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

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      The arbitrary and ad hoc nature of this work assumed a more formal shape after a meeting with a Lieutenant Colonel Stewart, who was inspecting the Mobile Unit on behalf of the Red Cross. ‘It was while … visiting Bethune Cemetery,’ Ware recalled an encounter that has since become part of Imperial War Graves Commission lore,

      that [Stewart] informed me that the B.R.C.S. were prepared to provide funds necessary for replacing the rough, and often only pencilled, inscriptions on the crosses erected over graves with inscriptions of a more durable kind. Beginning in Bethune cemetery I immediately gave instructions for the inscriptions to be painted on the crosses over the graves there; but finding that, notwithstanding the best intentions, the local people employed frequently made mistakes we next secured stencils and my officers and men devoted their spare time when not engaged in the work of carrying wounded to stencilling the inscriptions themselves to certain crosses which were procured. The work rapidly developed, and the stencils were replaced by stamping machines providing inscriptions on metal tapes.

      In the area around the Aisne and Marne, the southernmost point of the Allied retreat in 1914, Cecil’s deputy Ian Malcolm was already carrying out similar searches, but it was Ware’s unit that made the decisive difference to the way that Britain’s dead were recorded. The overwhelming burden of its work still lay with the French army and ambulance duties, but whenever enemy movements allowed it, his handful of men would be out in the field, liaising with local civic and medical authorities, collecting identification plaques, painstakingly patching together scraps of information or ploughing through the mud after children eager to display some isolated grave.

      Sometimes the trail would lead to a single grave, sometimes a cluster or a mass burial and sometimes – it was odd what a different perspective grave-hunting gave a man – to disappointment. ‘I may add that we are not always rewarded for our muddy tramp,’ one of Ware’s team recalled in December, ‘as on more than one occasion, I have found at the end of it the grave of a German soldier and then I have felt inclined to box the wretched child’s ears until I notice that the cross has been erected by British troops as the inscription is in English.’

      The same element of uncertainty entered into the process of identification, where often only some chance initiative or faintly pencilled inscription on a roughly made cross stood between the dead and oblivion. ‘Another and very ingenious method of recording the names of fallen soldiers,’ the same searcher, a volunteer called Broadley recorded, ‘is by writing their names on a piece of paper and placing this in a bottle. I came across a bottle only a day or two ago with a list of thirty names of men of the Royal Scots killed in action, with a note of the name of the Chaplain (Revd. Gibbs) stating that he had officiated at the burial.’

      For a volunteer like Broadley, ‘the proud satisfaction of knowing that I had done some slight honour to one brave man who has died for his country’ was reward enough, but as Ware was always keen to point out, it could never have begun without the sympathy of a population that had already adopted the British dead as their own. ‘I feel sure that the graves in these back gardens will always be treated … as sacred property,’ Broadley reported after one hunt had taken him to a site newly planted with London Pride,

      This brings to mind an incident when I called at a farm near Meteren and a farmer showed me the graves of two nameless heroes of the Seaforth Highlanders which were in a field. He explained that he had the greatest difficulty in keeping the cows away and added with tears in his eyes that he would give all the money in the world if these brave fellows could have been buried in his back garden instead of a field close by.

      One of the enduring themes, in fact, running through the origins of the Imperial War Graves Commission is the generosity of the French state and people, and Ware was determined that nothing was going to threaten this. ‘With very few exceptions the graves which we have seen up to the present are beautifully made and kept,’ he reported again back to the chairman of the Joint War Committee, Arthur Stanley, anxious to make sure that no ingratitude was shown to a population ‘that have been so ready to take upon themselves the pious care’ of British burial plots.

      The personal interest will cause many relatives to hesitate after the war before removing them. In many cases the exact circumstances of death were witnessed by the villagers and are engraved on their memories. Here a woman will relate how she saw a dragoon, whose grave is in her orchard, step under a tree to pick an apple and how while he was in the act a shell took his head off; there a woman will tell you how she watched a lancer, buried close by, kneeling on the bridge and firing on the Germans until he fell.

      The other thing that sustained his searchers in their harrowing and often dangerous work – and another important thread in the IWGC’s history – was the evidence of what it meant to the fighting soldier. ‘I was endeavouring to erect a cross in a field,’ Broadley wrote, when the bitter cold of early December 1914 had made the earth ‘as hard as iron,

      and my work was not progressing very rapidly. Some ‘Tommies’ who were marching down the road … obtained leave to fall out and help me. With their assistance the cross was speedily placed in position and then, without a word they all sprang to attention and solemnly saluted the grave of their dead comrade-in-arms. It was a most impressive and touching sight.

      There is something in this vignette – something in its air of reverence, of innocence almost – that movingly evokes a world that was disappearing even as Broadley described it. In the last two weeks of November 1914, he alone had located some three hundred graves in an area from Laventie to Steenvoorde, and yet this was still war and death on a scale that left room for all those human pieties and sensibilities that would sink in the mud and horror of the trenches.

      These would never entirely disappear – on the eve of the Somme, Sir Lionel Earle reassured The Weekly Dispatch’s readers that ‘our soldiers in the shell swept zones never tire of making reverent pilgrimages to the cemeteries where their dead comrades lie’ – but never again would the mores and social baggage of the pre-war world seem so real to men at the front.

      This was partly because those men were different, but it was also because the British Army itself had changed. In the first months of the fighting it was a far smaller and tighter entity than it later became, and even in 1915 a territorial like Captain Ian Mackay of the Cameron Highlanders, coming out to France for the first time, could hardly move behind the lines without stumbling into someone with whom he had been at school or danced an eightsome at the Northern Meeting.

      To officers like Mackay, the dead were not anonymous strangers but friends and estate workers with names and families: ‘Beauly and Portree boys’ with whom the Mackays had always historically gone to war; men called ‘Gray Buchanan a great Fettes pal of Ian Innes’, and Ian Innes himself; their graves places to visit, their funerals snatched moments of shared humanity in the din of war. ‘We had one poor fellow killed when walking along a road with a message some distance behind the front line,’ Mackay wrote home from Busnes in the winter of 1915,

      We sent for our padre … and I went to the funeral in a little British cemetery near a ruined farm not far from our firing line. It was a regular Sir John Moore burial as our guns were thundering at the time and while we were at the grave the Germans sent over several shrapnel and high explosives … which burst unpleasantly near.

      There were regiments, of course, who never relaxed СКАЧАТЬ