by David Crane
‘Think what this organisation of ours means as a model of what Imperial co-operation might do,’ he had told Violet Markham in 1924, and in speeches, memorial services and broadcasts he took every opportunity to make the dream a reality. Who can remember their 200,000 dead ‘and falter in his faith in our Empire?’ he had asked in a BBC radio address on Armistice Day 1926, calling on a bitterly divided Britain to recall its common heritage of sacrifice,
Never in the world’s history has there been anything like it. And let us here, in this dear land, remember that the imperishable glory and unsurpassed heroism of the greater multitude of dead of the Mother Country, men nurtured in these islands, the home and focus of the freedom … gains an added brilliance from the devotion and sacrifice of their fellow-subjects from overseas.
On anniversary after anniversary he would return to the same themes. It was not just a call to unity for a Britain torn apart by the General Strike but for the wider Empire too. ‘Can we possibly visualise them to-day, these Anzac graves,’ he asked his listeners in an Anzac Day broadcast on 24 April 1933, blissfully unaware, as ever, of the double-edged sword he was unsheathing,fn18
They are literally scattered over the world … they lie in cemeteries whose names are to you household words, names given by these dead themselves and their comrades to nooks and plateaux of that stern promontory lapped by the blue Aegean Sea, to heights on those arid slopes to which they desperately and heroically clung. Listen to the names of some of them. Just a few: Lone Pine … Shrapnel Valley, the Nek … Thousands of years hence some of them will still be there to remind [the world] of a British Empire that was one and indivisible when assailed.
To Ware the Empire was not just the political cause that he had espoused in the pages of the Morning Post but a religion for which the war and its cemeteries had provided the Holy Places. ‘On former Novembers I have given you a general account of the work of the Commission,’ he began another of his traditional eve-of-Armistice broadcasts, unashamedly decking out the day’s commemorations in the language and rituals of a solemn Holy Day,
But to-night [the ‘vigil’, as he called it, of ‘the greatest human anniversary the world has ever known’] I want you, in preparation for to-morrow, to let your thoughts dwell for a few minutes on some of those who fell so far from these Islands (almost as far away from England as from the overseas Dominions) that their graves can rarely be visited, and then only by a few of those to whom they are dear. I have just returned myself from an inspection of the cemeteries in the Near East and it is about them that I should like to say a few words …
Over the last month, he explained in a voice, with its slight lisp, redolent of a pre-war world, he had visited all but one of the thirty-one cemeteries on the Gallipoli peninsula, as well as Constantinople, Aleppo, Damascus, Beyrouth, Haifa, Jerusalem, Ramleh, Beersheba … Cairo, Alexandria. ‘I give the individual names to you as some of you who are listening to me may be interested in a particular one,’ he went on,
and I want you to know that in each I found the graves perfectly tended. To get a general idea of the extent of our graves in the Near East, might I suggest that when I have finished you take a map and draw a line round the Gallipoli Peninsula passing through Constantinople to Baghdad, then on to the Persian Gulf and back through the Red Sea across Egypt. Within that curve you will notice almost all the Bible countries, as we called them when I was a boy; within it are 135 of our cemeteries containing 62,727 graves, and in addition twelve monuments commemorating 82,273 men of the British Empire who have no known grave, 33,000 of them Indians. To these lands of ancient holy places the Great War has added our holy places, and believe me, so much they are increasingly regarded by the local inhabitants whatever their race and whatever their creed.
‘Enter this zone by the Dardanelles at daybreak as I did,’ continued ‘the Great Commemorator’, deftly drawing in his listeners to share his vision,
and as you pass the Southern end of the Gallipoli Peninsula, you will see, lit up by the rays of the rising sun, placed on the highest cliff and dominating the blue Aegean Sea, the great British Memorial to 12,000 of the Gallipoli Missing. They are not forgotten these dead, even by other nations than our own – for some, if not all, of the ships, foreign as well as British, salute the Memorial as they pass, dipping their flag and asking all passengers to observe two minutes silence.
The glamour and physical associations of the classical world had long had a seductive, Byronic pull for Britain’s soldiers – many a Philhellene had gone to a miserable end mistaking modern Greece for the Greece of the Iliad or Herodotus – but this Armistice it was not Troy but a very un-Homeric ideal of Christian sacrifice Ware wanted to evoke. ‘I have only a few minutes with you and cannot describe … all the cemeteries in lands within our curve,’ he apologised,
I will therefore select one. At first I was tempted to choose the cemetery in Jerusalem on the Mount of Olives, a very noble monument which we have endeavoured, for reasons which you will appreciate, to make the most beautiful. But I am taking one situated among conditions as foreign as they can possibly be, in a land where the English language is rarely heard and even British visitors are few … I have chosen Damascus.
It was not just a single cemetery, however, but a single grave around which he invited his listeners to stand. ‘I want to tell you of one selected grave, equal in honour, no more and no less, to all,’ he went on, uniting Empire and Motherland, Past and Present in one great continuum spanning the centuries that conjures up the shade of Evelyn Waugh’s Guy Crouchback,
In a cemetery in the south of Palestine stands a simple white headstone with its fern badge marking the grave of a trooper of the Dominion cavalry. In the old days of sailing ships, before most of us were born, he left England for New Zealand, the eldest of fifteen children, his father an officer bearing the name of one of the oldest English families; surmounting through years of hardship the obstacles which faced the pioneer in a new colony, he had established himself in that country and founded a branch of his family to carry on its traditions of the New World. The War came; it found him an old man; he enlisted, refusing to accept the rank that was repeatedly offered him, and set out on the homeward journey. He fought gallantly in Palestine – where he fell, in that Holy Land where had fallen before him ancestors who had set out in the ranks of the Crusaders from his own English country … In to-morrow’s Silence, give a thought to the children of many such men as this; they will not be here in the Motherland by our sides, but their spirits in the great trial were at one with ours and with us to-morrow they will celebrate the eternally binding community of sacrifice.
As Ware got older, his sense of what could and must be done through the Commission’s work took on an enlarged and increasingly visionary tone. ‘In the course of my pilgrimage,’ King George V had famously told the crowds at Terlincthun Cemetery at the end of his tour of the Western Front in 1922,
I have many times asked myself whether there can be more potent advocates of peace on earth … than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to the desolation of war. And I feel that, so long as we have faith in God’s purpose, we cannot but believe that the existence of these visible memorials will, eventually, serve to draw all peoples together in sanity and self-control, even as it has already set the relations between our Empire and our allies on the deep-rooted bases of a common heroism and a common agony.
The speech may have been the King’s, the words Kipling’s, but the sentiments were Ware’s and over the next sixteen years he returned to this vision of the healing power of the dead with ever greater urgency. It is possible that the ideal had been somewhere at the back of his mind from an even earlier date. He would certainly have seen photographs of the ageing Gettysburg veterans, snowy-bearded Unionists and Confederates in their grey and blue, shaking hands over the Stone Wall at the ‘Angle’ on the fiftieth anniversary of the battle in 1913 in a gesture of reconciliation that provided the romantic theatre for a politically driven belief
in the unifying and ‘regenerative power of sacrifice’. ‘Cold must be the heart of that American,’ Champ Clark, the Speaker of the House, had insisted at the ceremonies,
who is not proud to claim as countrymen the flower of the Southern youth who charged up the slippery slopes of Gettysburg with peerless Pickett, or those unconquerable men in blue, who three long and dreadful days held these … heights in the face of fierce assaults. It was not Southern valor nor Northern valor. It was, thank God, American valor.
America had set another precedent with its Civil War cemeteries, too, and for Ware the common sacrifice that out of different wars had brought Union and Confederacy and Empire and allies closer, could perform a wider alchemy. ‘I am here to speak to you of another and stronger union,’ he told his audience in a 1930 broadcast, summoning to the cause his own, ghostly League of Nations formed of the Empire’s million dead.
There is a strength in the League of the Dead based on realities and finalities, that can never be equalled either in faith or in courage by any union of living members. And I want to tell you why our Empire, yours and mine, has determined that those dead voices shall not be silenced, nay that they shall be given tongues on earth for all time.
Other countries were following the Empire’s example, Ware went on: America, France, Belgium and now even Germany, propelled by a popular desire for commemoration. ‘The one real common heritage of the war,’ – the dead – he insisted,
is drawing the Nations together, as nothing else can; drawing them together on no debatable ground, in no spirit of military rivalry. Drawing the peoples together to give constant warning to their governments; for this standing and visible record of the cost of war is the most potent and insistent reminder of the dread consequences of the political conditions which obtained in the world before 1914.
For a man of his intellect and sophistication, a man, in fact, with a good, healthy streak of cynicism running through his nature, Ware could be extraordinarily naive. He was hardly the only senior figure who refused to recognise what was coming in the 1930s, but his schooling in South Africa under Milner, dreaming with the rest of the Kindergarten of a peaceful world order firmly resting on the great ‘quadrilateral’ of the white Dominions, had possibly made him more desperate than most to keep faith with a dream that was dissolving in front of his eyes.
Milner had died in 1929, but his Kindergarten was still there, and through it the religio Milneriana still made itself felt in political circles. By the end of his life Milner had abandoned his dream of a supra-national imperial government for a looser ‘moral’ union, but as his disciples went their different ways, some clinging to the idea of a world government, some to a vague internationalism, some to an embryonic Commonwealth and others to die-hard imperialism, it was notable how many like Ware refused to see the danger that was emerging in Hitler’s Germany.
Geoffrey Dawson, the ‘appeasing’ editor of The Times through the 1930s, Philip Kerr, now Marquess of Lothian and soon to be Britain’s Ambassador to the USA, even Leo Amery, an imperial pragmatist when it came to central and eastern Europe: Ware was among old and influential friends in his stance, but it still seems remarkable that a man who saw what was happening in Germany at first hand could have kept his head in the sand as long as he did. It was partly age, perhaps; it was partly that he had lived so long with the carnage of the Great War that another must have seemed unthinkable; it was partly the optimism of an idealist and partly the blindness of the zealot, but whatever the reasons he seemed incapable of seeing that his dream of the healing role of the Imperial War Graves Commission was quite simply a dream. ‘Yes, here is heard truly the voice of the Dead,’ he told his listeners on the indissoluble ties binding Empire and its allies together – an address given to an audience that within little more than ten years would see those same ‘old allies’, Italy and Romania, siding with Hitler’s Germany, Japan overrunning Britain’s Empire in the East, Salazar’s Portugal shamelessly profiteering with Nazi Germany, America neutral and – most unimaginable of all to the Francophile Ware – Britain and Vichy France at war in those same doubly-sacred Holy Places of the Middle East that had filled his Armistice ‘Vigil’ addresses: ‘friends speak to friends of a peace that cannot be broken; for, so long as there is any generous impulse in the soul of man, these silent cities of our Dead make impossible any hostile contact between our Allies and the descendants of these Dead’.
I am ‘tired of this gush and pretence’, one old American Civil War brigadier protested against the sentimentalising fictions of ‘healing’ and ‘reconciliation’, outraged that anyone should believe that his own Union dead were the same as Rebel dead. It is uncertain if Ware ever really acknowledged the force of this kind of clear-eyed hostility. It was, in one sense, relatively easy for Britain to forgive an enemy that had never set foot on her soil, but it was asking a lot to expect a Belgium or France that had seen their country occupied, their cities reduced to rubble and their civilians murdered in their thousands, to rise to the same heights of sympathy.
It was asking even more to expect that the victors and the defeated should see their war cemeteries in the same way or hear the same message from their dead. It was all very well for Ware to invoke the authority of the Empire’s fallen in his search for peace, but what did that peace mean to a German army that believed it had never been beaten in the field? What did the ‘tongues’ of men who fought and died so fiercely in the final weeks of 1918 say to the survivors of an army that had been humiliated by the peace forced on Germany at Versailles?
The answers were coming thick and fast in the late 1930s – the Saar and the creation of a new German air force in 1935, the reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936, the Anschluss and Sudetenland in 1938 – but they only left Ware more convinced of the Commission’s role in securing peace. In 1935 the Anglo-French Mixed Committee, set up to oversee their mutual concerns, had been extended to include Germany, and over the next four years Ware lost no opportunity, either in Britain or at conferences in Germany, to preach the doctrine of peace and the sacred trust that the dead of both sides had bequeathed to the living. ‘It was like trying to turn back the tide,’ the Commission’s historian – seldom Ware’s sternest critic – wrote of these efforts,
He did not realise that the Nazis must have taken his stress on the horror of war as an indication, like the Oxford ‘Peace Vote’, that Britain would not fight. He did not seem to notice that they were perverting ceremonies of remembrance into occasions for banner-waving nationalism and the glorification of German arms. In Belgium they knew better. After German ex-servicemen had laid a wreath at the Menin Gate, the ribbon with the offending swastika was stolen.
It would be absurd to single out Ware from a decade of appeasement, but if the history of war graves teaches one lesson it is that while the ‘tongues of the dead’ might say what they must, the living will hear what they want. It seemed entirely axiomatic to Ware that a grave – especially a Commission grave – was an irresistible argument for peace, but from the German soldiers who desecrated those same graves in Greece in the Second World War down through Eire and Palestine to the destruction of Commission cemeteries in Libya during the ‘Arab Spring’, the British soldier’s headstone has carried a very different meaning.
Even within the Empire, too, the commemoration of the dead could be as divisive as it was healing. Within weeks of the first landings in April 1915, Gallipoli had become ‘sacred ground’ to Australians, but in a country split between those who had volunteered and those who had not – mainly Irish Catholics it was believed – the annual commemoration of the campaign on Anzac Day became a reminder of old sores as well as a celebration of nationhood.fn19
During the war, two plebiscites on conscription, narrowly won by the ‘antis’, had divided the country almost exactly down the middle and the Australian practice of recording not just the dead but the ‘returned’ on their war memorials at home gave a name and a face to both ‘hero’ and ‘shirker’. It was rumoured
that over ninety per cent of the Australian Imperial Force had, in fact, voted against conscription, but the stigma attached to those who had not fought effectively politicised the one day ‘of any holiness’ in the Australian calendar along fissure lines that would still be there when the country next went to war.fn20
Ware could hardly have been unconscious of other currents that eddied around the base of the Cenotaph – the calls in Parliament for an end to the Armistice Day commemorations, the White Poppies, the notorious Oxford debate – but nothing ever seems to have dented his faith. There is an historical gap between an imperialist and post-imperialist age that makes his kind of belief hard now to understand, and yet in the end it is not so much what he believed that distances us from him as the chasm which separates the visionary from the dull clay with which he has to work. ‘His legs bestrid the ocean; his rear’d arm/ Crested the world,’ Shakespeare’s exultant Cleopatra says of the dead Mark Antony, metamorphosing a defeated soldier into a figure of divine majesty,
His voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
He was as rattling thunder … in his livery
Walk’d crowns and crownets, realms and islands were
As plates dropp’d from his pocket …
Think you there was, or might be, such a man
As this I dream’d of?
What Ware had dreamed was what Cleopatra had dreamed, and if Dolabella’s answer – ‘Gentle madame, no’ – is the reductive answer of the man-in-the-street down the ages, it is not the imaginative truth anyone remembers. The same is true of Ware and his achievements. The cemeteries of the Great War might not have worked the alchemy that he hoped or sealed an Empire’s unity, but as an aspiration or dream his ‘Silent Cities’ remain a kind of Camelot of the Dead, a mythic evocation of those human possibilities that a Dolabella or Office of Works never sees.