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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">I am to take the views that he thinks right,’ Wilkinson complained to Lady Bathurst, ‘and he even explained to me what my views, which he thinks he knows better than I do, really are.’ It was a dangerous omniscience to insist on. This time he won his battle (Wilkinson could not even bring himself to mention Ware’s name when he wrote his memoirs) but Ware’s own days at the Morning Post were numbered. In the bitter infighting within the Conservative Party over Tariff Reform he had alienated some powerful interests, and when in 1910 a fundraising appeal, sponsored by the Morning Post, to buy the nation an airship to counter the ‘Zeppelin menace’ ended in chaos, farce and serious financial embarrassment for Lady Bathurst, Ware was forced to go.

      It was a grubby end to a brilliant, maverick, error-strewn age for the Morning Post and left Ware in a limbo that was both new and familiar to him. The terms of his severance gave him a measure of financial independence for the immediate future, but for a man who had been at the heart of the country’s political life for a decade – a man, moreover, with not just a wife, Anna, now but two small children and no more obvious prospects than he had when living in student poverty almost twenty years before – dismissal was a psychological blow from which it would take a war to help him recover.

      In his open ‘letter’ to Milner, written in France as a preface in 1912 to his last book, The Worker and His Country, Ware bravely trumpeted the blessing of his new-found ‘freedom’, but it was the Cassandra cry of a prophet without honour in his own country. ‘The existence of the United Kingdom to-day as a first-class Power is indissolubly bound up in the integrity of the British Empire,’ Ware warned from his ‘old student quarters’ in Paris, as he contemplated a France on the brink of civil war, a Britain torn apart by strikes, political atrophy and civil unrest, Ireland on the edge of disintegration and international relations stumbling from crisis to crisis,

      The gravity of the responsibilities thus incurred needs no emphasising; they will be accepted calmly by a race which has brought so large a portion of the earth within its rule … So long as patriotism is the controlling force, dominating all classes, the supreme instinct in the hour of crisis, no renunciation and no sacrifice will be too great in the cause of unity.

      It was only too horribly prophetic. For Ware, though, even if he could never have admitted it, the imminent prospect of war carried its own dark consolations. Spenser Wilkinson had once accused him of being a warmonger and he was only half wrong. If it seemed to Ware, in his gloomier moments, a mere toss-up whether civil strife or a European conflagration would come first, at least part of him saw the latter as the solution to the former. If the country could not heal its divisions in peace, perhaps it could in war. If ‘Milnerism’, the dream of a united, federated, white empire spanning the globe, was already unravelling in Ireland and South Africa then perhaps war – the great purging, unifying engine of change – might redeem it.

      He had dreamed and preached of the individual absorbed in the family, the family in the nation and the nation in that ‘highest attainment of human collectivity that the world has yet seen, the British Empire’, and just when it seemed that history had left that dream behind, war had come to give sacrificial patriotism a last, bloody chance. In the final summer of peace, the headmaster of Uppingham School had told his departing sixth form that unless they could serve their country they would be better dead, and for a heady moment in that autumn of 1914 it was as if the whole country had been listening – not just that headmaster’s ‘country’, not the country of Wykehamists and Etonians desperate to get to France before it was all over, but the 300,000 men who volunteered in August, the 450,000 in September, the 137,000 in October, forerunners of the five million who, in one way or another, would find themselves in uniform before the war’s end to bear out Kipling’s prophecy that it would be the ‘third-class carriages’ that would save the country.

      It was the same too on the broader scale, where all those dreams of imperial preference and closer union had seemed the vision of a departing age. The First World War would only hasten the centrifugal forces at work within the Empire, but before it did that it would prove a macabre theatre for the realisation of Ware’s dream. The parliaments of the Empire had no more say in the declaration of war than did the Imperial Parliament at Westminster, but as the Viceroy in India and each governor general issued the King’s proclamation, the same enthusiasm that had fired Britain brought the Dominion troops in their tens of thousands to sacrifice their lives – 65,000 Canadians, 60,000 Australians, 18,000 New Zealanders, more than 9,000 South Africans – in a war that only sentiment, historical ties and a shared linguistic and cultural heritage, can remotely have suggested was theirs.

      As Fabian Ware made his way across to France to take up his new post as commander of the Mobile Ambulance Unit, he at least knew what he wanted out of this war. Milner had found him a consultancy with Rio Tinto, but that was now forgotten. In October 1914 he had no idea, of course, where his Red Cross work would ultimately take him, but no one could have been better equipped to recognise and fill the need when it came. He had arrived with all the qualifications for the task – ambition, connections, intelligence, energy, diplomatic skills, charm, iron will, fluent French – but at the core of everything he would do was a belief in the rightness of the cause: belief in the Empire, belief in France, and a belief in a patriotic sacrifice. Fifteen years earlier he had written that the purpose of education was to produce the citizen ‘ready to perform, to the utmost of his ability, those duties which his country demands of him’, and war had only changed the nature of that call. ‘So long as … patriotism is the controlling force … no sacrifice will be thought too great in the cause of unity,’ he had concluded his political credo, and he was not going to shy away from the consequences now. Only at the moment of birth and death, he had written just two years earlier, can men be truly equal. Desperate and shameful poverty in England might have given the lie to the first part of that proposition, but, from now on, his life’s work would be to make sure that the second half of it, at least, would come true.

       TWO

       The Mobile Unit

      At the distance of a hundred years, the First World War and the attritional fighting of the Somme or Passchendaele have become so synonymous in the public mind that it is hard to remember that it was not always so. For any soldier going to France between the spring of 1915 and the end of 1917 this might well have been the one experience of war he would ever know, but for the men of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in August 1914, or their conscript heirs of 1918 who arrived in time to face the last German offensives and the final Advance to Victory, the Great War was a war not of entrenchment but of mobility, retreat and advance.

      It was this initial, highly fluid phase – defined for the British by their first, brilliant action at Mons on 23 August and by the death knell of the Old Army at the first battle of Ypres in early November – that had brought Ware and his Mobile Ambulance Unit into the conflict. In these early weeks of the war, before security fears dictated a stricter regime, it was easy enough for civilians to get over to France, and few things so beautifully capture the bizarre mix of amateurishness and high professionalism with which Britain went into battle in 1914 as the advertisement that Ware had seen in The Times on the day after the declaration of war: ‘The Royal Automobile Club,’ it announced over the name of the Hon. A. Stanley, the philanthropic chairman of the RAC who had just been brought in to try to make the Red Cross and St John Ambulance work together after more than thirty years of institutional bickering, СКАЧАТЬ