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 when he arrived at the front in 1918 for all the difference war made to his social life – but the old hierarchies were never so unashamedly honoured as in these early days. ‘Dear Miss F. Robertson,’ one former servant, now ‘Private Young, 4 Company, Divisional wiring, c/o Head Qrs’, wrote back in pencil from Ypres to his previous employer’s family,

      Yesterday I visited the Town Major’s office for the purpose of locating Mr. Lewis’s grave, the plans of the city were handed to me and with the address you gave me the exact spot was easy to find. After making my way through the ruins of the convent I came to the grounds which are badly damaged by shell fire. I cannot express to you how glad I was to find the grave in perfect order, except for weeds, brick and various other articles lying around, the bottom of the cross is damaged by shrapnel, however I will get to work right away, and make a new cross, which can stand behind the old one, also rearrange things and clear all rubbish away. While I am here you can depend on me to see that the grave is kept in good order. I have ample time on hand and can spare an hour or more work every day it is no trouble to me whatever I am only too glad, that the little service I hoped for, for months, has at last been fulfilled. If there is any plans you would like me to carry out, just mention them, I will be only to [sic] delighted to be of what little service that is possible for me to do. Must conclude in haste, I am quite fit and happy. Sincerely yours, D. Young.

      The arrival of the first Territorial battalions in November 1914, Sir Nevil Macready, the Adjutant General in France, recognised, had made this sense of ‘family’, with its attendant psychological complications, all the stronger too. Among the old regulars the response to a death might be no more than a few ‘words of rough regret’ and ‘a determination to get their own back’, but for the closely knit Territorials, bound together by every social tie of peacetime life, the brutal shock of seeing ‘hundreds of their comrades … swept away’ in battle would cause ‘a great wave of grief and depression’ which would take days to overcome.

      It was a pointer to the future, and to the damage that whole communities would suffer when the Pals’ battalions went into action, and in such a climate the work of the Mobile Ambulance Unit took on a significance that probably caught even Ware by surprise. From the first he had issued instructions against the taking of undue risks, but he knew as well as his men that nothing added more to the prestige of the unit than the fact that they shared the dangers of the front-line troops. ‘It is fully recognised that the work of the organisation is of purely sentimental value, and that it does not directly contribute to the successful termination of the war,’ General Haig wrote to the War Office in March 1915, blithely unconscious of just how big a butcher’s bill he would finally be presenting to the nation,

      It has, however, an extraordinary moral value to the troops in the field as well as to the relatives and friends of the dead at home. The mere fact that these officers visit day after day the cemeteries close behind the trenches, fully exposed to shell and rifle fire, accurately to record not only the names of the dead but also the exact place of burial, has a symbolic value to the men that it would be difficult to exaggerate. Further, it should be borne in mind that on the termination of hostilities the nation will demand an account from the Government as to the steps which have been taken to mark and classify the burial places of the dead, steps which can only be effectively taken at, or soon after, burial.

      If Haig’s letter is a sure sign of the impact Ware’s unit had made it seems all the more extraordinary that it had been eight months in coming. In many ways the BEF had been the most professional army the country had ever sent abroad but when it came to the question of its dead and the accurate registration of burials, it might as well have been back in the Peninsula for all the planning or provisions that had been made.

      There were excuses – Treasury reluctance to spend money on anything that did not directly contribute to victory – but it was not as if the men in command had no first-hand experience of the distress and confusion that previous failures had caused. In the aftermath of the Boer War, the Loyal Women’s Guild had done its ‘admirable’ but ‘unsatisfactory’ best to fill the gap, but ‘a lot of trouble over soldiers’ graves’, Sir Nevil Macready, another old South Africa hand, later told a War Office committee, ‘would have been avoidable had a proper organisation been created to meet the need at the commencement of the war’.

      In the failure of the authorities to provide their own organisation, however, Ware saw his opportunity and it could not have come at a better moment. In the first months of the war he had been determined to keep the Army at arm’s length, but his men in the field had always found the absence of military rank a disadvantage and with the scale of work expanding all the time – by May 1915, 4,300 graves would be registered – and Ian Malcolm and the Paris office of the International Red Cross still operating to the south in the Marne and Aisne areas, the point had been reached at which Ware’s independence could best be preserved from within the Army rather than from without.

      The Army needed no persuasion of the value of his work – distressed relatives’ letters in the newspapers at home were reminders that there would come a reckoning if they continued to do nothing – but what Ware wanted was a monopoly of it and in late February he secured himself an appointment with the Adjutant General to make his case. ‘Into the old-fashioned French bedroom which served as my office came a spare, dark individual, dressed in the uniform of the French Croix-Rouge,’ Nevil Macready recalled,

      He explained that he had been working with the French, and was at that moment with General Conneau’s cavalry, but wished, if there was an opening, to give his services to his own countrymen. We chatted for some time, and I found that he had considerable administrative experience and was a fluent French scholar. His memory was better than mine, and it transpired that some forty years before, when we were both small boys, he had been present at a meeting house of the Plymouth Brethren, to which I had been taken by an aunt, and when I got into some difficulties over the ritual, an episode which had evidently impressed him. Before he left my room I had booked him to create an organisation to [find] and record the names of our soldiers.

      There can have been few First World War generals who had been bounced on Dickens’s knee as a child, but then a son of the great Victorian actor-manager Charles Macready and the great-grandson of the artist Sir William Beechey, Nevil Macready was hardly typical in the first place. As a young boy growing up in Cheltenham he would have preferred the stage to the Army, but his father was having none of it and after Sandhurst, and a brief and bloody baptism at Tel-el-Kebir in Egypt, he had gravitated into staff work as if born to it, rising quietly and seamlessly from an appointment with the military police in Alexandria to be Assistant Adjutant General and Chief Staff Officer for Cape Colony at the end of the Boer War. If the thespian in the fastidiously elegant Macready never entirely died – it is no surprise that he was the first to take off his moustache when he lifted the injunction against clean-shaven officers in the Army – the role he always played best was that of the brusquely efficient administrator. During the South African war he had seen more than his fair share of fighting at Ladysmith, but his real métier remained the staff and it was back at the War Office with responsibility for the deployment of troops in aid of the civil power that his talents came fully into their own.

      The years immediately before the war were not good ones for soldiers, years of widespread industrial violence and looming civil war in Ireland that drew the British Army into a policing role, but Macready was one of the few men to come out of them with his reputation enhanced. In 1910 he had taken command of operations in South Wales during the bitter miners’ strikes, and the name he made for himself there marked him for the top at a time when his qualities of judgment, firmness, and political impartiality had never been at a higher premium.

      With their Plymouth Brethren connections, Milner’s South Africa and even political СКАЧАТЬ