The Last Veteran

by Peter Parker

  Marching four abreast, the rest of the Allied representatives passed through Belgravia, heading south to cross the river over Vauxhall Bridge, through Kennington and Lambeth and the park where the Imperial War Museum would later stand. From there, they marched back north over the river via Westminster Bridge, past the Houses of Parliament, turning up Whitehall and saluting the Cenotaph as they passed. They then wheeled left through the south-west corner of a packed Trafalgar Square to go down the Mall to salute the King at Buckingham Palace. After this, the column marched along Constitution Hill to Hyde Park Corner, then along the south side of Hyde Park, ending up at Kensington Gardens, where everyone dispersed. As impressive as this parade of living soldiers was, it was as nothing compared with what might have been seen if the dead of the Empire had been able to march past the Cenotaph in their place. Someone made the calculation that if the dead were lined up four abreast in a continuous column, it would take them three and a half days to pass by. If they had set out from the north of England, the first of these ghosts would have reached the Cenotaph just as the last of them was leaving Durham.

  The Victory Parade was followed by all manner of public entertainments in the London parks, including open-air concerts and theatrical performances, the climax of which was a massive firework display in which likenesses of the Royal Family, the Prime Minister and British military leaders were pyrotechnically created. In spite of some complaints that the money squandered on celebrating the peace would be better spent on alleviating the problems of unemployed former soldiers, similar peace celebrations took place all over the country, with parades passing through bunting-draped streets lined with cheering crowds.

  Not that such events always went off smoothly. When mean-spirited local authorities in Luton refused to allow a group of ex-servicemen to hold a memorial service in a municipal park, the town clerk’s office was torched and firemen were forcibly prevented by incensed veterans from approaching the town hall as it was gutted. The army had to be called in to restore order, the entire town was placed under military occupation for four days, and the bill for damages was reckoned at some £200,000. Hopes that a Peace Day would pacify disgruntled former servicemen were further dashed at Chertsey, where several hundred of them refused to take part in the celebrations because they hadn’t yet secured their pension rights. Similar discontent was felt in Wales, where at Merthyr Tydfil jubilant celebrations were replaced by a sombre service of thanksgiving attended by 22,000 people, followed by a meeting at which a resolution was passed calling for higher pensions for former servicemen and their dependants. In Manchester unemployed servicemen held their own parade, carrying placards demanding better treatment. Elsewhere former soldiers boycotted the celebrations. They felt they had done quite enough marching during their war service and certainly weren’t going to turn out on parade for what they regarded as a display of militarism.

  Whatever the veterans’ feelings may have been, those who had come to mourn their dead evidently regarded Peace Day as worthwhile. The Victory March had no sooner passed the Cenotaph than crowds of the bereaved surged back and began laying flowers and wreaths once more. This may have been a civic nuisance, and may have aroused the fury of the Church Times, which declared that ecclesiastical buildings rather than this gimcrack secular shrine were the proper places for worship and commemoration, but the people appeared to have spoken. Because it was in essence a stage prop, the Cenotaph had not been designed to last more than a couple of weeks, but the original plan to dismantle it after ten days had to be abandoned because of public sentiment. A similar stay of execution had been granted an earlier memorial erected in Hyde Park in August 1918 to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the outbreak of war. Whatever the original intention, this huge, flag-draped Maltese Cross had become a focus for national grief, and the bereaved had made a habit of laying wreaths at its foot. Indeed, in a photograph published in the Illustrated London News of the shrine being blessed by Arthur Winnington-Ingram, the Bishop of London, it is hard to make out the shrine at all beneath the mounds of flowers. When, the following year, it was announced that the shrine would have to be demolished because of its decayed condition, there had been an outcry, even though Lutyens had been commissioned to design a more permanent replacement. Plans for a new monument had, however, been shelved when the war ended. The temporary Cenotaph now fulfilled a similar public function and the cheers had scarcely died away after Peace Day than there were calls to replace it with a permanent one made of Portland stone. The cabinet had agreed to these demands by the end of July.

  None of this meant that the temporary Cenotaph could be swept away there and then, inconveniently sited though it was in the middle of a major London thoroughfare, and it would remain in place until building work began on its more solid replacement. Throughout the rest of July, people continued to lay flowers, much to the annoyance of the Board of Works, who felt that this practice should be discouraged. All men who walked past it automatically doffed their caps, and representatives of numerous organisations – including some 15,000 members of the Federation of Discharged and Demobilised Sailors and Soldiers en route to a rather more peaceful rally in Hyde Park than their previous one – continued to visit the monument and lay wreaths. There always seemed to be someone standing before it, head bowed in remembrance or recollection.

  The Cenotaph also became the focus of the first anniversary of the Armistice, which attracted even larger crowds than those attending Peace Day. This was something of a surprise to the government, which, it seems, originally had no particular plan to observe the occasion. The notion of marking it with a two minutes’ silence in which the whole country would pause to remember the dead was put before the War Cabinet only on 4 November. The idea came from Sir Percy FitzPatrick, a South African author and politician, one of whose sons had been killed in action in 1917. Throughout the war a silence had been observed in South Africa at noon every day so that people could think about the sacrifices being made, and Sir Percy suggested to Viscount Milner, the Secretary of State for War, that a similar observance once a year in the mother country would be an appropriate way of ensuring that the Empire’s dead were not forgotten. The cabinet agreed, but this last-minute decision meant that the idea needed to be announced to the people quickly and forcibly. A personal request from the King that at ‘the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, there may be for the brief space of two minutes a complete suspension of all our normal activities’ was placed in all the newspapers on 7 November. Most papers followed this up with a reminder to the nation on 11 November itself, which fell on a Tuesday. Ensuring that everyone stopped what they were doing at the correct and same moment was complicated, but church and other bells, factory sirens, exploding maroons and artillery fire were all used to mark the moment. Given the very short notice people had been given, and the practical difficulties of stopping industry, commerce and even traffic in their daily round, it is remarkable how widely the silence was observed. There was no service at the Cenotaph, as there is today, but the King and Queen had sent wreaths and the British and French Prime Ministers arrived shortly before 11 a.m. to lay their own tributes. Equally, there was no parade or march-past by veterans: unlike on Peace Day, the focus of the first anniversary of the Armistice was bereaved civilians. As the maroons went off, silence fell over the vast crowd of men, women and children. Men removed their hats, women bowed their heads, soldiers stood to attention and saluted. As The Times eloquently put it: ‘the very pulse of time stood still’.

  A national day of mourning seemed appropriate: there were, after all, a great many people to mourn. British Empire losses – those who were killed or missing, presumed dead – stood at a staggering 1,104,890. Frustrating as it must have been for those still in uniform long after the end of hostilities, there were many soldiers who never came back at all, since the government had decreed that the bodies of those killed in action would not be returned to Britain for burial. This would have been impractical while the war
was still being fought, but the real reason behind the decision was that in the interests of national unity it was important that all the dead should be treated equally. The practice that had obtained after Waterloo, when officers’ bodies were shipped home while other ranks were shovelled into unmarked mass graves, clearly wouldn’t do in the present circumstances. While wealthier families might have been able to make private arrangements for their dead to be brought home, many of those whose husbands, fathers, brothers and sons had been killed would have been hard pushed to find the money for a funeral in peacetime, let alone to pay for a body to be transported across the Channel or from other even more distant theatres of war. Soldiers would therefore lie with their comrades where they had died.

  This noble-sounding idea was not always matched by the circumstances in which ‘the Fallen’ were dealt with during the war. Some of the dead, uncoffined and with blankets serving as shrouds, were buried in civilian cemeteries, but by early 1915 it was already clear that the scale of the casualties was such that land would have to be acquired to create new military cemeteries. In the meantime, burials took place where possible behind the lines. These may often have lacked individuality, with several bodies laid together in specially dug trenches, but they were dignified affairs with a proper religious service conducted by a padre and attended by soldiers from the same company of the deceased. Given the chaos of battle, however, and the difficulty of bringing in the dead under fire, many soldiers were quite literally buried where they fell. Even when a soldier was identifiable, and had died recently and comparatively ‘cleanly’, burials in the field could be hurried and basic affairs, with bodies tipped into convenient shell holes and covered with a few shovelfuls of earth or mud while someone said a brief prayer. Personal effects would be placed in marked bags to be returned in due course to relatives, and the man’s tin helmet would be hung on a bayonet or on a rifle thrust into the ground, barrel first. Where there was no rifle or bayonet, a bottle containing a piece of paper inscribed with identifying details of the dead soldier would be stuck in the ground. In some places burial parties had time to use bits of wood and wire to fashion crude crosses.

  Elsewhere it was a matter of gathering up remains that had been lying around for some time or had been scattered by shellfire, and doing the best you could. Even when people had been given a decent burial, the ground in which they lay was often later fought over as opposing armies advanced and retreated. The most careful burial could prove very temporary indeed as high-explosive shells churned up the earth once more, destroying graves and redistributing the dead piecemeal. Given these conditions, it is perhaps not so surprising that over 300,000 of the 750,000 British and Empire troops killed in action on the Western Front still have no known grave.

  One of the jobs undertaken by the British Red Cross was to ascertain what had happened to those who were listed as ‘missing in action’. This term was not always a euphemism, and the Red Cross was occasionally able to bring good news to distraught relatives. Soldiers unaccounted for may have been lying unidentified in hospitals, or been taken prisoner. Stories abounded of soldiers separated from the regiment during battle and found wandering behind the lines wholly disoriented, or perhaps suffering the effects of shell shock. Mostly, however, the missing were rightly presumed dead. The Red Cross’s job was hampered by the fact that at the beginning of the war no system of recording burials had been organised, so that even when a soldier was known to have died and had been given a proper burial, it was not always easy to find the site. The careless practices of Waterloo had long since been abandoned, but marking and maintaining soldiers’ graves in distant engagements such as the Boer War in South Africa remained a fairly haphazard affair. This may have been deemed acceptable for Tommy Atkins, the professional soldier, but many of the dead of the First World War were civilian volunteers and conscripts and their families expected them to be treated accordingly.

  It was while working with the Mobile Unit of the British Red Cross Society based at Lille that Fabian Ware, a former editor of the Morning Post, took it upon himself to begin making a note of British graves and their locations. The Unit had been formed in September 1914 after the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, had asked for volunteers to go in search of soldiers who had gone missing and might well be wandering lost in the chaos that often prevailed in the aftermath of battle. It was a curiously amateur yet effective organisation, made up of people in civilian vehicles who not only drove around looking for lost soldiers but also collected the wounded and transported them to hospitals. Ware subsequently persuaded the Adjutant-General of the British Expeditionary Force that his project to record burial sites should receive official War Office backing, and in March 1915 a Graves Registration Commission was created. Ware himself was given the rank of major and by October the Commission had registered over 31,000 graves, all of which had their temporary markers replaced by wooden crosses on which details were indelibly recorded. Lists of names and locations were drawn up and Ware entered negotiations with the French authorities to acquire land in perpetuity for the construction of British war cemeteries.

  Once created, cemeteries required considerable effort to maintain, and so in January 1916 Ware set up the National Committee for the Care of Soldiers’ Graves. News of this organisation’s work had reached Britain, and relatives of the dead began to direct their enquiries to this new body as well as to the Red Cross. In order to answer these enquiries, the Graves Registration Commission was reorganised in the spring of 1916 into the Directorate of Graves Registration and Enquiries (DGRE), supplying relatives with information about and even photographs of burial sites. The intention was that after the war was over people would be able to visit these graves, but at the time such pilgrimages must have seemed a very long way off.

  In May 1917, the National Committee for the Care of Soldiers’ Graves became the Imperial War Graves Commission, constituted under royal charter and with the Prince of Wales as its president. The Commission undertook the daunting task of providing a marked grave for every corpse, even those whose headstones would merely read ‘A Soldier of the Great War: Known Unto God’, a designation for the unidentified chosen by Rudyard Kipling, who had been appointed literary adviser to the Commission, and whose own son, killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915, was among those with no known grave.

  Someone who conducted many burial services at the front, both of the known and unknown, was an army chaplain called David Railton. The son of a leading figure in the Salvation Army, Railton served on the front line as a padre throughout the war and had been awarded an MC in 1916 for tending the wounded under fire. It was Railton who came up with the idea after the war that a single unidentified serviceman should be brought home to Britain as a representative not only of those whose bodies had never been found or identified, but of all those who had been killed in action. In August 1920 he sent this proposal to the Dean of Westminster, Herbert Ryle, who, in passing it on first to George V and then to Lloyd George, shamelessly claimed it as his own. The King rejected the idea as in poor taste, and there was some worry that such a gesture might reopen wounds that were in the process of healing, but it won acceptance when placed before a cabinet meeting in October. Once again, preparations had to be made hastily since it was decided that a state funeral of this representative of all the dead should take place on Armistice Day, 11 November, followed by burial in Westminster Abbey.

  By making the funeral of an unidentified soldier brought back from the battlefields the focus of the second anniversary of the Armistice, the Church had a chance to reassert itself at the centre of the commemoration. At the insistence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Thomas Davidson, there had in fact been a short service of dedication when the temporary Cenotaph was unveiled (Lloyd George had favoured an entirely secular event), but Lutyens’ empty tomb still seemed to the Church distressingly pagan. Now, however, there was an opportunity to reclaim Armistice Day for God.

  Selecting the soldier who would become
known as the Unknown Warrior was made into an elaborate procedure, and there are several different versions of what happened. The most reliable account is that provided by Brigadier-General L.J. Wyatt, GOC the British troops still based in France and Flanders, who took part and provided a written account in a letter published in the Daily Telegraph in November 1939. In conditions of strictest secrecy, four unidentified British bodies were exhumed from temporary battlefield cemeteries at Ypres, Arras, the Aisne and the Somme on the night of 7 November 1920. These exhumations were carried out by four carefully selected teams made up of an officer and two other ranks. Presumably the rankers were handed the shovels and sacks, while the officer was there to direct operations, but none of the men was told why the bodies were being dug up and brought back by field ambulance to GHQ at St-Pol-sur-Ternoise. The men were further instructed that if they discovered anything that revealed the rank or regiment of the soldier they had exhumed they should immediately rebury the remains and select another grave. The intention was that any of the relatives of the 517,773 combatants whose bodies had not been identified could believe that the Unknown Warrior might be their lost husband, father, brother or son; but on the advice of the Abbey, which was nervous about the possibility of receiving more recent and potentially noisome remains, it is probable that instructions had been given that the four disinterred soldiers should have died early in the war on the grounds that such bodies would have been reduced to mere bones.