Empires of the Dead

by David Crane

  The new, imperial status of Ware’s organisation was most obviously reflected in his decision, in May 1916, to move the Directorate’s headquarters from France to St James’s Square in London, but the focus and model for all its work remained the Western Front. The French government had laid down the legal framework for the burial of British and Belgian soldiers in 1915, and within days of its final ratification Macready had issued in General Routine Orders his instructions for how this was to be carried out on the ground. Most of these regulations were of a purely administrative nature – the role of ‘A Branch’ in choosing sites, the number of burial plots to each corps, the consultation process with the Directorate officers, additional grounds for casualty clearing and field ambulance centres, map scales, registration procedures, legal formalities, the precise dimensions and spacing of graves (‘9" to 12" apart and a path not exceeding 3' in width … between the rows of graves’) – but shining through the thick fog of acronyms and echelons and duplicates and interminable forms is the old ‘fieldcraft’ of Ware’s Mobile Ambulance Unit days. ‘(4) At the time of burial, “Instructions to Chaplains”,’ read:

  The grave must be marked in such a way as to ensure identification. Chaplains are responsible that, even in cases when the unit proposes to erect a cross, a grave is properly marked by other means until this is done. Pegs with labels attached are supplied by the Graves Registration Units for the purpose.

  The lessons of the early days had been well learned. Particulars were to be written on the label in ‘hard-black lead’ and not with indelible pencil, the pegs were to be placed at forty-five degrees to the grave, the labels on the underside protected from the weather. ‘In special cases where the eventual erection of crosses may be difficult or delayed,’

  a record written with hard-black lead pencil is, in addition, to be placed in a tin or bottle (neck downwards) half-buried in the ground. Where one tin or bottle is necessarily used to mark several graves, the record enclosed must be so marked as to ensure the proper identification of each grave …

  In authorised cemeteries, numbered pegs are now being placed to show where graves are to be dug. These numbers should be shown on the burial returns as graves are used.

  Under no circumstances are crosses erected or registered by the Graves Registration Units to be removed or altered without authority from the DGR&E.

  It was, however, in matters of general policy and philosophy that Ware’s influence was most clearly needed because this was not just a European but a global war. It was already clear from that first meeting with imperial representatives that even the largely white and Christian Dominions had their own aspirations, but what of the Indian forces in the field? What of their Muslim troops? Or Sikh? Or Indian Christians? Or Egyptian Copts? Or the Chinese Labour Corps? Or the South African native troops? Or the men of the British West Indies?

  They had ‘experts’ to call on for advice – though the history of the British Empire would not suggest that was an infallible assistance – but if there is anything in the slow evolution of the old Mobile Unit into the Commonwealth War Graves Commission that chimes with modern sensibilities it is the way in which Ware answered these questions. There is the occasional use of language that highlights the inevitable gulf that separates his world from ours, and yet it is difficult to imagine that anyone operating within the cultural assumptions of the age could have come up with policies that offered so few hostages to the future: ‘On no account should [Egyptian] Mohammedans be buried in Christian consecrated ground’ … ‘Mohammedan’ graves were to be ‘at least 6 feet deep’ …; their burial grounds, wherever possible, should be ‘dug by Egyptian labour’ …; a small stone either end of the grave to be allowed, but no writing … Copts should be placed in coffins in Christian burial grounds and a modified service read at the chaplain’s direction … Jewish graves were to be marked with a double triangle on a stake. ‘Under no circumstances should a cross be erected over an Indian Grave …’

  Within the all-embracing ambition that graves should be sited ‘facing the enemy’ to the east – a stipulation that conveniently satisfied religious as well as military sensibilities – the permutations were daunting and the punctilio and desire to respect difference faultless. ‘The ideal site to secure repose and drive away evil spirits,’ Ware’s revised 1918 instructions for the burial of Chinese dead, explains,

  is on sloping ground with a stream below, or gully down which water always or occasionally passes. The grave should not be parallel to the north, south, east or west. This is especially important to Chinese Mohammedans. It should be about 4ft deep, with the head towards the hill and the feet towards the water. A mound of earth about 2ft high is piled over the grave … Whenever possible the friends of the deceased should be allowed access to the corpse, and should be allowed to handle it, as they like to dress it and show marks of respect.

  There were limits to cultural sympathies – a strict ban, for instance, on firing parties or European troops at the burials of South African natives – and a wartime speech from General Smuts offers a sobering reminder of the realities that lay behind even the most inclusive vision of Empire. ‘We were not aware of the great military value of the natives until this war,’ the old Boer poacher turned imperial gamekeeper told a meeting at London’s Savoy that was chaired by Lord Selborne, Milner’s successor in South Africa,

  This war has been an eye-opener in many new directions. It will be a serious question for the statesmen of the Empire and Europe whether they are going to allow a state of affairs like that to be possible, and to become a menace not just to Africa, but perhaps to Europe itself. I hope that one of the results of this war will be some arrangement or convention among the nations interested in Central Africa by which the military training of natives in that area will be prevented, as we have prevented it in South Africa. It can well be foreseen that armies may be trained there, which under proper leadership might prove a danger to civilisation itself.

  There was also the problem of dealing with a professional army that was finding its practices and assumptions coming under the sustained scrutiny of a civilian world. ‘In April, 1916, I was appointed by the War Cabinet to be a member of an International War Graves Committee,’ Sir Lionel Earle later wrote, recalling an inspection visit of the cemeteries near Albert,fn4

  In some of the cemeteries I noticed two or three isolated graves with wooden crosses with nothing on them. I asked what they were, and whether they were German soldiers; I was told not to ask any questions. I insisted on knowing, and was informed that they were graves of men who had paid the penalty for cowardice in the field. This segregation of graves worried me, as I felt that the men had paid the penalty for their weakness, which may be largely physical, and that it was absolutely wrong to brand them for all time, inflicting pain on their relatives.

  I do not think my views were accepted by our military companions, so I submitted a minute on the subject to the War Cabinet, and they endorsed my view, so this custom was abolished and the graves merged with the others.

  The Army was not going to fade away tamely – the inscription on the graves of executed men was to be marked ‘DIED’ instead of ‘KILLED IN ACTION’ or ‘DIED OF WOUNDS’ – but the old order was inevitably changing and the face of the cemeteries changing with it. In 1915 the Red Cross had offered funds for some simple gardening work to begin, and in the early part of 1916, Arthur Hill, the assistant director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, went on a tour of the Western Front cemeteries at Ware’s request to advise on a systematic programme of planting.

  As the work of the Directorate expanded to other theatres – Palestine, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Salonika, Gallipoli, Italy – the challenges would only grow more acute and various; even within the area defined by the British-held sector of the Western Front there were issues enough. The pressure from the Dominions for native plants remained Hill’s principal concern, but in the cold climate of northern France, with loam on top of chalk and the thin topsoil often b
uried under the impact of exploding shells, there was a limit to what could be done. ‘South Africa,’ Hill later lamented, ‘except for annuals, can have no permanent commemorative plant; nor alas! can we show our respect, by any floral emblem, to our West Indian, West African, Malayan and other Colonial soldiers who have fought and died in France.’

  There were also interminable French regulations governing the distance of trees and hedges from cemetery borders and the size of paths and grave plots to curb Hill’s ambitions, but with maple seeds from Canada, Tasmanian Eucalyptus and New Zealand shrubs arriving at Kew the first real progress was made. In his original tour of France, Arthur Hill had inspected thirty-seven different cemeteries, and over the next two years this number swelled to almost two hundred with four nurseries and an expanding staff of officers, gardeners and the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps volunteers to service them.

  It was all very well issuing detailed instructions to gravediggers to reserve the topsoil, or talk of planting wattlefn5 among the whitening bones at Gallipoli, though, because the horrors of 1916 can have left no one in doubt that the real work would have to wait. By the beginning of that summer Ware’s men had already registered more than 50,000 graves, but from that first misty July morning on the Somme, when the opening waves of Kitchener’s raw, un-blooded New Army went over the top for the first (and for 20,000 of them, the last) time, that figure would come to seem almost nothing.

  There were 58,000 British casualties on that first day – 415,000 killed, wounded or missing over the next four and a half months, one and a quarter million Allied and enemy in all. It was not just the scale of death, but the nature of it that seemed to make a mockery of everything Ware’s organisation stood for. ‘Beyond the area called on the map Thiepval,’ the poet Edmund Blunden, a future literary advisor to the IWGC, wrote of a battlefield that had obliterated not just the individuality of the fighting man but his very physical integrity,

  on the map a trench called St Martin’s led forward; unhappy he who got into it! It was blasted out by intense bombardment into a broad shapeless gorge, and pools of mortar-like mud filled most of it. A few duckboards lay half submerged along the parapet, and these were perforce used by our companies, and calculatingly and fiercely shelled at moments by the enemy. The wooden track ended, and then the men fought their way on through the gluey morass, until not one nor two were reduced to tears and impotent wild cries to God. They were not yet at the worst of their duty, for the Schwaben Redoubt ahead was an almost obliterated cocoon of trenches in which mud, and death, and life were much the same thing – and there, the deep dugouts, which faced the German guns, were cancerous with torn bodies, and to pass an entrance was to gulp poison; in one place a corpse had apparently been thrust in to stop up a doorway’s dangerous displacement, and an arm swung stupidly. Men of the next battalion were found in mud up to the armpits, and their fate was not spoken of; those who found them could not get them out. The whole zone was a corpse, and the mud itself mortified.

  It was a world where the dead had precious little claim on the living. ‘Crossing the Ancre again …,’ recalled Blunden,

  and climbing the dirty little road over the steep bank, one immediately entered the land of despair. Bodies, bodies and their useless gear heaped the gross waste ground. The shell-holes were mostly small lakes of what was no doubt merely rusty water, but had a red and foul semblance of blood … Of the dead, one was conspicuous. He was a Scottish soldier, and was kneeling, facing east, so that one could scarcely credit death in him; he was at some little distance from the usual tracks, and no one had much time in Thiepval just then for sight-seeing, or burying. Death could not kneel so, I thought, and approaching I ascertained with a sudden shrivelling of spirit that Death could and did.

  The sustained sacrifice of the offensive over more than four months, the range and destructiveness of the artillery, the capture and recapture of enemy positions, all made it often impossible to observe prescribed burial regulations. In the middle of the battle, an Army Order introduced, on Ware’s initiative, a new double identity disc made of pressed fibre. But when a shell could obliterate all trace of a man’s existence even the most scrupulous search for regimental badges, tabs, discs, chaplain’s and unit returns or – most fantastic of all – ‘the measurements and description of the body’, was impotent to scratch even the surface of the problem.fn6

  In the face of this destructive power – and it was not just bodies and graves that were obliterated, but the landscape itself, with all those defining features, natural and man-made, that Ware’s men relied on in their searches – there seems something simultaneously heroic and impossible in the dogged labours of the DGR&E. Over the nine months that followed the first day of the Somme, the Directorate added another 100,000 graves to its register, but one look at the great Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme with its 72,000 names is reminder enough that Ware’s work would, in the future, be as much with those who could not be identified as those who could.

  Third Ypres in 1917 and the German Spring Offensive of 1918 would make things only worse, but with corpses still littering the Somme battlefield almost a year after the offensive had begun, Ware’s resources were already stretched to the limit. The responsibility for burial lay with the Army and not the Graves Directorate, but as the conduit between relatives and the Army and the official ‘face’ of death – ‘Lord Wargraves’ as Ware was irreverently nicknamed – he increasingly took the full brunt of a growing public resentment. ‘We are on the verge over here of serious trouble about the number of bodies lying out still unburied on the Somme battlefields,’ he wrote almost a year to the day after the start of the battle.

  The soldiers returning wounded or on leave to England are complaining bitterly about it and the War Office has already received letters on the subject. There is every reason to expect that the question may be raised in Parliament any day and I do not see what defence the Government could offer for the neglect of the Army in the Field in this connection. We of course have no responsibility in the matter but I feel a lot of the good impression our work has created will be undone if a public scandal should arise in regard to this and Colonel Whitehead will be the first to appreciate that this kind of scandal will be used immediately and with great effect by the pacifists, and by others who are endeavouring to assist the enemy by obstructing the proper prosecution of the war.

  The use of ‘over here’ to mean Britain and not France shows a shift in Ware’s perspective since the early months of the war. While he had been based with the Army in the field he could preserve some kind of distance from domestic opinion but ensconced in Winchester House, St James’s Square, and inundated with queries and demands from distraught relatives, there was no escaping. ‘I am held up on my work,’ an overstretched and understaffed Ware complained to Macready, also now back in London as Adjutant General to the Forces,

  My staff is unable to deal with [letters] and cannot offer relatives the true explanation of my inability to answer many of their enquiries. It is small satisfaction in connection with work of this kind to think that this most regrettable state of affairs is not due to any lack of foresight on my part but is entirely due to the action of the Treasury.fn7

  It was little use, either, expounding the virtues of ‘attrition’ to this Britain or telling it that the Somme had relieved pressure on their French allies or on the Eastern Front; the loss was too stark and immediate for that. ‘The field of Gommecourt is heaped with the bodies of Londoners,’ the future Poet Laureate John Masefield wrote, evoking the Britain of cities, towns, villages and farms that had to face up to this loss,

  The London Scottish lie at the Sixteen Poplars; the Yorkshires are outside Serre; the Warwickshires lie in Serre itself; all the great hill of the Hawthorn Ridge is littered with Middlesex; the Irish are at Hamel, the Kents on the Schwaben, and the Wilts and Dorset on the Leipzig. Men of all the towns and counties of England, Wales and Scotland lie scattered among the slopes from Ovillers to Maricou
rt. English dead pave the road to La Boiselle, the Welsh and Scotch are in Mametz. In gullies and sheltered places, where wounded could be brought during the fighting, there are little towns of dead in all these places.

  It is worth remembering this perspective, because here was the Britain – not forgetting the Newfoundland that left its dead at Beaumont-Hamel, the South Africa at Delville Wood or Australia at Pozières – to which Ware would have to answer for the rest of his working life. Over the last two years of the war the workload of the Graves Directorate would increase massively, but Ware’s real battles from now on were to be on the home front. He had won over the Army; the harder task, now, was to win over the public.

  FIVE

  The Imperial War Graves Commission

  In the spring of 1917, the old Mobile Ambulance Unit that had gone to France in the September of 1914 began the penultimate and decisive step in its metamorphosis into the modern Commonwealth War Graves Commission. The National Committee for the Care of Soldiers’ Graves had served its purpose well enough, but with ‘the great expansion and development of the work of the Directorate’, Ware recalled in his first General Report on the origins of the new organisation, ‘it was felt that … the organisation of the National Committee needed to be brought into line with [its] greatly extended scope … and to be placed on a permanent basis’.

  The initiative for the new body had formally come from the Prince of Wales, as president of the National Committee, Ware explained, and in March 1917 the Prince had submitted a memorandum to the Prime Minister requesting that the question should be raised at the forthcoming Imperial War Conference. At the conference in April the ‘matter accordingly formed one of the chief subjects of the deliberations’, and on 13 April a resolution was passed ‘praying His Majesty to grant a Royal Charter for the constitution of an Imperial War Graves Commission’, with the power to maintain the graves of those fallen in the war, to acquire land for new burial places, ‘and to erect permanent memorials in the cemeteries and elsewhere. The Royal Charter was granted on the 21st May, 1917, and the Imperial War Graves Commission was duly constituted thereunder.’