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 which everything was for the best even in the worst of all possible worlds – nothing is ever allowed to darken the sunlit landscape or shake the faith and love of his Paris youth.

      There are no defeatists in Ware’s France, no meanness, no ugliness, no deep-rooted suspicions, no resentment of Albion, no offending calvaries, no truculent farmers, no haggling women, no syphilis, none of the stock French characters with their ‘monkey’ language and monkey habits and monkey morals who fill the British Tommy’s memories of this time, but only a country of devoted doctors and tireless curés, of debonair cavalry generals and saintly bishops, of grateful faces, ‘delightful camaraderie’ and stoic courage in which none but the Hun is vile.

      The remarkable thing about Ware, though, was that he was one of the few men connected with the BEF in France with the charm and the language to turn this dream of France into something approaching reality. There is no reason to believe that the reports he sent home offer anything more than a highly subjective truth, but in these early months with the Mobile Unit, the only cloud on his horizon was one that had bubbled up on the other side of the Channel. ‘It is good work out here,’ he insisted in a letter to his old chief, Lord Milner, on 13 October,

      Of course we can be crabbed for working for the French only, but everybody so far who has come to crab has ended by begging to be allowed to join us and the search for the missing is going on.

      If only I had time to write a letter to The Times on this:- an extraordinarily fine French priest who I have met once or twice with the wounded & become friends with put his hands on my shoulder the other day as I was [showing] an English paper to one of my men for its prominent account of a football match, & said in an inexpressibly pained but friendly way ‘mais, mon commandant, ce n’est past le moment pour le football’. If only people at home could have seen the surroundings in which that was said, wounded & dying all around us, they would at least stop reporting their damned football.

      God protect us from ‘all the muddle and mischief which Satan finds for idle hands in England’, he complained again to Milner, and in letter after letter he returned to the same theme. ‘The British Red Cross has been directly or indirectly responsible for men working among the French, whose presence among them has I think done positive harm to the Allied cause,’ he lectured Lawley,

      Therefore it is absolutely essential that they should be carefully selected. Men of the proper sort are, as you know, extremely rare, and there are very few men who we could think really qualified to go off alone with a few cars uncontrolled and in a position to make their own arrangements and conduct negotiations with the French. Of the men who are not competent two extreme types have come under my notice … One, the man who speaking a little French complains of the food the French provide, and the French ways – and two, the man who speaks no more French, but adopts a patronising air towards the French and attempts to organise everything for them.

      It was all the more important for Ware to scotch these Little Englander attitudes because the unit’s searches were leading to another line of work for which the co-operation of the French was vital. In the first days of the war the Red Cross had set up a Wounded and Missing Department under Lord Robert Cecil, but with only a handful of volunteers to handle enquiries, no adequate database to cope with the soaring casualty figures and, as yet, no one like the archaeologist, traveller, alpinist and Middle East expert, Gertrude Bell to impose some system on the mounting chaos of letters, casualty lists and hospital returns, the oblivion that had been the historical fate of the dead British soldier in all previous wars looked well on the way to repeating itself.

      The casualties had been unimaginable in their scale – 16,200 officers and men killed by the end of 1914, 47,707 wounded, 16,746 missing or captured (by comparison, Wellington’s losses at Waterloo were 3,500) – and behind each of those numbers lay a personal history and a personal loss. ‘I shall never forget the scene at Boulogne,’ recalled Sir Lionel Earle, a future colleague and sparring partner of Ware’s, in France searching for news of his brother, a Grenadier officer last seen beside the Menin Road near Ypres, lying on the ground with a bullet through his head and one eye lying on his cheek. ‘Scores of Indian troops, sitting patiently along the wharf with bandages on their heads, arms, legs, and bodies, some soaked with blood, waiting for some hospital ship to take them away. Scores and scores of ambulance wagons, full of wounded, kept on entering the town …’

      There would be rumours one day that Earle’s brother was dead in Frankfurt, counter-rumours the next that he was ‘lying on the straw’ with a mass of German wounded in the Town Hall at Courtrai, and then ‘nothing more for some weeks’, continued Earle, all the bitterness and hatred as fresh after twenty-one years as if it had all happened the day before,

      when one day my sister-in-law received a letter unsigned, asking if she would go to a certain tabernacle in the East End at a certain hour and day, as there was news waiting her there. She came to consult me as to whether she ought to go or not, and I advised her to go, as it might be news about her husband.

      She went, and found this little tabernacle empty, when suddenly she saw a man, who looked like a foreign clergyman. She went up to him, and he handed her a note. This was a line from my brother, saying he was in hospital and suffering terribly in his head. This clergyman was a Swiss, and was walking one day in Brussels with a small grip in his hand, when a girl came up to him and asked if he was going home on a journey. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘to England.’ Upon which she slipped a note into his hand, addressed to my sister-in-law.

      My brother’s wounds were more severe, even than we had thought, as after the bullet had gone clean through his head, the regimental doctor was binding up his head, when the Germans surrounded them, blew the brains of the doctor, although unarmed and covered with Red Cross, all over my brother’s face, and the orderly was killed at close range by a rifle bullet, which after passing through the poor man’s stomach, passed all down the leg of my brother, infecting the whole leg with Bacillus coli. I expect my brother was spared, as probably the Germans thought that a colonel of the Guards might be of value as regards exchange of prisoners at some future date.

      Lionel Earle was lucky – as ultimately was his brother, if eight operations, gangrene, ‘the studied malevolence’ of his German doctors, stone deafness and partial blindness counts as lucky – because he could at least call in favours from Embassy officials and pre-war connections, but it would have been another story again for that orderly killed at his brother’s side. In these early months of the war, the Red Cross office had at least created card indexes of the officers admitted to base hospitals, but for the relatives of missing rank and file, obstructed on all sides by an army determined to hide actual casualty figures and keep Red Cross personnel away from the field hospitals, there was nothing but an interminable wait and the grim sense that nothing had changed in the century since the British Army had last fought in the Low Countries.

      It was partly in response to this growing crisis that Ware’s Mobile Unit first became involved in the work that would eventually lead to the creation of the Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC). From the early weeks of September his men had been searching the line of the British retreat from Mons and Le Cateau to the Marne, and it was a short step from sharing information with Cecil that might transform a ‘missing’ into a ‘wounded’ or ‘killed’ on the Red Cross lists, to a protective interest in the graves themselves. ‘The experience gained in the search for British wounded has helped the Unit in taking up another most useful piece of work,’ Ware wrote back to London – as ever, reporting to his masters after the event, ‘viz: the identification of places in which British killed have been hastily buried, and the placing of crosses on СКАЧАТЬ