Empires of the Dead: How One Man’s Vision Led to the Creation of WWI’s War Graves. David Crane

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СКАЧАТЬ least, the next thing to a Bolshevik in uniform – the two men might have been made for each other. The result was the creation of a Graves Registration Commission (GRC) with Ware at the helm. ‘At the beginning of the present war,’ Macready later told a War Office Committee, smoothly glossing over the turf wars and bloodletting that lay behind its birth, he had,

      talked over the matter with the … Chief Engineer, BEF, and decided to create an organisation to deal with the graves question. Certain members of the Red Cross Society at the time were in a spasmodic way interesting themselves in the matter and expending their energies in different directions. But there was no control and, to cut a long story short, [I] obtained the services of … Ware, and put him in charge.

      Although in some ways the new GRC remained a curiously hybrid, semi-detached sort of unit – the Red Cross continued to supply men and vehicles, while Ware was given the local rank of major (with two captains and seven lieutenants under him) and the Army took on the costs of crosses, rations and fuel – the crucial thing for Ware was that the GRC had the monopoly he had wanted. In the first months of the war he been obliged to share power with the Red Cross’s Paris office, and with Macready now behind him, he moved swiftly and ruthlessly to take control of the work being done in the Aisne/Marne district by Ian Malcolm and bring it under a single unified command.

      He was right to do what he did – unauthorised individuals had become involved, vital identification evidence removed, questionable exhumations carried out – but it was unmistakably the old Ware of South Africa and Morning Post days who had ruthlessly squeezed out Spenser Wilkinson. In the earliest days in France he had often found the Red Cross were actually ahead of him in their work, and yet if Malcolm imagined now that that would count for anything he was in for a sad awakening. ‘There is not, of course, much in the personal point,’ Malcolm pleaded with Lawley,

      though I am bound to say I feel rather aggrieved at being completely passed over and superseded in my own area where I have worked so hard for five months [but on public grounds, to avoid replication]. Would it not, therefore, be well if the A.G., or Fabian Ware … could entrust me with their official programme? Can you not help to arrange this?

      ‘It would be a matter of the greatest disappointment to me if all this were suddenly taken from out of my hands,’ he wrote in the same plaintive vein to Ware on 11 March, ‘and I should feel sure that it would be far from your wish that it should be so.’

      He did not know his man, and within the week all his maps, lists and cemetery concessions were on the new director’s desk, as Ware began the business of putting their old grave work on a more organised footing. At the outset Ware still had all the problems of a volunteer workforce and a War Office that ‘neither cares nor understands’, but by the middle of August 1915 plans had already assumed a ‘definite’ enough shape for him to be able to describe the organisation in a report to Macready that shows just why he had been the right choice for the job.

      Ware had divided the Commission into two parts, with seven distinct sections to carry out the field work and a headquarters responsible for the compilation and update of two registers. The first of these was a registration of graves with the names of officers and men listed by regiment, with details of any existing cross or inscriptions where the sites were accessible, and a note of who had reported them where they could no longer be reached, along with a record of any outstanding enquiries.

      The second, complementing the regimental lists, was a geographical register. ‘By means of this,’ Ware explained, with all the breezy confidence of a man who still did not know what lay ahead,

      it is possible to state at once how many burial grounds are in existence, how many graves are in each, and in what units they belong. The register also enables crosses destroyed by shell fire or otherwise to be replaced, and it is practically impossible for any grave once located to be lost sight of.

      All enquiries, half of them from France, half from home, were also dealt with at their chateau headquarters at Lillers, but the real spade-work, as it were, was carried out by the sections. In the first reorganisation Ware had envisaged that there would be four of these, but by the August of 1915 those four had swelled to seven – ‘A’ and ‘G’ at Bethune for instance, ‘D’ at Aisne and Marne – with the officer in charge of each district responsible for marking and reporting burials to headquarters, tracking down and verifying old graves, collating daily returns from chaplains, units and hospitals, and finally preparing and erecting wooden crosses with their machine-punched metal identification plates.

      In tandem with this work, often carried out under conditions of great risk, as Haig noted, went a growing number of local enquiries, and the first rudimentary improvements to the appearance of cemeteries sparked off by a torrent of requests for photographs from families back in Britain. Macready had already exempted the Graves Registration Commission from the prohibition against photography, and with funds from the Joint War Committee of the Red Cross and St John Ambulance a separate department was set up and three ‘first-class’ professional photographers put to work over the summer months to begin the task of photographing all the graves.

      Six thousand graves photographed, 800 photographs despatched to families in England, 18,173 graves registered, it was an extraordinary workload that had been completed by the middle of August. However there was a limit to what even Ware could do. In the first days of the GRC he had wanted the old Mobile Unit to continue its ambulance duties, but with his resources stretched to the limit by the expanding GRC work it was probably as well that a rare breakdown in his relations, and an even rarer show of offended dignity from Ware, forced his hand.

      It was a sad end to a fertile partnership, but it cleared the way for Ware to concentrate on his graves work. It also foreshadowed another equally inevitable development in the story of the GRC. Macready and the Old Army – with memories of the chaos in South Africa – had never been entirely comfortable co-operating with the Red Cross and a change of status was needed. With the volume of work growing by the day, and a volunteer manpower inadequate to the task, the existing compromise made no sense. ‘I saw the AG the other day,’ Sir Arthur Lawley wrote in mock outrage to Ware at the end of August,

      who hinted at an act of Piracy so audacious that I am still dumb with horror at the mere suggestion.

      He proposes to swallow at one gulp the GRC and all its merry men.

      Could you ever endure to be torn from the sheltering arms of the Red Cross?

      ‘Now!’ I hear you say.

      I will do all I can to save you.

      Within weeks it was a faint accompli. On 6 September, Macready recommended to the War Office that the GRC should ‘be placed on a proper footing as part of His Majesty’s forces’, and a month later its old hybrid existence came to an end. It marked the end of the first phase of Ware’s life work. The enduring, impressive and controversial aspects of that work – the questions of repatriation, commemoration, permanence, uniformity, imperial involvement and authority – still lay ahead but without the Mobile Ambulance Unit none of it could have happened.

      ‘I am sorry and at the same time glad that it should be so,’ Lawley wrote again at the end of October, after the Army’s ‘piracy’ had become official,

      sorry of course that we can no longer look upon your achievements as ‘our’ work and claim a share in its reflected glory; glad on the СКАЧАТЬ