by David Crane
Calais Southern Cemetery, 720 graves; Les Baraques British Cemetery, Sangatte, 919; Wimereux Communal Cemetery, 2,847; Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery, Poperinghe, 9,887; Poperinghe New Military Cemetery, 677, Villers-Bocage Communal Cemetery Extension, 59; Doullens No 1, Doullens No 2 … Fifteen miles of hedges by the spring of 1921, seventy-five miles of flower borders, 200 acres of sown grass. ‘In France and Belgium alone there are 970 cemeteries,’ Ware would eventually be able to write of an achievement that Kipling called the greatest work attempted since the Pyramids, ‘surrounded by 50 miles of walling in brick or stone, with nearly one thousand Crosses of Sacrifice and 560 Stones of Remembrance, and many chapels, record buildings and shelters; there are some 600,000 headstones resting on nearly 250 miles of concrete beam foundations.’
For all the building and planting and sowing of these post-war years – ‘The Strenuous Years’ as the Commission’s historian proudly dubbed them – and for all the establishment of nurseries, the compilation and printing of cemetery registers, the daunting task of verification and the garnering of personal inscriptions, there remained one issue that sheer slog could not resolve. In the grim process of exhumation, every conceivable effort had been made to identify remains, but what was to be done about all those who could not be identified? What of the hundreds of thousands who had graves but no names or had been obliterated or lost without trace? ‘I, for one, would not have risen but for the fact that I desire, if I may be permitted to do so, to impress one aspect of this matter which has been very little dwelt on,’ one MP had begun his reluctant contribution to the war graves debate in Parliament,
Like my hon. Friend opposite, I am one of those who will never have even the melancholy consolation of mourning at the grave of my son. The appeal I desire to make is on behalf of those, of whom I think there are some in this Commission, and many thousand outside, that in these cemeteries which will be scattered over the world even we may have some share in the memorial which will be erected to our honoured dead. May I convey what is in my mind by an illustration?
The illustration was a familiar one: a young officer leads his ‘gallant men’ into an enemy trench, the Germans evacuate and shell it, the officer and his men are shelled, the trench becomes their tomb, it is retaken by the Germans, and their bodies are lost forever. ‘It is impossible thus to secure individual graves for our boys,’ he went on,
but those boys are as much loved by us as any of those who have individual graves, and we would, therefore, without any controversy whatever, appeal to the Commission to see whether it is not possible that in the cemetery nearest where many came to their death there cannot be some memorial where their names are recorded, so that all dying in that locality may have the honour of being recognised by this country? If under the conditions we cannot go and kneel by the side of the individual grave, we can at least go to the memorial where our boys’ names will remind us of what they suffered and sacrificed for us. I do not know whether it is possible … I hope it is possible, because it will bring satisfaction to tens of thousands of hearts in this country.
‘It will certainly be possible to meet the wish my hon. Friend has just expressed,’ Churchill had assured him, but the problem was more complex than his confidence suggested and if the Commission had not yet come up with an answer it was not for any want of trying. In December 1918, Kenyon had proposed inscribing the names of the missing on panels in the cemetery closest to their deaths, but whichever way the Commission turned – geographical, regimental, monumental, individual graves or tablets – all the old passions and divisions stirred by the headstone and cross controversies only resurfaced in aggravated form.
It had seemed relatively simple to deal with the graves of the unidentified dead – in his role as literary advisor, responsible for all the Commission’s texts, Kipling came up with the haunting formula that in its variations can be found on 180,000 headstones, ‘A Soldier of the Great War Known unto God’ – but that still left relatives of the missing exactly where they were. ‘My own feeling,’ one bereaved mother, Mary Elwood, who had lost her son on 14 July 1916, two weeks into the Battle of the Somme, wrote to Ware,
is that I should much prefer his name being recorded on a headstone exactly the same as all those whose graves are known … this would make all the memorials the same, which is to my mind such a very nice idea. I like the feeling of all the headstones being the same, for officers and men, & personally I feel I should like a headstone to my son in the cemetery amongst his men, who fell with him, and who all loved him.
‘Sir, my son is one of the missing,’ another parent, N. Smith of 180 Canterbury Rd., Croydon wrote,
Could I have a stone instead of a tablet if I paid for it? [‘No’ was Ware’s answer.] I should like a stone the same as the soldiers have if it is possible. My son’s address is Pte. S. Smith 10999 1st Queen RWSB Company, BEF France. I could send the money if it could be done if you would please let me know what it would be,
Yours respectfully,
N. Smith
There was another ‘No’ to a Mrs Christie who wanted her two sons’ memorials near each other, and it was not only individuals who felt that every missing soldier was ‘entitled to his six feet of ground’. ‘In my recollection,’ Ware was reminded in the spring of 1919 by a representative of Hughes’s Australian government, especially sensitive to the issue on account of the heavy toll of unidentified bodies that still had to be dealt with from the Gallipoli campaign,
the idea of the Commission was to avoid dogmatising as to any particular treatment and to invite some suggestion from parties who were interested.
So far as Australia is concerned, the Prime Minister after giving the matter due consideration on the spot, has decided that Australia deserves that each man should have his place in a cemetery whether his burial has been ascertained or not, together with a temporary cross, at once, and a permanent headstone at a later date. The cross and the headstone would, of course, not bear any statement as to the fact that the body had not been discovered.
The South Africa government wanted the same for the dead of Delville Wood – their own Gallipoli – but if there was one thing the Commission was adamant on it was that there should be no ‘fake’ or ‘dud’ graves. They were prepared to allow the erection of temporary wooden crosses so long as it was clear that they did not mark actual burials. But with more than half a million men missing, how on earth, as Macready wanted to know, could they ask a French government struggling with reconstruction and the problems of commemorating its own dead to double the gift of land that they had ceded in 1915?
There were strong practical reasons against it from the Commission’s point of view as well – changes of design, delays in construction, uncertainties over numbers, that would all mean extra costs and time – but in the end it was a matter of gut instinct rather than economics. ‘I may tell you confidentially,’ Ware wrote to a Mrs Anstruther, leaking the Australian proposal that a headstone and ‘grave space’ should be allowed to every missing soldier, ‘this met with bitter opposition, with which I am bound to say I sympathise, from those on the Commission who have lost their own sons. Mr Kipling very strongly rejected the idea of what he called a “dud grave”.’
It is one of the more curious ironies of an organisation devoted to equality, unity and, ultimately, reconciliation, that its chosen spokesman was one of the most brilliant and talented ‘haters’ of the age. It was perhaps understandable that Kipling hated the Hun, but he hated politicians and priests as well, he hated liberal anti-imperialists and organised labour and the miners and the strikers and the Chinese and the ‘Yids’ and the Vatican and democracy and parliaments and, possibly above all – an oddity from the author of the history of the Irish Guards with whom his son served – he hated the Irish and their ‘pernicious little bitch of a country’ with a violent and dangerous passion.
In many respects Kipling’s prejudices were those of the age – it simply seems to matter more with a man of his extra
ordinary gifts – but in his hands prejudice took on a savage and vindictive harshness. ‘Allah, for his own purposes, has created a pig called Mond, Head of the Public Works,’ he wrote of his fellow Commissioner, the future Lord Melchett, ‘an ’Ebrew whose mere voice and presence is enough to put up the back of any and every committee that he presides over’ – and the tone was not untypical. ‘He was a man of the strongest political prejudice,’ even Ware, a staunch friend and ally on the Commission, was forced to confess,
and would never meet my more radical friends such as Shaw, who always wanted to meet Kipling. His only excuse was that he was always preoccupied with foreign dangers, loathed those who ignored them, and happened to be right. He loved people who shared his opinions absolutely, such as Gwynne and Lady Bathurst. Everything was either black or white. There were no other colours.
It took a lot to make Ware seem a political moderate, however, and any political differences between the two men were swallowed up in their shared belief in Empire. In the years before the war, Kipling’s stock as a writer and public Jeremiah had taken a steep fall, but for men of the generation that made up the Commission, for old South Africa hands and imperialists like Ware who shared Kipling’s sense of national election, the idea of an Imperial War Graves Commission without the great poet and mythologiser of Empire would have been unthinkable.
When it came to the question of ‘the missing’, though, it was not the name but the authority of a father to whom the war had dealt a numbing personal tragedy that gave Kipling the decisive voice within the Commission. His son, John, had been just sixteen when war broke out. On his seventeenth birthday, less than two weeks later, he had tried to volunteer. When he was rejected on account of poor eyesight, Kipling used his influence with Lord Roberts to get John a nomination into Roberts’s old regiment. His influence worked its grim magic. By 14 September, John was on his way to Warley Barracks and on 15 August 1915 to France with the Irish Guards. ‘One mustn’t let one’s friends and neighbours sons be killed in order to save us and our son,’ his mother Carrie – one of the mothers of ancient Rome, Burdett-Coutts spoke of – had written,
There is no chance John will survive unless he is so maimed from a wound as to be unfit to fight. We know it and he does. We all know it, but we all must give and do what we can and live on the shadow of a hope that our boy will be the one to escape.
He was not. ‘He looks very straight and smart and young,’ she noted in her diary the day he left, ‘as he turned at the top of the stairs to say: “Send my love to Dad-o”.’ Six weeks later – that familiar timescale in the short lives of Great War subalterns – the news they dreaded and expected arrived. ‘Two of my men say they saw your son limping,’ John’s company commander wrote to tell the Kiplings,
just by the Red House, and one said he saw him fall, and somebody ran to his assistance, probably his orderly who is also missing. The Platoon Sergeant of No.5, however, tells me your son did not go to the Red House, but remained with the rest of the 2nd Btn. digging themselves in just outside the wood, but I think the former story the more correct.
The body was not found.fn11 ‘Have you news of my boy Jack?’ Kipling wrote in 1916, putting into the mouth of the bereaved mother of a lost sailor all the hard, implacable grief and stoic pride he felt in the loss of his own short-sighted, eighteen-year-old boy,
‘Have you news of my boy Jack?’
Not this tide.
‘When do you think that he’ll come back?’
Not with this wind blowing …
‘Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?’
None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind –
Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide,
Then hold your head up all the more,
This tide,
And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
And gave to the wind blowing and that tide.
It was a poem and a yearning to which tens and hundreds of thousands of parents across the Empire could relate. In 1931, an Australian mother was found sobbing with relief at the grave on Gallipoli of a son who she had thought among the missing. ‘If only I could see your grave, I would die happy,’ another Australian, the mother of Jack Fothergill, killed on the first day of the Gallipoli landings in 1915, wrote in the memorial column of the Melbourne Argus eight years later. ‘After nearly two years’ private enquiry,’ a London father, whose son had been ‘reported missing presumed killed’ in the summer of 1917, wrote to Burdett-Coutts in 1920,
I got into touch with a man serving in the same company who saw my son fall, in the morning of August 17th, in the advance on Passchendaele; the spot immediately above the ‘pill boxes’ known as Tower Hamlets. He was carrying a watch, automatic pistol etc., and it appears probable that his identity disc was destroyed by the RAMC bearers who removed his body. I traced the automatic to an officer who purchased it from one of the orderlies, but by the time the information reached me, both orderly and officer had been killed in Italy and it was useless pressing the matter further.
Was there to be no memorial to his son? he wanted to know. Could at least his name be inscribed somewhere? On a stone? ‘By taking up this matter and securing the adoption of some such suggestion,’ he finished, ‘you would earn the gratitude of many parents to whose sons no visible memorial has been erected.’
There was, inevitably, no shortage of suggestions from families as to what form that memorial should take. One wanted to commemorate the missing with a ‘Grand Statue of our Saviour as the Light of the World’, in place of the Blomfield stone cross. Another suggested a sundial carved from the rock of the Giants’ Causeway and inscribed beneath the head of the King with the gladiators’ Morituri te Salutant. ‘There should be a granite or marble soldier lying dead,’ Lena Hunter wrote to Ware, ‘with a half circle of Angels standing around him with bent heads & the text beneath “He shall give his angels charge over thee” – Ps XCI. II. I might tell you,’ she went on to explain,
that I had a vision of my son, the late Captain N. D. D. Hunter, climbing a hill with determined face, with a half circle of five angels behind him; and he met his death, when climbing an embankment to locate the enemy’s machine gun, which was enfilading his men, and was killed while pointing at the position of the gun to his men, & his body could not be recovered, as the enemy were pressing forward in overwhelming numbers.
It was the Commission’s nightmare made marble, and the letters and proposals – ‘Via Sacra’, ‘Campo Santo’, ‘Iona’ Cross – kept coming. The mother of one Australian lieutenant proposed a giant stone of the kind Lutyens had designed, but with the face decorated with relief carving running from the top left to bottom right and showing,
fragments of destroyed wire entanglements. In bottom left corner foreground a large shell hole containing one or more deceased soldiers partly buried by fallen debris, shells bursting overhead and on ground. A township under bombardment and on fire or similar battle scene on top left hand corner. The stone should be surmounted by the figure of an Angel bearing a large open scroll or book which is inscribed: ‘The Book of Life’. Rev XX 12.
The Commission knew that they did not want angels at any price, but what they did want remained as elusive as ever. In the early stages of the process Lieutenant Colonel Durham, Ware’s Director of Works, had put forward a scheme for commemorating the missing in ‘regimental chapels’, but to the men of Kitchener’s New Army – and still more their relatives – the old loyalties and pride that had made the ‘regiment’ Captain Oates’s last thought as he stumbled out into the Antarctic blizzard meant little or ‘practically nothing’.
There were sound economic and practical arguments for Durham’s scheme but the Commission could not afford to allow ‘economy’ to be their only watchword. The single thing that was important to relatives, Kipling warned them, was ‘that little piece of France’ where their son or husband had fallen and anything th
at divorced remembrance from ‘place’ could only seem ‘heartless and official’. What consolation to a mother was a ‘regimental’ memorial on the Somme to a son whose body lay in the Ypres mud? ‘The policy of the Commission in dealing with a matter which affects almost every home in England has, up to the present been entirely & may I say – cruelly practical,’ one widow, Mrs Una Langton, eloquently put it,
all these poor souls [the relatives of the missing] know is the ‘place’ where their dear one was last seen, & naturally that ‘place’ holds a peculiar sacredness in their eyes.
Why therefore cannot the Commission give a sympathetic consideration to these cases, & overlook the fact that to commemorate the missing in the nearest Cemetery to the place of death ‘will mean so much extra work’; ‘take so much longer’; ‘present such great difficulty’ & similar unsatisfactory reasons which I have heard expressed …
The War Office has recognised with sympathy the sorrow of the next of kin in these sad cases by the erection of memorial crosses, an action which has given intense satisfaction to many, & I cannot conceive the Commission can ruthlessly take these down & substitute a name on a memorial in some cases miles away. This is what would happen in my own husband’s case.