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

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       THREE

       With an Eye to the Future

      There were possibly any number of administrators who could have put the work of the Graves Registration Commission on an efficient footing in 1915, but how many could also have dealt with the political complexities and negotiation that went with it is a very different matter. In the early spring of 1915, Ware had begun talks in Paris with the French government on the status of British war graves, and over the next weeks and months he was in constant contact with the different government departments involved, assuaging cultural differences and repairing real or imagined slights with the finesse of a born diplomat and the political savvy of an old newspaperman.

      There were the usual ‘us and them’ gripes – the War Office were ‘blighters’, he told Milner, and their clerks should be shipped over to the trenches for a week – but as ‘the sole intermediary between the British Army in the Field and the French military and civil authorities on all matters relating to graves’ he had the complete authority he wanted. In the earliest days with the Mobile Ambulance Unit his work had inevitably been essentially reactive, but here, for the first time, was a chance to think and plan for the future on a scale appropriate to his energy and vision and to the growing magnitude of the Allies’ sacrifice.

      It is impossible to do much more than guess what the Army had in mind when it placed Ware in charge of the negotiations. They knew that in Ware they had found a man with the experience and tact to smooth over difficulties, but if they imagined that they were taking on a kind of glorified Undertaker General to the Forces to put an acceptable face on Death for the benefit of a disturbed public back at home, then they had hopelessly underestimated their man.

      He would certainly do that for them – no one in the history of warfare has transformed the horrors and suffering of a battlefield into oases of peace like Ware – but from early in their alliance he and the Army had different objectives in view. There was nothing stupid or blinkered about a man like Nevil Macready, but where he saw a problem Ware saw an opportunity; where the soldier and administrator simply recognised a failure in procedures that would come back to haunt the Army, the visionary saw the glimmer of an answer to all those pre-war dreams of unity and equality he had preached. One of the most intriguing questions that the history of the war graves poses, in fact, is when Ware first realised precisely what he was doing in France. There is an element of self-congratulation in the traditional accounts of the War Graves Commission that makes it all sound inevitable from the start, but if there is certainly a retrospective logic to its history that links the Mobile Ambulance Unit and its various reincarnations to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission of today, it owed as much to chance and opportunism as it did to vision or principle.

      Ware was without question a visionary and idealist, but the real quality that enabled him to achieve things was an eye for the main chance, a politician’s instinct for popular movement, an intuitive sense of the zeitgeist, and at no time was that more obvious than in the summer of 1915. Over the late spring and early summer of that year there would be two decisions taken in France that were absolutely seminal to the future of Britain’s war graves, but if anyone other than Ware so much as glimpsed the implications of them or the social and political transformation they foreshadowed, then he kept very quiet about it.

      Ware could not possibly have seen the future or even the full consequences of all the decisions he was taking, but then who in 1915 could be sure that there would be a future? In the popular consciousness the year forms a muted intermezzo between the high hopes of 1914 and the horrors of the Somme, but for those who lived through it this was the year of Neuve-Chapelle, German gas and Loos, of the naval and military disasters of Gallipoli, the year in which even the sinking of the Lusitania and the Armenian Massacres failed to shake Woodrow Wilson’s high-minded neutrality – the year that ended for Britain with the silent evacuation of one beaten army from the beaches of Turkey, the hopeless and disease-ravaged rump of another besieged in the Iraqi city of Kut, and any hopes of an Allied breakthrough on the Western Front looking more delusory than ever.

      For Vera Brittain, for Rudyard Kipling and his wife Carrie, for the relatives of the 11,500 dead of Aubers Ridge who had died for nothing, of the 16,500 of Festubert who at least had their thousand yards to show for it, of the 43,000 lost at Loos, the greatest battle yet fought by a British army – it was the year that the world stopped and for the volunteers of 1914 it was their welcome to Erich Remarque’s universal enemy, Death. ‘The dug-outs have been nearly all blown in,’ Roland Leighton, Vera Brittain’s fiancé and one of the brightest of those golden youths who had sat listening to Uppingham’s headmaster only a year before, wrote bitterly home,

      and in among the chaos of twisted iron and splintered timber and shapeless earth are the fleshless, blackened bones of simple men who poured out their red, sweet wine of youth unknowing, for nothing more tangible than Honour or their Country’s Glory or another Lust of Power. Let him who thinks War is a glorious, golden thing, who loves to roll forth stirring words of exhortation, invoking Honour and Praise and Valour and Love of Country with as thoughtless and fervid faith as inspired the priests of Baal to call on their own slumbering deity, let him but look at a little pile of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull and a shin bone and what might have been his ribs, or at this skeleton lying on its side, resting, half crouching, as it fell, perfect but that it is headless … and let him think how grand and glorious a thing it is to have distilled all Youth and Joy and Life into a foetid heap of hideous putrescence!

      Leighton himself would be dead by Christmas, shot through the stomach, but if this year of disillusionment and rising casualties brought home the grim paradox at the heart of Ware’s steady rise up the military ladder, that only made him the more resolved to ‘stick to it’. ‘I told you in my last letter I regarded things then as on the knees of the Gods,’ he wrote to Milner at the end of April, just a week after the first gas attacks against French and French African troops north of Ypres.^fn2 ‘Well СКАЧАТЬ