Empires of the Dead
Page 11
There were the most basic questions to be answered. Would every grave be separately identified? Would each have its own headstone? Would that headstone be in the form of plain stone or cross? What kind of permanent memorials should there be in the cemeteries? What kind of character should those cemeteries aim at? Kenyon cast his net wide for answers. ‘I have also had opportunities, both abroad and at home, of consulting representatives of the principal interests involved,’ he continued,
the Army, the relatives of the fallen, the religious denominations, and the artists and others whose judgment may be of value in a work demanding imagination and taste and good feeling … Among others, I have made a point of obtaining opinions from those who are qualified to speak for India and the Dominions which have sent so many of their sons to lie in the graves which for generations to come will mark the line of our front in France and Flanders.
Kenyon and the Commission would be absolutely punctilious in their respect for Hindu or Muslim practices, but his first readers cannot have got far into his report before feeling that the public at home might get a rather more cavalier treatment. There is no reason to think that he was anything other than sincere in these consultations, but implicit in that telling category – ‘those whose judgment may be of value’ – is a very Ware-like assumption that when it came to matters of taste and feeling, the public were better off being told what to do by their betters than left to their own unlettered devices.
Kenyon was justly insistent in his report that all must be treated the same – as he and Ware would point out repeatedly, only the rich would be able to erect their monuments if they were allowed – but inside the great wooden horse called ‘Equality’ a very different standard was being smuggled. On the matter of individual graves, he continued his urbane exposition of the Commission’s thinking:
It was felt that the provision of monuments could not be left to individual initiative. In a few cases, where money and good taste were not wanting, a satisfactory result would be obtained, in the sense that a fine individual monument would be erected. In the large majority of cases either no monument would be erected, or it would be poor in quality; and the total result would be one of inequality, haphazard and disorder. The cemetery would become a collection of individual memorials, a few good, but many bad, and with a total want of congruity and uniformity.
The argument has drifted a long way from mere ‘equality’ – this was now about quality, taste and artistic judgment – but there would be no going back and no softening of the Commission’s stance. ‘It is necessary to face the fact that this decision has given pain in some quarters,’ Kenyon admitted, ‘yet it is hoped’ that relatives who had planned to erect their own memorials,
will realize that they are asked to join in an action of even higher significance. The sacrifice of the individual is a great idea and worthy of commemoration; but the community of sacrifice, the service of a common cause, the comradeship of arms which has brought together men of all ranks and grades – these are greater ideas, which should be commemorated in those cemeteries where they lie together, the representatives of their country in the lands in which they served. The place for the individual memorial is at home.
It was a moot point even then whether the mindless slaughter of more than a million men was a ‘great idea worthy of commemoration’, however the Commission was designed as an agent of imperial will and not a critic of it. In the years after the Armistice it would stumble upon the idea that there could be no more eloquent argument against war than its cemeteries, but this was an afterthought that had no place in Kenyon’s original report. ‘My endeavour,’ he proudly wrote – determined to maintain the high moral ground at a moment when the chivalrous idealism of 1914 had come to seem a very tarnished thing,
has been to arrive at a result which will, so far as may be, satisfy the feelings of relatives and comrades of those who lie in these cemeteries; which will represent the soldierly spirit and discipline in which they fought and fell: which will typify the Army to which they belonged; which will give expression to those deeper emotions, of regimental comradeship, of service to their Army, their King, their country and their God, which underlay (perhaps often unconsciously) their sacrifice of themselves for the cause in which they fought, and which in ages to come will be a dignified memorial, worthy of the nation and the men who gave their lives for it, in the lands of the Allies with whom and for whom they fought.
It would be hard to guess from this that Kenyon’s ‘cause’ and Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘crime against humanity’ were one and the same thing, but these were military cemeteries and if they were never intended to be triumphalist they were never going to be apologetic. One of the possibilities he examined would have given relatives something closer to a memorial park than a cemetery, but for Kenyon anything that obscured or ‘fudged’ their military identity was a betrayal of the men who lay there. The cemeteries, he recommended, should have a central monument or monuments and,
be marked by rows of headstones of uniform height and width … Although it is not desired that our war cemeteries should be gloomy places, it is right that the fact that they are cemeteries, containing the bodies of hundreds and thousands of men who have given their lives for their country, should be evident at first sight, and should be constantly present to the minds of those who pass by or who visit them.
Here essentially was Lutyens’s vision: identical headstones 2 feet 6 inches by 1 foot 3 in size, arranged in the ‘ordered ranks … of a battalion on parade’, facing east towards the enemy (ready to spring up and face him again at the Last Trump in the less forgiving interpretations), complete with name, rank, date of death and regimental insignia, and all that was required was the refinement of detail. ‘There is some difference of opinion as to whether leave should be given to relatives to add anything further,’ he added with the de haut en bas air of a man more used to dealing with Greek papyri than with the Kensal Green Cemetery School of Poetry,
It is clearly undesirable to allow free scope for the effusions of the mortuary mason, the sentimental versifier, or the crank; nor can space be given for a lengthy epitaph. On the other hand it would give satisfaction in many individual instances to be allowed to add an appropriate text or prayer or words of dedication; and notably it is certain that in the case of members of the Roman Catholic communion there would be a strong desire to place a customary formula beneath the name. I am inclined, therefore, to recommend that leave should be given for a short inscription of not more than three lines, to be added on the application of the next-of-kin, or other person or organisation … and at the cost of the applicant [a cost never levied]; but that the inscription must be of the nature of a text or prayer, and that the Commission shall have absolute power of rejection or acceptance.
With the question of the graves settled, Kenyon turned to the question of ‘the central monument’ for the cemeteries and here there had to be compromise. In his heart he probably agreed with Ware that Lutyens’s ‘Great Stone’ was the answer, but whatever else it might symbolise (and the comic ‘Stoneology’ that Lutyens scrawled down for Barrie – ‘War Stone’, ‘Stone of Peace’, ‘Stone of Watching’, ‘Stone of Sleep’ … forty-odd names in all shows just how flexible a concept it was) the one thing his great, uncompromising monolith did not embody was Christian love. ‘It would meet many forms of religious feeling,’ Kenyon wrote,
To some it would merely be a memorial stone, such as those of which we read in the Old Testament. To others it would be an altar, one of the most ancient and general of symbols, and would serve as the centre of religious services. As an altar, it would represent one side of the idea of sacrifice, the sacrifice which the Empire had made of its youth, in the great cause for which it sent them forth … [But] it lacks what many (probably a large majority) would desire, the definitely Christian character; and it does not represent the idea of self-sacrifice. For this the one essential symbol is the cross; and I have no doubt that great distress would be felt if o
ur cemeteries lacked the recognition of the fact that we are a Christian Empire, and this symbol of self-sacrifice made by those who lie in them.
There was a certain amount of agonising over what this cross should look like, and a very English and Protestant dread that it should in any way resemble the kind of ‘horrors’ that filled French and Belgian cemeteries, but a report that had taken Kenyon no more than two months had effectively created a blueprint for the Commission’s future. There were a number of modifications and refinements that time and experience would suggest, but in essence the cemetery Kenyon describes, with its Lutyens stone and great cross and regimented headstones and shelter and plantings and low boundary walls, was the cemetery that can be found in its hundreds up and down the old Western Front.
Kenyon’s ‘recommendations’, Ware recorded in his first General Report, ‘were adopted by the Commission at their meeting of the 18th February, 1918, in the following form’:
That the principle of equality of treatment laid down by the Commission should be carried out by the erection over the graves of all officers and men in the war cemeteries abroad of headstones of uniform dimensions, though with some variety of pattern.
That each regiment should have its own pattern of headstone … and that regimental feeling should be consulted.
That there should be carved on the headstone the rank, name, regiment and date of death of the man buried beneath it, and that relatives should be allowed at their own cost to add a short inscription of the nature of a text or prayer, subject to the approval of the Commission.
That in every cemetery there should be two central monuments; (a) at the eastern end, a great memorial stone upon broad steps and bearing some appropriate phrase or text; and (b) elsewhere in the cemetery, a cross.
That in every cemetery there should be some form of building, either covering the memorial stone or separate from it, as a shelter for visitors … and as a place where religious services might be held.
That the cemeteries should be laid out and planted with flowers and shrubs … The surfaces of the graves should be levelled, for reasons of convenience and economy.
That each cemetery should be fenced in by some durable boundary.
That each cemetery should have a printed register of the burials in it, which should be easily accessible to visitors.
That, in consultation with the French authorities, the principle of concentrating in selected cemeteries the bodies at present buried in isolated graves or in small groups should be settled in advance …
It was an impressive and disciplined piece of thinking and more surprisingly perhaps, an extraordinary act of imagination from a not particularly imaginative man. Lutyens and Hill had seen the Western Front when the poppies and larks were out in force, but Kenyon had toured it in all its winter ugliness and out of the chaos and horror of Ypres he had somehow managed to extrapolate a vision of order and peace – out of an exhausted and embittered Britain, torn by strikes and doubts and disillusionment, he had created a metaphor for national and imperial unity; out of the sustained and complicit failure of the Churches, a perfect ‘type’ of Christian sacrifice; out of the psychic and physical mangling of a whole generation, a picture of ordered sanity – out of a troglodytic war of shell-holes and bunkers and mud and filth and corpses, rats and lice, and trench fever and disappointment, a vision of an army that, in its smart and disciplined ranks and parade ground order, had not existed since 1914 and First Ypres.
The Imperial War Graves Commission did not invent these myths about the war and the Army, but what Kenyon had effectively mapped out here were the cemeteries that would become the cultural spaces in which they took on their most persuasive physical and permanent expression. It is important to remember that he was writing his report while the war was still going on, and if it was not propaganda in any overt sense, it was a blueprint for an idealised Britain and Army that had no place in it for doubt, disunity or self-questioning.
There was no room in his vision for the ‘crokers’ Ware had complained of, no recognition that Sassoon’s conscripted ‘droves of victims’ would fill his cemeteries, no admission of the divisions, inequalities and brutalities that were as much a part of the Army’s experience as courage, comradeship and endurance, and above all no confronting that great taboo of the war, Death. From the day that Ware was appointed to head the Graves Registration Commission, death was the reason for everything he did, but perhaps nothing is more extraordinary about the cemeteries he and Kenyon were creating than the discreet cult of Omertà that surrounds them or their strange sense of disconnection with the realities that lay beneath Blunden’s ‘green coverlets’ of lawn.
‘The beauty, the serenity’, Blunden would later write of them – an old and astonished Silas Marner in reverse, revisiting the dystopic landscape of his youth to find in its place a world of ‘lovely, elegiac closes’ which ‘almost cause me to deny my own experience in the acres they now grace’ – but that was precisely what Kenyon had intended. It is no coincidence that it took more than a decade for Remarque’s great novel of death, All Quiet on the Western Front, to emerge, because nobody before that – and certainly nobody in the early months of 1918 – could have borne the truth that behind all the euphemisms of the ‘Fallen’ and the ‘Glorious Dead’ and ‘Sacred Places’ was nothing but the grim, annihilating fact of death.
Even the possible texts for Lutyens’s Great Stone – some variant on ‘Rest in Peace’ or ‘They Lie in Peace’ – had to be quietly shelved in case some disgruntled veteran changed the ‘peace’ to ‘pieces’; between the man at the front and his wife or parent or child at home was a gulf that neither side wished to bridge. The ignorance and jingoism of the home front might provoke fantasies of hatred and revenge in a soldier-poet like Sassoon, but for the vast, decent majority of men in the trenches and their families the only salvation or sanity lay in silence. ‘You biddie people at home have no idea what sort of hell this is,’ the sculptor Charles Jagger wrote from Gallipoli, but the reception of his Hyde Park Memorial after the war shows how little they wanted or could have borne to know. ‘Those gruesome rags,’ Vera Brittain recalled, the physical horror of returning to find a parcel with her dead fiancé’s uniform lying on the floor still vivid after nearly twenty years: they ‘made me realise as I had never realised before, all that France really meant’.
‘Everything was damp and worn and simply caked with mud,’ she had written at the time to her brother Edward, another of the headmaster of Uppingham’s boys about to die,
The smell of those clothes was the smell of graveyards and the Dead. The mud of France that covered them was not ordinary mud; it had not the usual clean pure smell of earth, but it was as though it was saturated with dead bodies – dead that had been dead a long, long time.
There is no need here to rehearse the gothic horrors of the trenches – the skeletal hands and feet jutting out of the Flanders mud, the fly-blown corpses of Gallipoli, the grave-robbing of Mesopotamia – these are among the abiding visual clichés of the war, but it needs remembering that death was not the quiet sleep of Kenyon’s sleight of hand. ‘We see men go on living with the top of their skulls missing. We see soldiers go on running when both their feet have been shot away … we find someone who has gripped the main artery in his arm between his teeth for two hours so that he doesn’t bleed to death,’ wrote Remarque of the visceral fear, the soldier’s primal urge to cling on to life in a world where every instinct was ‘on guard against death’.
A hole has been blown in the ground right in front of me. I can just about make it out … and I want to get into that hole. Without stopping, I wriggle across the earth as fast as I can, flat as an eel on the ground – there is a whistling noise again, I curl up quickly and grab for some cover, feel something to my left and press against it, it gives, I groan … I crawl under whatever it was that gave away when I touched it, pull it over me – it is wood, cloth, cover, cover … then I remember we’ve taken cover in a cemetery.
‘Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?’ one general is supposed to have wept when he saw for the first time for himself the swampland of the Ypres Salient, and the cemeteries seemed to offer the reassuring answer of ‘no’. It was one thing to nurse memories of a ‘Happy Warrior’ like Julian Grenfell, but the alien world of terror, pity, horror, curiosity, forensic interest and brute indifference that soldiers inhabited needed to be kept at bay. Death for one Highland officer had been ‘three rather gamy Germans … but one gets used to that sort of thing’. At Festubert, in May 1915, it was ‘an enormous Hun’ dressed in spite of the heat in ‘two pairs of trousers and thick pants below them’. For Remarque there was the eternal, accusing stare of a French soldier slowly slipping away in the same dug-out; for Francis Law, a callow subaltern in the Irish Guards, the face of a young Irish lad, lying alone on a stretcher at the end of a support trench, waiting to be taken away. For the Australian volunteer, Albert Facey, it was reassembling his brother’s arm with the other fragments of his body in a mass grave at Gallipoli; for the Reverend Julian Bickersteth, a boy who had volunteered under age in 1914, ‘turning his blind-fold face to me and [saying] in a voice which wrung my heart, “Kiss me, Sir, kiss me”, before a firing-party sent him into the Great Unseen’.