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

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       PROLOGUE

       They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest

       Uncoffined – just as found:

       His landmark is a kopje-crest

       That breaks the veldt around:

       And foreign constellations west

      Each night above his mound.

      ‘Drummer Hodge’, THOMAS HARDY

      High on the north wall of Florence’s Duomo can be seen one of the most arresting images of the early Italian Renaissance. Against a deep red background a knight sits on horseback, a spectral figure painted in a cadaverous terra verde that emerges out of the cathedral gloom like some menacing cross between the great equestrian bronze of Marcus Aurelius and Mozart’s avenging Commendatore.

      The fresco is the work of Paolo Uccello, and in it Renaissance and Middle Ages meet. The eyes are sightless, the lips drawn back, but astride his ghostly green charger – off-fore raised, neck curved in a gracefully submissive arc – Uccello’s rider still grasps firmly on to his baton of earthly command. Here, simultaneously, is a celebration of life and memento mori, a portrait of power and dissolution, of individual glory and universal mortality, the creation of an age that understood war and death and had seen more than its fair share of both. Pride, fame, blood-guilt, atonement, hope, gratitude – all those complex feelings that lie behind every war memorial – they are all here, and so too is the universal fact of mortality that unites subject and viewer in one common fate. ‘Ioannes Acutus Eques Britannicus’ reads the inscription beneath, ‘Dux Aetatis Suae Cautissimus Et Rei Militaris Pertissimus Habitus Est’ – ‘This is John Hawkwood, British knight, esteemed the most cautious and expert general of his age.’

      It seems a perverse irony that the first – and for a very long time only – memorial raised on European soil to an English soldier by a grateful government is Florence’s tribute to the great fourteenth-century mercenary and diavolo incarnato, Sir John Hawkwood. Over the centuries that followed Hawkwood’s death, British armies fought and died across the length and breadth of the continent, and yet anyone walking Europe’s battlefields now in search of some trace of their existence would have about as much chance of finding it as they would the snow off the boots of mythical Russian soldiers marching through the north of England in 1914.

      A thin scattering of British graves across Europe does survive – three at Elvas in Portugal, another cluster on the rocky Atlantic-facing slopes above San Sebastián, three from 1813 in the mayoral garden at Biarritz, a few tablets preserved by Napoleon III from the Battle of Toulouse, Bayonne, a tiny clutch on the slopes of the Alma, sixteen in Brussels – but these are almost all the product of family or regimental piety and closer in their air of melancholy to forgotten pet cemeteries than to national monuments.^fn1

      These are virtually all officers’ graves; the ‘Die-hards’ who fell where they stood at Albuera or the ‘scum of the earth’ who won Waterloo could never expect anything more than a rapidly dug pit and a mass burial. In the immediate aftermath of battle the danger of disease naturally dictated haste, and yet it is hard not to wonder at the failure of imagination or humanity that separated the age which built All Souls, Oxford in memory of the dead of the Hundred Years War, or raised a chantry chapel on the field of Shrewsbury from that which could sanction the post-battle horrors of Waterloo. ‘The countrymen told us, that so great were the number of the slain, that it was impossible entirely to consume them,’ wrote Charlotte Eaton, who had picked her way through the human skulls and fleshless hands jutting out of the earth of Waterloo a month after the battle. ‘Pits had been dug, into which they had been thrown, but they were obliged to be raised far above the surface of the ground. These dreadful heaps were covered with piles of wood, which were set on fire, so that underneath the ashes lay numbers of human bodies unconsumed.’

      A complex interplay of social, cultural and religious factors divides the medieval mindset from Waterloo, but a simpler reason is that it took a long time for Britain to overcome a deep-rooted suspicion of its armies. In the course of the nineteenth century something like a rapprochement did occur, but for great tracts of its early modern history, Britain’s European wars were widely seen as ‘ministers’ wars’, or ‘Hanover’s wars’, or ‘Tory wars’, and her armies either instruments of oppression or costly pawns in dynastic coalition struggles that had more to do with an imported monarchy’s German interests than they had with those of a resentful John Bull.

      It was not simply a matter of politics, though, because the drunk, the thief, the debtor, the gullible and the unemployed who stocked Britain’s regiments between Cromwell’s God-infused soldiers of Naseby and the citizen armies of the twentieth century, were not easy men to love. Dr Johnson might insist that every man thought the less of himself for not having been a soldier, but one would be hard pressed, as Charles Carrington who served his military apprenticeship in the trenches of the Western Front pointed out, СКАЧАТЬ