by David Crane
reared from the acorns off the old trees which the early Dutch settlers had planted in Capetown, grown from seeds brought from Holland. In the centre [of the monument] and pathway … an archway was built with a flat dome on which is set a bronze horse. The idea was suggested to me by Macaulay’s poem on the Battle of Lake Regullus, telling how Great Twin Brethren appeared from the skies to fight in the ranks of Rome. Might it not seem miraculous, as the coming of the mythical Brethren did to the Romans, that Dutch and English, such recent enemies should have come overseas to fight for the British Commonwealth against a common foe?
Britain and Rome – Britain the ‘New Rome’, the old trope reborn in a shattered French wood, and nothing for Baker could be more Roman than the blessings of the gods on the Empire’s newest shrine. ‘The unveiling ceremony was a dramatic occasion,’ Baker recalled, with a blackening sky suddenly ‘bursting’ into a torrent of rain and hail as the visitors made their way up the long vista from the cemetery to the monument,
But as they reached the archway the storm disappeared as if by magic, and the sun from a blue sky shone down on General Hertzog, as he spoke, and on Mrs Louis Botha as she unveiled the bronze Twin Brethren above, symbols of the comradeship in arms of the two South African races.
This sense of destiny, the Churchillian perspective on history – and with it the faith and imagination to build for the future – are not just Baker’s prerogative, however, but one of the most remarkable aspects of the Commission’s work. The South African monument in Delville Wood now sits at the end of a long, beautiful oak avenue against a backcloth of dappled greens, but when Baker began there was nothing there – only one hornbeam survived from the wood in which there were 2,500 South African casualties in July 1916 – and it was the same story wherever along the old front that the Commission built.
Order out of chaos, beauty from ugliness – Kipling’s bereaved ‘pilgrim’ in ‘The Gardener’ stands in a bewildering forest of black crosses until she sees at the far end of the half-built cemetery the first of the clean, lucid lines of white headstones – it was a compelling vision and one few could resist. In some of his early cemeteries Charles Holden created a raw and desolate response to the carnage of war, but even Holden – ‘nine-tenths Quaker’ and the most disinterested, the most principled of the Principal Architects – softened in his style, moving from the uncompromising bleakness and horizontal gravestones of Wimereux to the classical refinement of Buttes New British Cemetery and Messines Ridge, mellowed by the passage of time, by the growing distance from the war, or simply converted himself by the note of pathos and proud patriotism that was the hallmark of the Commission’s work in the 1920s.
It is revealing to compare the Commission’s airy cemeteries with their darkly sylvan German counterparts, because while German sites offer nothing more than a muffled and apologetic echo of the Teutonic spirit, the Britain that went to war to save Plucky Little Belgium and sacrificed a generation in the cause of freedom, could unashamedly bask in its disciplined rows of headstones and crusader swords. ‘What I wanted to do in designing this cross was to make it abstract and impersonal,’ Blomfield wrote of his ubiquitous Cross of Sacrifice – in its moral smugness perhaps the one genuinely false note that the Commission struck,fn17
to free it from any association with any particular style, and, above all, to keep clear of any of the sentimentalities of Gothic. This was a man’s war far too terrible for any fripperies, and I hoped to get within range of the infinite in this symbol of those who had gone out to die. The bronze sword is there to identify it with war – and also there kept ringing in my head that text, ‘I came not to bring peace but a sword.’
It would be hard to imagine in a Commission cemetery Käthe Kollwitz’s great granite memorial at Vladslo Military Cemetery in Belgium, where her ‘Mourning Parents’, arms folded across their chests, the mother’s head bowed, kneel at their son Peter’s grave in a prayer for his forgiveness, because the generation that sent Britain’s ‘first holocaust of public schoolboys’ to their deaths in 1914 were not asking for forgiveness. ‘If any question why we died,/ Tell them because our fathers lied,’ Kipling wrote, but what he meant by that was something different from what Käthe Kollwitz’s kneeling figures mean. There are ambiguities about Kipling’s epitaph, but they are ambiguities only on the page. The author, who had done more than anyone to glamorise the brutality of war for the men and boys who filled the cemeteries, was not repenting or recanting. His anger was for the politicians who had not listened and left Britain unprepared, for the unions who had opposed conscription, and for those whose lies, complacency and cowardice had meant – the bitterness is still shocking – that his son John died ‘at eighteen instead of between nineteen and twenty, as he ought’.
This is what makes Thiepval so different. ‘His loss,’ John Kipling’s mother wrote of her dead son, ‘though so great a thing to us, is a little thing set against this greater.’ ‘This greater’ was the general sacrifice honoured in the Commission’s cemeteries but no one could look at the great gaping arch above the Ancre and believe that the mindless waste of the Somme or Passchendaele was a price that anyone should pay. Its impersonal, abstract indifference and intellectual sophistication are in themselves an indictment of the appalling stupidity and destruction of human potential it marks. Could anyone absorb the monstrous size of the thing, with its 70,000 plus names, and still believe his country cared? Could anyone stop to read the names of those under-sized boys of the Pals’ battalions – from Accrington, Bradford, Barnsley, Sheffield, Hull, Durham – and not wonder what the England of Gertrude Jekyll had to do with them? Could anyone who had survived, wounded, jobless and houseless, to find every promise of peace disappointed, not see in the beauty and seductive mythology of equality and unity that the Commission offered just one more establishment lie?
‘Let us honour if we can,’ wrote Auden in 1930, ‘The vertical man/ Though we value none/ But the horizontal one’ – those were more than just the smart lines of a man too young to have fought in the war to end wars. There was certainly no falling off during the 1930s of visitors to the Western Front cemeteries, but if somehow Thiepval slipped out of the popular consciousness that was because it conjured up a past that no one wanted to recognise and foreshadowed a future no one wanted to see. Memorials, Jay Winter wrote, are as much about forgetting as they are about remembering. But that is not true of Thiepval. It lets you neither forget nor forgive. It is war’s answer to Forster’s Marabar Caves, where the last words of Christ on the cross and the striking of a match produce only the same nihilistic echo. ‘Honour’, ‘Glory’, ‘Valour’, ‘Love of Country’– the words Roland Leighton grew to hate before a bullet in the stomach finished him – say them at Thiepval and they simply evaporate away through that great arch into the infinite sky, leaving behind only the massive, looming silence and the eternal reprimand of those 70,000 names.
The unveiling of Thiepval marked the end of the heroic period in the Commission’s history and if it was an odd irony that the greatest thing that the Commission ever did should be its least loved, it was an irony that Ware could live with. Less than anyone did he wish to hear what the monument said about the past or the future. He had begun his commemorative work to enshrine an idea about nation and Empire, but by the time Thiepval was finished another and even greater vision had grown out of it. Twenty years earlier, writing with his ‘filthy French pen’ in his Paris room and recalling the sunsets of South Africa, Ware had wondered if the great collective ideal he had learned there at Milner’s feet might not ultimately grow beyond the British Empire to embrace all mankind. Now, as the world moved towards another war, it became an old man’s dream that the cemeteries that had been born of a deep and inclusive patriotism should and must contribute to a greater unity.
TEN
Keeping the Faith
One of the most engaging things about Fabian Ware was that he never lost the idealism or enthusiasm that had fired his youth. In an intervie
w with him in 1924, Violet Markham wrote that to see him again was to be face to face once more with one’s own younger self, and nothing would ever change him in that respect, nothing dim the visionary gleam.
When Kipling wrote his great hymn-like ‘Recessional’ for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, the Reverend F .W. Macdonald, the last of his family to cling to their dissenting origins, wrote to tell him that the Methodist community proudly claimed it and him as its own, and in an odd sort of way the Plymouth Brethren would have said the same of Ware. In the forty years since he had escaped the narrow ‘cell’ of his parents’ faith, he had travelled as far as possible, but the visions that had once filled that cell with glimpses of another and transformed world would burn as bright for him at sixty as they had at six.
Like Lutyens, Ware was something other than he seemed, a religious zealot masquerading as a secularist, a missionary parading as a politician, and his opponents might have made a better fist of opposition if they had only recognised this. It was once said of Baker that he had a ‘conviction … of the rightness of British Imperialism so strong as to be almost a religion’, but there was no ‘almost’ about Ware, no Anglican fudges or compromises, only that same all-consuming instinct for the ‘absolute’ and the ‘Godhead’ that fired Lutyens’s art.
Visionaries come in different forms, however, and nothing better illustrates either the fierce power or the limitations of the chiliastic dream that Ware had inherited from his parents than the work of an artist who was to leave Britain with its finest memorial of the First World War: Stanley Spencer. Spencer had served through the conflict as a medical orderly with the RAMC in Bristol and Macedonia, and at the end of the 1920s was asked to paint a series of murals for a memorial chapel that had been commissioned from Charles Holden’s architectural partner, Lionel Pearson to commemorate a lieutenant who had died from an illness contracted in Macedonia.
The result was the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere, near Newbury, a plain brick structure from the outside, and inside as close as one will ever get in England to fourteenth-century Italy. The formal inspiration for Spencer’s murals was Giotto and the Arena Chapel in Padua, but it is Giotto mediated through a peculiarly English sensibility that locates the divine and the spiritual in the everyday. Along the flanking walls, the murals record the unheroic world of Spencer’s war, of hospital orderlies and delousing, of bathtubs, iodine, stray dogs, idling soldiers, ration tins and angels. And on the end wall, above the altar, Spencer has painted a Resurrection at the last day that is unlike any commemoration of war ever painted. In the foreground, crowding the plane of the painting, tumbling almost into the chapel itself, is a jumble of white crosses and behind it soldiers emerge sleepily from their graves to find themselves in the Macedonian landscape in which they fought and died. Again, though, there is no violence here. They look around them. They carefully unwind their puttees. One, still only half out of his grave, stretches out a hand to stroke a tortoise. Another leans back against a mule, taking silent stock of the situation. At the centre, two white mules, mirror images of each other, stir slowly into life again, and framed between their arched necks, and receding into the background, a long procession of soldiers climbs towards a small and unmemorable seated Christ, carrying their grave crosses with them.
This is the Last Day, but it is the last day in the here and now, and that is where Spencer and Ware’s visions are at odds. Spencer dreamed of the resurrected man and painted the ordinary soldier; Ware buried the soldier and dreamed for him a brighter world. It was the future he was concerned with. There was nothing of Spencer’s sense of the numinous about him, no sense of the holy in the everyday. He did not see God in the simple act of a soldier unwinding his puttees or treating a wounded man, or cleaning a bath. He did not see God in Spencer’s soldier – Ware’s double identity discs about his neck – skimming a stone across a shallow stream. He did not see God in the world; like his father he wanted a new world, a world that in its promise of human perfectibility offers an oddly secularised version of a re-made world that fuelled the faith of his father’s Plymouth Brethren.
‘Each stage reproduces the development of that which has produced it,’ he had written before the war, his political vision of the British Empire growing into something still greater, infused with the visionary fervour of his youth,
and … under the influence of some force from the infinite – incomprehensible to the human intelligence because it transcends it, but seized in momentary flashes by the instinct – each succeeding stage … passes something of its spirit down … And so, in ascending collectivities the human race progresses, the limit – if limit there be – being a united humanity.
It was probably as well that Ware also inherited all the more bruising features of the Brethren tradition because in the years before the struggle with Hitler’s Germany came to revalidate his dreams, the street-fighter was as badly needed as the visionary. ‘Do you think that they [“the Gallant Dead”] would have wished these Millions to be spent when their Comrades are on the dole?’ demanded one furious, six-times wounded veteran, of ‘Major-General Sir Fabian Ware, KCVO, KBE, CB, CMG’, as he contemptuously addressed him.
I am unable to ascertain the gallant corps you commanded or is it just an honorary rank you hold like so many more out here in the Commission … I wonder what General in the regular army draws your salary? Look at the great Marshall [sic] Foch who could have availed himself of a Field Marshall’s [sic] pay of £1,692 a year from our country but patriotically refused although his own pay was far less a sum – look at the great Marshall [sic] Joffre’s salary and realise for one minute what the great French nation must think of this gigantic squandering which is going on …
Captain Chanter had only just begun, and in bilious, caricature form, every charge of high-handedness and waste thrown at the Commission in the years between the wars was rolled out. ‘Let me invite the public to go to the length and breadth of France and Belgium and see the country plastered with Cemeteries and Monuments and signposts specially designed broadcasting what Britain did in the Great War,’ he continued,
– is it dignified? Is it military? Is it British? The French Nation, I would remind you, also fought in the War and … they have not got their cemeteries all over the country but have concentrated them in certain places … Imagine your country plastered from North to South with French Memorials but it is lost on you … to see you arrive at an unveiling ceremony puts Napoleon in all his glory in the shade. Those who do not know imagine you to be some Veteran Warrior or 13th Apostle of the Great War.
Ware could cope with a man like Captain Chanter – Chanter was running a business out of La Panne, laying wreaths (or not, as the suggestion was) for relatives too poor to cross the Channel, but his diatribe is just the crank’s version of some far wider concerns about the War Graves Commission. From the earliest days there had been a strong feeling in some circles that the Commission’s money would be better spent on public projects, and the distressed state of many of the cemeteries by the early 1930s – an inevitable result of the speed and inexperience with which they had been constructed – inevitably added fuel to the sense that this was money that had been misdirected. ‘I have just returned lately from placing my wreaths for relatives on the actual graves and what I have seen is simply one gigantic disgrace,’ Chanter wrote again – and his letter is dated February 1931, only ten years after the first of Blomfield’s ‘experimental’ cemeteries had been finished,
there are piles of cheap bricks and stones at nearly every Cemetery where shelters or tool sheds are being built and which look just like Pill Boxes … thousands of Headstones are toppling over and you are aware of the numbers that have already cracked in two and which will go on cracking … the stones look as if they had been bombarded by shrapnel and in the same Cemetery you see the plain simple White Cross of the French graves which stand out in prominence to the dirty stained Headstones erected by the Commission.
A great deal o
f this was true, but the real challenge for Ware and the Commission in the inter-war years was not subsidence or crooks or public indifference but the old enemy of the Treasury. As early as 1921 the Treasury had signalled its hope that as interest faded, the cemeteries ‘might ultimately be allowed to disappear’, and over the next fifteen years a semi-permanent state of war existed, with successive Chancellors determined to control and curb the Commission’s expenditure and Ware equally bent on preserving its independence.
As far as the Treasury was concerned, the notion of an independent controlling body was ‘inconsistent with the principles of British Government finance’ and even when an endowment fund was set up in 1925 they did their best to make life for the Commission as difficult as possible. The other participating governments had all agreed to contribute their shares within six and a half years, but with eighty per cent of the total to find, the Treasury was determined to hold out for longer, insisting that Britain should have fourteen years to pay its instalments – £4,076,000 of the Endowment Fund in mounting increments – and that their contributions to the fund should be confined to investments in UK government securities.
For the Treasury, searching for cuts and economies at a time of depression, the issue at stake was one of money, financial control and the principle of responsibility, but for Ware it was a battle between utilitarian officialdom and the larger imperial dream that had always underpinned his work for the Commission. ‘For Ware,’ his old friend from South African days, Leo Amery, declared at his memorial service,
the thought of what the war cemeteries could give in individual consolation was never separated from the thought of what they might mean as a spiritual link between our peoples and an example and model of how a common task might be effectively carried out by a jointly established organisation.