The Company March did not provoke any applause - I expect the enemy had heard it too often. We embarked on national anthems. The Marsellaise was but a success d’estime, drawing a perfunctory shrapnel or so, but when the band gave them and the whole accusing arch of heaven the Brabanconne the enemy were much moved.
‘I told you they had no taste,’ said a young faun on a rock shelf; ‘still, it shows the swine have a conscience.’
But some folk never know when to stop; besides, it was time for the working-parties to be coming in off the roads. So an announcement was made from high overhead to our unseen audience that the performance was ended and they need not applaud any longer. It was put a little more curtly than this, and it sounded exactly like ears being boxed.
The silence spread with the great shadows of the rock towers across the snow: there was tapping and clinking and an occasional stone-slide far up the mountain side; the aerial railway carried on as usual; the working parties knocked off, and piled tools, and the night shifts began.
The last I saw of the joyous children was a cluster of gnome-like figures a furlong overhead, standing, for there was no visible foothold, on nothing. They separated, and went about their jobs as single dots, moving up or sideways on the face of the rock, till they disappeared into it like ants. Their real work lay ‘only a few steps higher up’ where the observation-posts, the sentries, the supports and all the rest live on ground compared with which the baboon-tracks round the Mess and the barracks are level pavement. Those rounds must be taken in every weather and light; that is, made at eleven thousand feet, with death for company under each foot, and the width of a foot on each side, at every step of the most uneventful round. Frosty glazed rock where a blunt- nailed boot slips once and no more; mountain blasts round the corner of ledges before the body is braced to them; a knob of rotten shale crumbling beneath the hand; an ankle twisted at the bottom of a ninety-foot rift; a roaring descent of rocks loosened by snow from some corner the sun has undermined through the day - these are a few of the risks they face going from and returning to the coffee and gramophones at the Mess, ‘in the ordinary discharge of their duties.’
A turn of the downward road shut them and their world from sight - never to be seen again by my eyes, but the hot youth, the overplus of strength, the happy, unconsidered insolence of it all, the gravity, beautifully maintained over the coffee cups, but relaxed when the band played to the enemy, and the genuine, boyish kindness, will remain with me. But, behind it all, fine as the steel wire ropes, implacable as the mountain, one was conscious of the hardness of their race.
THE TRENTINO FRONT
June 20 1917
IT DOES NOT NEED an expert to distinguish the notes of the several Italian fronts. One picks them up a long way behind the lines, from the troops in rest or the traffic on the road. Even behind Browning’s lovely Asolo where, you will remember, Pippa passed, seventy-six years since, announcing that ‘All’s right with the world,’ one felt the tightening in the air.
The officer, too, explained frankly above his map:
‘See where our frontier west of the Dolomites dips south in this V-like spearhead. That’s the Trentino. Garibaldi’s volunteers were in full possession of it in our War of Independence. Prussia was our ally then against Austria, but Prussia made peace when it suited her - I’m talking of 1864 - and we had to accept the frontier that she and Austria laid down. The Italian frontier is a bad one everywhere - Prussia and Austria took care of that - but the Trentino section is specially bad.’
Mist wrapped the plateau we were climbing. The mountains had changed into rounded, almost barrel- shaped heights, steep above dry valleys. The roads were many and new, but the lorries held their pace; the usual old man and young boy were there to see to that. Scotch moors, red uplands, scarred with trenches and punched with shell-holes, a confusion of hills without colour and, in the mist, almost without shape, rose and dropped behind us. They hid the troops in their folds - always awaiting troops - and the trenches multiplied themselves high and low on their sides.
We descended a mountain smashed into rubbish from head to heel, but still preserving the outline, like wrinkles on a forehead, of trenches that had followed its contours. A narrow, shallow ditch (it might have been a water-main) ran vertically up the hill, cutting the faded trenches at right angles.
‘That was where our men stood before the Austrians were driven back in their last push - the Asiago push, don’t you call it? It took the Austrians ten days to work half-way down from the top of the mountain. Our men drove that trench straight up the hill, as you see. Then they climbed, and the Austrians broke. It’s not as bad as it looks, because, in this sort of work, if the enemy uphill misses his footing, he rolls down among your men, but if you stumble, you only slip back among your friends.’
‘What did it cost you?’ I whispered.
‘A good deal. And on that mountain across the gorge - but the mist won’t let you see it - our men fought for a week - mostly without water. The Austrians were the first people to lay out a line of twelve-inch shell-holes on a mountain’s side to serve as trenches. It’s almost a regulation trick on all the fronts now, but it’s annoying.’
He told tales of the long, bitter fight when the Austrians thought, till General Cadorna showed them otherwise, they had the plains to the south at their mercy. I should not care to be an Austrian with the Boche behind me and the exercitus Romanus in front.
It was the quietest of fronts and the least ostentatious of armies. It lived in great towns among forests where we found snow again in dirty, hollow-flanked drifts, that were giving up all the rubbish and refuse that winter had hidden. Labour battalions dealt with the stuff, and there were no smells. Other gangs mended shell- holes with speed; the lorries do not like being checked.
Another township, founded among stones, stood empty except for the cooks and a bored road-mender or two. The population was up the hill digging and blasting; or in wooded park-like hollows of lowland. Battalions slipped like shadows through the mists between the pines. When we reached the edge of everything, there was, as usual, nothing whatever, except uptorn breadths of grass and an ‘unhealthy’ house - the battered core of what had once been human - with rain-water dripping through the starred ceilings. The view from it included the sight of the Austrian trenches on pale slopes and the noise of Austrian guns - not lazy ones this time, but eager, querulous, almost questioning.
There was no reply from our side. ‘If they want to find out anything, they can come and look,’ said the officer.
One speculated how much the men behind those guns would have given for a seat in the car through the next few hours that took us along yet another veiled line of arms. But perhaps by now the Austrians have learned.
The mist thickened around us, and the far shoulders of mountains, and the suddenly-seen masses of men who loomed out of it and were gone. We headed upwards till the mists met the clouds, by a steeper road than any we had used before. It ended in a rock gallery where immense guns , set to a certain point when a certain hour should come, waited in the dark.
‘Mind how you walk! It’s rather a sharp turn there.’
The gallery came out on a naked space, and a vertical drop of hundreds of feet of striated rock tufted with heath in bloom. At the wall-foot the actual mountain, hardly less steep, began, and, far below that again, flared outward till it became more reasonable slopes, descending in shoulders and knolls to the immense and ancient plains four thousand feet below.
The mists obscured the northern views, but to the southward one traced the courses of broad rivers, the thin shadows of aqueducts, and the piled outlines of city after city whose single past was worth more than the future of all the barbarians clamouring behind the ranges that were pointed out to us through the observatory windows. The officer finished his tales of year-long battles and bombardments among them.
‘And that nick in the skyline to the right of that smooth crest under the clouds is a mine we sprung,’ said
he.
The observation shutter behind its fringe of heather-bells closed softly. They do everything without noise in this hard and silent land.
The New Italy
Setting aside the incredible labour of every phase of the Italian war, it is this hardness that impresses one at every turn - from the stripped austerity of General Cadorna’s headquarters, which might be a monastery or a laboratory, down to the wayside muleteer, white with dust, but not a bead of sweat on him, working the ladder-like mountain trails behind his animal, or the single sentry lying-out like a panther pressed against a hump of rock, and still as the stone except for his shadowed eyes. There is no pomp, parade, or gallery play anywhere, nor even, as far as can be seen, a desire to turn the best side of things to the light. ‘Here,’ everybody seems to imply, ‘is the work we do. Here are the men and the mechanisms we use. Draw your own conclusions.’ No one is hurried or over-pressed, and the ‘excitable Latin’ of the Boche legend does not appear. One finds, instead, a balanced and elastic system, served by passionate devotion, which saves and spares in the smallest details as wisely and with as broad a view as it drenches the necessary position with the blood of twenty thousand men.
Yet it is not inhuman nor oppressive, nor does it claim to be holy. It works as the Italian, or the knife, works - smoothly and quietly, up to the hilt, maybe. The natural temperateness and open-air existence of the people, their strict training in economy, and their readiness to stake life lightly on personal issues have evolved this system or, maybe, their secular instinct for administration had been reborn under the sword.
When one considers the whole massed scheme of their work one leans to the first opinion; when one looks at the faces of their generals, chiselled out by war to the very cameos of their ancestors under the Roman eagles, one inclines to the second.
Italy, too, has a larger number than most countries of men returned from money-getting in the western republics, who have settled down at home again. (They are called Americanos. They have used the new world, but love the old.) Theirs is a curiously spread influence which, working upon the national quickness of mind and art, makes, I should imagine, for invention and faculty. Add to this the consciousness of the New Italy created by its own immense efforts and necessities - a thing as impossible as dawn to express in words or to miss in the air - and one begins to understand what sort of future is opening for this oldest and youngest among the nations. With thrift, valour, temperance, and an idea, one goes far.
They are fighting now, as all civilisation fights, against the essential devildom of the Boche, which they know better than we do in England, because they were once his ally.
To that end they give, not wasting or sparing, the whole of their endevour. But they are under no illusions as to guarantees of safety necessary after the War, without which their own existence cannot be secured. They fight for these also, because, like the French, they are logical and face facts to the end.
Their difficulties, general and particular, are many. But Italy accepts these burdens and others in just the same spirit as she accepts the cave-riddled plateaux, the mountains, the unstable snows and rocks and the inconceivable toil that they impose upon her arms. They are hard, but she is harder’.
Yet, what man can set out to judge anything? In an hotel waiting for a midnight train, an officer was speaking of some of d’Annunzio’s poetry that has literally helped to move mountains in this war. He explained an allusion in it by a quotation from Dante. An old porter, waiting for our luggage, dozed crumpled up in a chair by the veranda. As he caught the long swing of the verse, his eyes opened! His chin came out of his shirt-front, till he sat like a little hawk on a perch, attentive to each line, his foot softly following its cadence.
THE GRAVES OF THE FALLEN
His only son having been killed in 1915 at the age of eighteen, Kipling was a member of the War Graves Commission, and wrote this 16 page pamphlet The Graves of the Fallen. Kipling was asked to compose epitaphs to accompany the instructional booklet. Over the next few years he made several tours of the battlefields, Kipling and his wife never found the grave for their son John.
The original illustrations are provided in this edition, along with the text of this important war document.
CONTENTS
NOTE
WHAT THE COMMISSION IS
ITS HISTORY
ITS FINANCE
THE CEMETERIES
THEIR DESIGN AND CARE
INSCRIPTIONS, REGISTERS, AND PLANNING
MEMORIALS TO THE MISSING
GRAVES OF INDIAN TROOPS
TREATMENT OF ISOLATED GRAVES
REMOVAL OF BODIES
BATTLE MEMORIALS
SUGGESTIONS FROM THE PUBLIC
THE PROGRESS OF THE WORK
Note
This Descriptive Account of the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission was written by Mr. Rudyard Kipling at the Commission s request. The Illustrations showing the cemeteries and memorials as they will appear when completed are by Mr. Douglas Macpherson.
What the Commission is
THE Commission consists of: —
The Secretary of State for War. The Secretary of State for the Colonies. The Secretary of State for India. The First Commissioner of Works.
The Hon. Sir George Perley, K.C.M.G. (appointed by the Government of Canada). The Right Hon. Andrew Fisher, P.C. (appointed by the Government of Australia). The Hon. Sir Thomas Mackenzie, K.C.M.G. (appointed by the Government of New Zealand).
The Right Hon. W. P. Schreiner, P.C., K.C., C.M.G. (appointed by the Government
of the Union of South Africa). The Hon. Sir Edgar Bowring (appointed by the Government of Newfoundland).
and the following members who (accepted the invitation to help in this work, and were appointed by Royal Warrant: —
Sir William Garstin,. G.C.M.G., G.B.E. Mr. Harry Goslings C.H., J.P. Mr. Rudyard Kipling.
General Sir C. F. N. Macready, G.C.M.G., K.C.B. General Sir Herbert C. O. Plumer, G.C.B., G.C.M.G., G.C.V.O. Admiral Sir Edmund S. Poe, G.C.V.O., K.C.B. Major-General Fabian Ware, C.B., C.M.G.
All letters should be addressed to the Secretary, Imperial War Graves Commission, Winchester House, St. James’s Square, S.W. I ; and not to any individual member of the Commission.
Its History
THE origin and development of the Imperial War Graves Commission is very simple. In the first days of the war the different armies engaged created organisations, under the direction of the War Office, to register, mark, and tend the graves of British soldiers, as well as to answer inquiries from relatives, and, where possible, to send them photographs of the graves. Later, a National Committee was constituted, which, on the suggestion of the Prince of Wales, who took a keen personal interest in the work, was expanded into an Imperial Commission, representing the Dominions, India, the Colonies, the fighting Services, Labour, the great public departments interested, and the British Red Cross, which latter had supplied, as it still does to a considerable extent, the funds for photographing and planting the graves.
Its Finance
THE finance of the Commission is Imperial. All parts of the Empire have generously and unreservedly promised to bear their share of the expenses. The Imperial War Conference, having considered the proposals of the Commission, passed the following resolution on June 17, 1918 : “The Conference desires to place on record its appreciation of the Labours of the Imperial War Graves Commission, and is in favour of the cost of carrying out the decisions of the Commission being borne by the respective Governments in proportion to the numbers of the graves of their dead.”
The Cemeteries
WITH the growth of the war the Commission’s work naturally covered every part of the world where the men of the Empire had served and died — from the vast and known cities of our dead in Flanders and France to hidden and outlying burial-grounds of a few score at the ends of the earth. These resting-places are situated on every conceivable site — on bare hills flayed by years of bat
tle, in orchards and meadows, beside populous towns or little villages, in jungle-glades, at coast ports, in far-away islands, among |desert sands, and desolate ravines. It would be as impossible as undesirable to reduce them all to any uniformity of aspect by planting or by architecture.
In a war where the full strength of nations was used without respect of persons, no difference could be made between the graves of officers or men. Yet some sort of central idea was needed that should symbolise our common sacrifice wherever our dead might be laid ; and it was realised, above all, that each cemetery and individual grave should be made as permanent as man’s art could devise.
Their Design and Care
The Commission instructed Sir Frederic Kenyon, K.C.B., to report! how these aims could best I be realised, and he, after consulting very fully with the relatives, representatives of the Services, religion and art, and knowing the practical limitations, particularly in obtaining labour, for carrying out such a vast undertaking, recommended that in each cemetery there should stand a Cross of Sacrifice, and an altarlike Stone of Remembrance, and that the headstones or the graves should be of uniform shape and size. Stone crosses to succeed the temporary wooden crosses were at first suggested, but crosses of the small size necessitated by the nearness of the graves to each other do not allow sufficient space for the men’s names and the inscriptions, and are also by their shape too fragile and too subject to the action of frost and weather for enduring use. Plain headstones, measuring 2 ft. 6 in. by I ft. 3 in., were therefore chosen, upon which the Cross or other religious symbol of the dead man’s faith could be carved and his Regimental badge fully displayed. The Regiments have been consulted as to the designs of these badges, some of which have now been approved and are ready for engraving as soon as experiments which are being carried on have shown how to overcome the difficulties of dealing with such numbers. In due time, then, wherever a man may be buried, from East Africa to North Russia, his headstone will carry his Regimental badge, identifiable the world over.
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 872