by David Crane
There must have been another life – a cottage in the country, a wife, two children, the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, Gloucestershire Rural Community Council – but his wife’s rather puzzled response to a request for information after his death says it all: his life was, she said, his work. Before the war he had written that for Milner work was his ‘mistress’ – not, as it turned out, the whole truth – but for Ware it was. It, the work of the Commission, the Canadian Prime Minister said, was all thanks to him and he was right. His methods were not always over-scrupulous, but the world needs its St Bernard as well as its St Francis. He did not achieve all he set out to do but that is no more than saying that he was a man of his time. The apostle of Empire would have hated to see a separate Canadian or an Australian Unknown Soldier diluting the imperial significance of the tomb in Westminster Abbey, but the author of The Worker and His Country would have seen it coming and found a way of dealing with it. For a fierce idealist and visionary, he was an unusually skilled politician; for a born autocrat, he was a smooth performer in committees; for a natural leader, he was, as he once told the New Zealand High Commissioner, a willing servant to six masters. And for an ardent patriot who had dedicated the greater part of his life to making an immense corner of a foreign field forever England, what compromise or symbolism could be more apposite than that enshrined in the tomb of the Unknown Warrior? A soldier of the Empire, resting in a coffin of English oak among England’s Kings and Queens – and the soil in which he is buried? – soil from the battlefields of the Western Front. A corner of Thorney Island shall be forever Flanders.
Il Diavolo Incarnato. Paolo Uccello’s equestrian memorial to Sir John Hawkwood, the notorious fourteenth-century English mercenary and scourge of Italy commemorated by a grateful city in Florence’s Duomo.
Gallipoli. A soldier salutes at the grave prepared for the remains of New Zealand dead, killed in the savage fighting for Chunuk Bair on 8 August 1915. After a gap of five years identification was often impossible, but the bones have been arranged in a forlorn attempt to give an individual integrity to each burial.
Thiepval, 1 August 1932. Fabian Ware – ‘The Great Commemorator’ and moving spirit of the Imperial War Graves Commission – with the Prince of Wales at the unveiling of Lutyens’s Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. Lutyens can be seen in the background on the left.
Vendresse Cemetery, south of Laon in the Department of the Aisne, France. In its utter simplicity and pastoral quiet, perhaps the archetypal Commission cemetery. It contains the graves of more than seven hundred men killed, principally, in the fighting of 1914 and 1918, of whom only 327 have names.
‘Have you news of my boy Jack?’ . Rudyard Kipling and his son John, killed at the age of eighteen at the Battle of Loos in 1915. As both the Poet of Empire and bereaved father who never recovered from his son’s loss, Kipling enjoyed an immense influence as the Imperial War Graves Commission’s first literary advisor.
Armed for battle. William Nicholls’s caricature of the Commission architects Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker, who had badly fallen out over the building of New Delhi and brought their differences with them to France.
The official war artist Francis Dodd’s portrait of his friend Charles Holden, the most austere of the Principal Architects in charge of the cemeteries along the old Western Front.
Sir Edwin Lutyens’s Serre Road Cemetery, No. 2. Just one of the seemingly interminable line of cemeteries that mark the Battle of the Somme in 1916, and the 1918 German spring advance over the same bitterly won ground. The cemetery was begun in 1917 and enlarged after the war as the process of concentration began. Almost 5,000 of the 7,127 burials are unidentified.
Etaples. A view back to the cemetery entrance, showing one of the two arched pylons, with the perpetually motionless stone flags that Lutyens had wanted to employ on his Whitehall Cenotaph.
Etaples, 1919: Life and death. Sir John Lavery’s beautiful painting of the great base-camp cemetery, and in the distance a passing train. Fabian Ware had been determined that trains should be able to pause here for passengers to pay their moment’s respect to the cemetery’s 11,000 dead.
Lutyens’s Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, the greatest and most challenging of all the Commission’s works. On it are inscribed the names of 72,085 soldiers who were killed on the Somme and Ancre and have no known grave. On the slope below are the graves of 300 British dead and alongside them and visible here, of 300 French.
A stonemason works on the headstone of a Canadian soldier buried in France. Simplicity, equality and uniformity were the guiding principles of its design but nothing in the Commission’s history would cause such bitter debate.
The devastated town of Ypres, as the architect Reginald Blomfield first saw it in 1919, when he began preparations for his great Memorial to the missing of the Ypres Salient. The war-artist Will Longstaff attended the unveiling ceremony in 1927, and the result was his visionary ‘Menin Gate at Midnight’, with its ghost army marching out over the same moonlit landscape across which almost every British and Empire army unit had once gone into battle.
‘These intolerably nameless names.’ The central arch of Blomfield’s Menin Gate, where the names of almost 55,000 ‘officers and men who fell in the Ypres Salient but to whom the fortunes of war denied the known and honoured burial given to their comrades in death’ are recorded.
Sacred Places. Lone Pine Cemetery, Turkey. Nowhere have the Imperial War Graves Commission Cemeteries and the battles they commemorate played so important a part in the creation of national identities as here in Gallipoli. The Lone Pine Memorial records the names of almost 5,000 Australian and New Zealand soldiers who have no known grave.
Etaples. The funeral of a St John’s Ambulance Brigade nursing sister, Annie Bain, killed in an air raid on 1 June 1918.
The Commission headstone over her grave. She lies among the 10,816 who are buried here.
Cultural differences. Käthe Kollwitz’s deeply moving ‘Mourning Parents’, a portrait of grief and a monument to her son, Peter, killed in the early, heady days of war and buried here in the Vladslo German war cemetery.
The graves of French dead from Verdun, and in the background the monstrous Douaumont ossuary.
Tyne Cot Cemetery, near Ypres. The work of Sir Herbert Baker, and the largest of the Commission cemeteries in Belgium. In the foreground can be seen Lutyens’s Stone of Remembrance, and beyond it and the original scattering of graves, covered in stone and surmounted by Blomfield’s Cross of Sacrifice, the German bunkhouse that gave the cemetery its name.
11 November 1920. The funeral procession of the Unknown Warrior, an outpouring of national grief and one of the great cathartic moments in the post-War history of a Britain coming to terms with its immense losses.
‘Done at dinner.’ Lutyens’s rapid sketch of a monument for the Peace Day Celebrations of July 1919. Originally made of wood and plaster, it immediately became such a popular focus of national mourning that the Government decided to replicate it in stone on the same site in Whitehall.
Armistice Day 1920, the unveiling of Lutyens’s cenotaph, or ‘empty tomb’. ‘The majestic unveiling ceremony by the king … is part of our national history,’ wrote Lutyens. ‘My hope is that, as the years pass into centuries, the cenotaph will endure as a sacred symbol of remembrance.’
Sandham Memorial Chapel, Burghclere. The great centrepiece of Stanley Spencer’s extraordinary commemoration of the War, painted for the Oratory commissioned by the Behrends in memory of Henry Sandham who died in 1919 from an illness contracted during the Macedonian Campaign.
FOOTNOTES
Prologue
fn1 In Brussels, there is a Waterloo Monument over the graves of fifteen officers and a warrant officer, but these bodies had been moved there from abandoned cemeteries, and it was unveiled seventy-five years after the battle. High on the ramparts above Corunna, the tomb of Sir John Moore also comes closer to expectations, but even this – the grave of the
man who did as much as anyone to drag the British Army out of the morass of its late eighteenth-century condition – owed more to Spanish punctilio than it did to the gratitude of a parliament more interested in making politics of his death than honouring his memory in the field.
3. With an Eye to the Future
fn2 ‘Talking about Gods,’ Ware flippantly added for his old chief’s benefit, ‘when the Turcos saw the yellow fumes slowly advancing towards them they thought it was a Gin and legged it!’ This was the crisis that was redeemed in large part by the heroics of the 1st Canadian Division in a series of desperate actions commemorated by Frederick Chapman Clemesha’s St Julien Memorial at ‘Vancouver Corner’, north-east of Ypres, an 11-metre-high single shaft of Vosges granite surmounted by a ‘Brooding Soldier’, head bowed, reversed arms. It bears the inscription: THIS COLUMN MARKS THE BATTLEFIELD WHERE 18,000 CANADIANS ON THE BRITISH LEFT WITHSTOOD THE FIRST GERMAN GAS ATTACKS THE 22nd – 24th OF APRIL. 2,000 FELL AND HERE LIE BURIED. ‘The Canadians paid heavily for their sacrifice,’ Marshal Foch declared at the unveiling ceremony in 1923, ‘and the corner of earth on which this Memorial of gratitude and piety rises has been bathed in their blood. They wrote here the first page in that Book of Glory which is the history of their participation in the war.’
fn3 Robert Graves, inevitably, had a rather different take on it. According to Graves, Gladstone had only volunteered in the first place because those same mourning tenants threatened to chuck him in the duck pond if he didn’t.
4. Consolidation
fn4 This was the same Earle whose brother had been reported killed in 1914. His own personal experience of the war was improbably enhanced in 1918 when a fragment of an anti-aircraft shell landed on him in St James’s Park.
fn5 ‘It was all Australia to me,’ Kipling, the poet of Empire, had written of the homesick scent of wattle (Acacia) for an Australian volunteer in the Boer War. ‘All I had found or missed, Every face I was crazy to see, And every woman I’d kissed: All that I shouldn’t ha’ done, God knows! (As he knows I’ll do it again) The smell of the wattle round Lichtenberg, Riding in, in the rain!’
fn6 The horrors had been, if anything, worse at Gallipoli, where in the fierce summer heat the state of a bloated and blackened corpse often meant that a burial party simply could not bear to rescue identity discs.
fn7 The Office of Works had not forgotten old enmities either. ‘My Dear Ware,’ Lionel Earle wrote on 13 December 1916, an average enough sort of day on the Western Front: ‘It has been brought to my notice that Colonel Stobart of your department, whose staff occupy Room 21 on the ground floor of Winchester House, insists on open fireplaces being used as well as radiators. As this is absolutely contrary to the instructions issued by order of the First Commissioner, I feel bound to call your attention unofficially in the first place, to the deviation from the rule, and shall have to do so officially unless I am absolutely convinced that it is necessary to disregard the rule in this instance. I have various reports before me as to the temperatures of the room at various times, and I find that, even at 8.10 a.m., the radiators were hot and the temperature stood at 60 [degrees].’ Earle, himself, was the hardy soul who had had to flee the bathroom in his French inn when he found a cockroach in it.
7. Opposition
fn8 There was one abortive attempt at compromise when at a private meeting with Balfour (another of the Cecil clan) it was agreed that he should present designs to their artistic advisors for an alternative cruciform gravestone. There was a very strong instinct within the Commission to rest its argument on principles, but nothing could have made the aesthetic case for their own simple headstone better than the squat and bulbous confection that looked as if it might have been the product of a game of ‘Consequences’ among Balfour’s ‘Souls’. ‘I should much regret its adoption, both on artistic grounds and as a matter of principle,’ Kenyon responded to his design. ‘Artistically it seems to me thoroughly ugly.’ It was open house at the IWGC, with Commissioners, artistic advisors and Principal Architects competing in their abuse. MacDonald Gill did at least made an effort to find ‘a good word for it’ before giving up the attempt as impossible, but from Lutyens to Baker, from General Cox of the India office to South Africa’s Reginald Blankenberg and Sir Alfred Mond, there was no such charity: ‘extraordinarily ugly’ … ‘ugly and ungainly’ … ‘appalling’ … ‘disastrous’ … ‘a humpty-dumpty design’ … ‘a bottle’ … ‘a sort of thing you shoot at’ – just the sort of thing, in fact, that you could expect, as Blomfield predictably reminded the Commission, the moment that you didn’t leave everything to your Principal Architects.
fn9 It does not change the argument but it is, sadly, no longer true. Raymond Asquith, the Prime Minister’s son, is buried between two fellow officers in Guillemont Cemetery, which was constructed after the war. Lieutenant the Honourable Edward Tennant is buried in the same row, but there is no Simon.
fn10 It is ironic that a rare beneficiary of Commission flexibility on burial should in fact be a Cecil. Lady Violet Cecil – a Cecil by marriage, and a reluctant one at that – had lost her son at Villers-Cotterêts in the early fighting of September 1914. On the death of her husband she had married Lord Milner, with whom, it seems, she had been in love for twenty years. In 1922 a distressed Ware wrote to Milner to say that he had received a request from the families of the three officers buried with George Cecil in a single grave known as the ‘Guards’ Grave’. They wanted the bodies exhumed and reburied with their comrades. This could not be done without moving all four. What, Ware wanted to know, would Lady Milner wish? It is hard to imagine that anyone but Milner’s wife would have got this letter, but on 11 April 1922 the four bodies were ‘carried under a Union Jack to the Guards’ Cemetery where a service was held by the Chaplain’. Lady Milner visited her son’s grave every year until the Second World War made it impossible.
8. The Task
fn11 The Kiplings did not live to know it, but their son’s body was eventually identified by a process of detection and elimination some seventy years later. Another ‘Unknown’ was given a name.
fn12 During the fighting in Mesopotamia, at least one unit found its own macabre solution to the problem. The Methodist chaplain with the Leicestershires (the father of ‘E.P.’ and of Frank Thompson, executed by Bulgarian fascists and buried in a ditch after a botched SOE operation in 1944) remembered how his battalion would dig a ‘dud grave’ alongside a new burial, remove the pin from a Mills bomb, place the bomb carefully in the ‘grave’, weight it with earth, and retire to the nearest cover to await the grave-robbers and the explosion.
9. Completion
fn13 The redevelopment of London’s Docklands has given Lutyens’s Mercantile Memorial a second chance, though it has never really recovered from its miserable start. It offers a classic illustration of the snobberies and class assumptions that the Commission was up against in its work in Britain. Abroad, all could be treated equally: at home, Blomfield advised the Office of Works, men should be ‘classed according to their occupations’ and commemorated accordingly in some appropriate place. On this basis, the Fine Arts Commission suggested Tower Hill for Lutyens’s memorial as the area was ‘devoted to sea-going occupations’ with the result that it is the least well known of all the great First World War memorials. The decision infuriated Lutyens. The thousand men commemorated on it deserved the same treatment as everyone else, he insisted, not some ‘hole in the corner because they happen to have been low in social status’. Let the beggars be commemorated in Parliament, he added, and ‘the Earls at Shoreditch or better to the Tower’.
fn14 It is interesting that the village memorial of Lydford, examined in great detail by Clive Aslet in War Memorial, reflects the economic realities of rural life that lay behind Ware’s sense of Empire. Two of the names on it, Mancel Clark and Samuel Voyzey, were Lydford boys who had emigrated to Canada and fought and died with Canadian battalions on the Somme.
fn15 The relationship between the C
ommission and its constituent members was intricate. The Dominions and government of India paid for their separate memorials but the Commission were responsible for the names of the missing inscribed on them.
fn16 A fascinating addition to the standard list is Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928), a murder story set on Armistice Day in a London military club. The plot depends on the fact that the body can be moved at precisely 11 a.m. on 11 November because the whole world will be at the Cenotaph. No civilian in the story can believe anyone could be so callously indifferent to feeling and no ex-officer is in the least surprised; they are broke, unemployed, mentally disturbed and have had enough of all the Commemorative ‘gush’.