. If only people at home could have seen the surroundings in which that was said, wounded & dying all around us, they would at least stop reporting their damned football.

  God protect us from ‘all the muddle and mischief which Satan finds for idle hands in England’, he complained again to Milner, and in letter after letter he returned to the same theme. ‘The British Red Cross has been directly or indirectly responsible for men working among the French, whose presence among them has I think done positive harm to the Allied cause,’ he lectured Lawley,

  Therefore it is absolutely essential that they should be carefully selected. Men of the proper sort are, as you know, extremely rare, and there are very few men who we could think really qualified to go off alone with a few cars uncontrolled and in a position to make their own arrangements and conduct negotiations with the French. Of the men who are not competent two extreme types have come under my notice … One, the man who speaking a little French complains of the food the French provide, and the French ways – and two, the man who speaks no more French, but adopts a patronising air towards the French and attempts to organise everything for them.

  It was all the more important for Ware to scotch these Little Englander attitudes because the unit’s searches were leading to another line of work for which the co-operation of the French was vital. In the first days of the war the Red Cross had set up a Wounded and Missing Department under Lord Robert Cecil, but with only a handful of volunteers to handle enquiries, no adequate database to cope with the soaring casualty figures and, as yet, no one like the archaeologist, traveller, alpinist and Middle East expert, Gertrude Bell to impose some system on the mounting chaos of letters, casualty lists and hospital returns, the oblivion that had been the historical fate of the dead British soldier in all previous wars looked well on the way to repeating itself.

  The casualties had been unimaginable in their scale – 16,200 officers and men killed by the end of 1914, 47,707 wounded, 16,746 missing or captured (by comparison, Wellington’s losses at Waterloo were 3,500) – and behind each of those numbers lay a personal history and a personal loss. ‘I shall never forget the scene at Boulogne,’ recalled Sir Lionel Earle, a future colleague and sparring partner of Ware’s, in France searching for news of his brother, a Grenadier officer last seen beside the Menin Road near Ypres, lying on the ground with a bullet through his head and one eye lying on his cheek. ‘Scores of Indian troops, sitting patiently along the wharf with bandages on their heads, arms, legs, and bodies, some soaked with blood, waiting for some hospital ship to take them away. Scores and scores of ambulance wagons, full of wounded, kept on entering the town …’

  There would be rumours one day that Earle’s brother was dead in Frankfurt, counter-rumours the next that he was ‘lying on the straw’ with a mass of German wounded in the Town Hall at Courtrai, and then ‘nothing more for some weeks’, continued Earle, all the bitterness and hatred as fresh after twenty-one years as if it had all happened the day before,

  when one day my sister-in-law received a letter unsigned, asking if she would go to a certain tabernacle in the East End at a certain hour and day, as there was news waiting her there. She came to consult me as to whether she ought to go or not, and I advised her to go, as it might be news about her husband.

  She went, and found this little tabernacle empty, when suddenly she saw a man, who looked like a foreign clergyman. She went up to him, and he handed her a note. This was a line from my brother, saying he was in hospital and suffering terribly in his head. This c
lergyman was a Swiss, and was walking one day in Brussels with a small grip in his hand, when a girl came up to him and asked if he was going home on a journey. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘to England.’ Upon which she slipped a note into his hand, addressed to my sister-in-law.

  My brother’s wounds were more severe, even than we had thought, as after the bullet had gone clean through his head, the regimental doctor was binding up his head, when the Germans surrounded them, blew the brains of the doctor, although unarmed and covered with Red Cross, all over my brother’s face, and the orderly was killed at close range by a rifle bullet, which after passing through the poor man’s stomach, passed all down the leg of my brother, infecting the whole leg with Bacillus coli. I expect my brother was spared, as probably the Germans thought that a colonel of the Guards might be of value as regards exchange of prisoners at some future date.

  Lionel Earle was lucky – as ultimately was his brother, if eight operations, gangrene, ‘the studied malevolence’ of his German doctors, stone deafness and partial blindness counts as lucky – because he could at least call in favours from Embassy officials and pre-war connections, but it would have been another story again for that orderly killed at his brother’s side. In these early months of the war, the Red Cross office had at least created card indexes of the officers admitted to base hospitals, but for the relatives of missing rank and file, obstructed on all sides by an army determined to hide actual casualty figures and keep Red Cross personnel away from the field hospitals, there was nothing but an interminable wait and the grim sense that nothing had changed in the century since the British Army had last fought in the Low Countries.

  It was partly in response to this growing crisis that Ware’s Mobile Unit first became involved in the work that would eventually lead to the creation of the Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC). From the early weeks of September his men had been searching the line of the British retreat from Mons and Le Cateau to the Marne, and it was a short step from sharing information with Cecil that might transform a ‘missing’ into a ‘wounded’ or ‘killed’ on the Red Cross lists, to a protective interest in the graves themselves. ‘The experience gained in the search for British wounded has helped the Unit in taking up another most useful piece of work,’ Ware wrote back to London – as ever, reporting to his masters after the event, ‘viz: the identification of places in which British killed have been hastily buried, and the placing of crosses on the spots thus identified, with inscriptions designed to preserve the rough records which in many cases are already in danger of becoming obliterated.’

  The arbitrary and ad hoc nature of this work assumed a more formal shape after a meeting with a Lieutenant Colonel Stewart, who was inspecting the Mobile Unit on behalf of the Red Cross. ‘It was while … visiting Bethune Cemetery,’ Ware recalled an encounter that has since become part of Imperial War Graves Commission lore,

  that [Stewart] informed me that the B.R.C.S. were prepared to provide funds necessary for replacing the rough, and often only pencilled, inscriptions on the crosses erected over graves with inscriptions of a more durable kind. Beginning in Bethune cemetery I immediately gave instructions for the inscriptions to be painted on the crosses over the graves there; but finding that, notwithstanding the best intentions, the local people employed frequently made mistakes we next secured stencils and my officers and men devoted their spare time when not engaged in the work of carrying wounded to stencilling the inscriptions themselves to certain crosses which were procured. The work rapidly developed, and the stencils were replaced by stamping machines providing inscriptions on metal tapes.

  In the area around the Aisne and Marne, the southernmost point of the Allied retreat in 1914, Cecil’s deputy Ian Malcolm was already carrying out similar searches, but it was Ware’s unit that made the decisive difference to the way that Britain’s dead were recorded. The overwhelming burden of its work still lay with the French army and ambulance duties, but whenever enemy movements allowed it, his handful of men would be out in the field, liaising with local civic and medical authorities, collecting identification plaques, painstakingly patching together scraps of information or ploughing through the mud after children eager to display some isolated grave.

  Sometimes the trail would lead to a single grave, sometimes a cluster or a mass burial and sometimes – it was odd what a different perspective grave-hunting gave a man – to disappointment. ‘I may add that we are not always rewarded for our muddy tramp,’ one of Ware’s team recalled in December, ‘as on more than one occasion, I have found at the end of it the grave of a German soldier and then I have felt inclined to box the wretched child’s ears until I notice that the cross has been erected by British troops as the inscription is in English.’

  The same element of uncertainty entered into the process of identification, where often only some chance initiative or faintly pencilled inscription on a roughly made cross stood between the dead and oblivion. ‘Another and very ingenious method of recording the names of fallen soldiers,’ the same searcher, a volunteer called Broadley recorded, ‘is by writing their names on a piece of paper and placing this in a bottle. I came across a bottle only a day or two ago with a list of thirty names of men of the Royal Scots killed in action, with a note of the name of the Chaplain (Revd. Gibbs) stating that he had officiated at the burial.’

  For a volunteer like Broadley, ‘the proud satisfaction of knowing that I had done some slight honour to one brave man who has died for his country’ was reward enough, but as Ware was always keen to point out, it could never have begun without the sympathy of a population that had already adopted the British dead as their own. ‘I feel sure that the graves in these back gardens will always be treated … as sacred property,’ Broadley reported after one hunt had taken him to a site newly planted with London Pride,

  This brings to mind an incident when I called at a farm near Meteren and a farmer showed me the graves of two nameless heroes of the Seaforth Highlanders which were in a field. He explained that he had the greatest difficulty in keeping the cows away and added with tears in his eyes that he would give all the money in the world if these brave fellows could have been buried in his back garden instead of a field close by.

  One of the enduring themes, in fact, running through the origins of the Imperial War Graves Commission is the generosity of the French state and people, and Ware was determined that nothing was going to threaten this. ‘With very few exceptions the graves which we have seen up to the present are beautifully made and kept,’ he reported again back to the chairman of the Joint War Committee, Arthur Stanley, anxious to make sure that no ingratitude was shown to a population ‘that have been so ready to take upon themselves the pious care’ of British burial plots.

  The personal interest will cause many relatives to hesitate after the war before removing them. In many cases the exact circumstances of death were witnessed by the villagers and are engraved on their memories. Here a woman will relate how she saw a dragoon, whose grave is in her orchard, step under a tree to pick an apple and how while he was in the act a shell took his head off; there a woman will tell you how she watched a lancer, buried close by, kneeling on the bridge and firing on the Germans until he fell.

  The other thing that sustained his searchers in their harrowing and often dangerous work – and another important thread in the IWGC’s history – was the evidence of what it meant to the fighting soldier. ‘I was endeavouring to erect a cross in a field,’ Broadley wrote, when the bitter cold of early December 1914 had made the earth ‘as hard as iron,

  and my work was not progressing very rapidly. Some ‘Tommies’ who were marching down the road … obtained leave to fall out and help me. With their assistance the cross was speedily placed in position and then, without a word they all sprang to attention and solemnly saluted the grave of their dead comrade-in-arms. It was a most impressive and touching sight.

  There is something in this vignette – something in its air of reverence, of innocence almost – that movi
ngly evokes a world that was disappearing even as Broadley described it. In the last two weeks of November 1914, he alone had located some three hundred graves in an area from Laventie to Steenvoorde, and yet this was still war and death on a scale that left room for all those human pieties and sensibilities that would sink in the mud and horror of the trenches.

  These would never entirely disappear – on the eve of the Somme, Sir Lionel Earle reassured The Weekly Dispatch’s readers that ‘our soldiers in the shell swept zones never tire of making reverent pilgrimages to the cemeteries where their dead comrades lie’ – but never again would the mores and social baggage of the pre-war world seem so real to men at the front.

  This was partly because those men were different, but it was also because the British Army itself had changed. In the first months of the fighting it was a far smaller and tighter entity than it later became, and even in 1915 a territorial like Captain Ian Mackay of the Cameron Highlanders, coming out to France for the first time, could hardly move behind the lines without stumbling into someone with whom he had been at school or danced an eightsome at the Northern Meeting.

  To officers like Mackay, the dead were not anonymous strangers but friends and estate workers with names and families: ‘Beauly and Portree boys’ with whom the Mackays had always historically gone to war; men called ‘Gray Buchanan a great Fettes pal of Ian Innes’, and Ian Innes himself; their graves places to visit, their funerals snatched moments of shared humanity in the din of war. ‘We had one poor fellow killed when walking along a road with a message some distance behind the front line,’ Mackay wrote home from Busnes in the winter of 1915,