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 or their services with their cars either for home or foreign service, in case of need.’

      There was a certain scepticism from the Army over civilian involvement, but in the days when the nation still believed in Kitchener, Kitchener’s pronouncement in September that he could see ‘no objection to parties with Motor Ambulances searching villages that are not in occupation by the Germans for wounded and to obtain particulars of the missing and to convey them to hospital’, was all that was needed. On the Sunday morning following it, the first vehicles and owners embarked at Folkestone for France, and by the end of the month twenty-five vehicles had made the crossing, the vanguard of over two hundred cars that were collected by road and rail from across the country by engineers before being converted into ambulances and shipped out under the aegis of the Red Cross to Le Havre.

      Among the first of these arrivals was the collection of owners and cars – a Hudson, Vauxhall, Morris Oxford, Sunbeam, Daimler – that made up the unit that Fabian Ware had come out to command. The Mobile Unit was not the only Red Cross team operating in northern France during these opening weeks, but from the first, Ware’s was unusual in being a quasi-autonomous command, enjoying a jealously guarded independence owing something to its original remit, but still more to Ware’s iron determination to run his own show in France as he had done in South Africa or at the Morning Post.

      He was lucky in his bosses – lucky they were for the most part on the other side of the Channel, lucky they were the kind of men they were – and Arthur Stanley, in particular, had never been a man to see a committee as anything but a rubber stamp. Over the next months there would be various challenges to the unit’s independence, but the Joint Finance Committee of the Red Cross and St John Ambulance was always ready to back him, sanctioning his local initiatives and giving him his own budget – £2,000 for these first three months, £3,000 for the second – perfectly happy to believe what he told them and bask in the reflected glory of the work that the unit carried out.

      It was a necessary latitude because for all that it was a hand-to-mouth existence in these early weeks – petrol to be begged, hotel rooms and office space to be found, cars to be mended, jurisdictional niceties to be negotiated, rivals to be seen off, Uhlans to be avoided – Ware had arrived at a moment when events were rapidly outstripping the unit’s original modest remit. ‘The Mobile Unit was organised under the command of Mr Fabian Ware, shortly after the Battle of the Marne,’ Ware himself – always perfectly at ease talking of himself in the third person – reported back to the Red Cross in London on the first steps in its evolution into something a world away from anything Kitchener had had in mind when he first sanctioned their searches,

      and the original object of the Unit was to search for British wounded and missing in the district which had been overrun by the Germans during the retreat from Mons, and to convey them back to the British lines or to a British base. Fighting was still proceeding in some of these districts, and the French authorities invited the help of ambulance care for the conveyance of the wounded.

      That ‘invitation’ had come at Amiens in early October at a time when the town of Albert was under heavy bombardment and for the next six months the Mobile Unit worked increasingly with the wounded and dying of the French army. By the middle of the month Ware had added a mobile light hospital and medical staff to his growing fleet of ambulances, and before the unit was finally disbanded it had dealt with more than twelve thousand casualties, ferrying and treating the wounded from Amiens to Ypres as the rival armies began their crab-like ‘race for the sea’ and stalemate.

      After the years of frustration and disappointment, Ware was in his element, crisscrossing north-western France, liaising one day in Paris and the next in London, putting down his marker here, warning off a potential rival there, his energy and optimism seemingly inexhaustible. ‘October 29^th’, his diary reads – a typical, and gloriously White Rabbit-ish entry, sent off to London to explain why he had no time to send the Joint War Committee the full report he owed them,

      Left Doullens 6.10 a.m., where I had arrived the night before (in order to confer with Colonel Barry and to define sphere). Breakfasted at St Pol 6.50. Met and despatched from here one of our sections at 7 a.m. (This had come to me by appointment at Headin.) Arrived Houdain Station at 7.30 a.m. Met a party in charge of Dr Kelly which I had sent out the night before in order to determine the site of our light hospital. Arrived at Bethune 8.55 a.m. Consulted with the director of the RAMC there. Left Bethune at 9.45 a.m. … Arrived Noeux les Nines at 10.5 a.m. … Arrived Merville 11.45 a.m. Arranged with the General commanding the 1^st Corps of French Cavalry to place our light hospital at Merville for the use of both French and British. Left Merville 2 p.m.

      There was, too, in these early fluid days, real danger, and the unit’s work could often bring them under direct enemy fire. ‘To be fair to them, and heap coals of fire on their heads,’ Ware wrote to Sir Arthur Lawley, another Milner appointee in the Transvaal and a staunch support at the Red Cross, after a second abortive attempt to rescue a wounded girl from among the ruins of Albert had brought the German artillery down on their defenceless convoy,

      I think it possible that they may not have distinguished the Red Cross at that distance … I have never been in such a scene of desolation – it was like nothing on earth but the pictures one saw in one’s childhood of the Last Day. The place was so ruined that they couldn’t recognise the streets and there was a minute when I thought that we should go round and round and never find our way. All the time we were going towards the guns! … We stopped at the remains of a corner to ask a man the way, but he wouldn’t stay long enough to do more than point down a street and then run off … We found the house, and a woman with two dear little children came up from the cellar, and crying her heart out told us the girl was dead.

      Ware was no more immune to the frisson of danger than his men – ‘the thought that [the shells] were meant for oneself brought rather a sporting element in to the thing’, he reported – but as an old newspaperman he also knew good copy when he saw it and was not going to be slow to pass it on. ‘The strong and able had been able to quit long before,’ he wrote of another rescue from among the shattered ruins of a nursing convent, proffering it with the suggestion that the Red Cross might think about exploiting the story for fundraising purposes,

      and these poor helpless, old souls, cared for so kindly by the Sisters of the Convent, alone remained perforce. Could any request to members of our Society be more fitting? Would not every member at once go forward and rejoice at having this opportunity?

      The utter desolation and destruction baffles description; let it suffice to explain that below were over fifty women of ages varying from 70 to 95 years – many bedridden for years and others too infirm to help themselves …

      Five dead were removed from this awful debris, others it was impossible to extricate. Of those who lived some had limbs shattered by the cruel missiles of a heartless enemy … all bearing an expression of awful terror, such a scene only seen on the field of war …

      It was 4 p.m. when we had finished our work at Ypres, but what cared members of the Red Cross for the incessant cannonading or for the constant and deafening explosion of bursting shells. We knew we were carrying out the work of some of those generous subscribers at home by making such use of their ambulances, and if any of them could have seen and understood the expressions of relief and gratitude in the faces of those we saved he would indeed have felt that his money had been well spent.

      A streak of genial cynicism in Ware and an unashamed gift for self-promotion make it easy to forget that they were only the accidental trappings of a deeply romantic attachment to France and her people. In the letters and memoirs of the British СКАЧАТЬ