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 of the work out here.’

      There were any number of sensitive and potentially divisive issues that fell within his new remit – cremations, exhumations, the proliferation of unauthorised private memorials – but at the centre of Ware’s negotiations was the key question of land expropriation for the burial of the Allied dead. Initially it had been possible to deal with these matters at local level, but as the cemeteries and churchyards immediately behind the front line filled, the problem of acquiring new land and establishing rights over old burial grounds had become a matter for the state and not the municipality. The kindness and gratitude of the French people had been a constant theme of Ware’s early letters and reports, and in the crisis summer of 1915 their government followed suit with an inimitably Gallic elan, claiming for France not just the duty but the right ‘to adopt as her child and to honour … every soldier who has fallen on her soil for justice and the freedom of the nations’. It would be the best part of a year before Ware’s negotiations finally bore legislative fruit in an ‘expropriation bill’, but in all the complex and often fractious wartime dealings of the Allies, it would be hard to find a more signal act of friendship and imagination than France’s response to the British dead.

      There would be difficulties and frustrations ahead, delays and amendments in the bill’s committee stage, rumblings in the Senate, legal questions and unease over the effective appropriation of French land by a foreign government, but Ware was at least determined to make sure that his own side did not make things worse. ‘I have warned the Press to tell their correspondents to be on the lookout for M. Millerand’s speech,’ he wrote to his deputy Captain Messer at a crucial stage at the end of June, when the French Minister of War was ready to move the bill, convinced, as ever, that if he did not tell people what to say and when to say it, then no one – not the Army, the Paris Embassy, the politicians at home, the newspapers, not even the Royal Family – could be trusted to do or say the right thing at the right time, ‘and I have also been privately promised that the Prime Minister will make a suitable reply in the House of Commons to M. Millerand.’

      Could the Adjutant General put some pressure on the Embassy to be a little more gracious? Could a telegram of thanks from the King be sent at the right time? Could Britain not be more generous with her decorations to French civilians? It was the old Ware of the Morning Post again, prodding and cajoling, dropping a ‘hint’ to the Times editor here, soothing a minister’s vanity there, and if there was a touch of megalomania in it all, it clearly worked. By September, Millerand’s bill had been carried through the Chamber of Deputies on the back of an emotional appeal from the Rapporteur, and in December at last became law in a form that enshrined all the most disinterested intentions of the original bill with the addition of one crucial clause that would give Britain control over the future upkeep of its war graves.

      Ware never did anything more important in his life and that last clause had a lot to do with it. ‘The law of 29 December’ was all and more than he could have hoped for – ‘perpetuity of sepulture’ for Britain and her Empire’s dead, the cost of all lands to be borne on the French budget, but it was this last provision for a single ‘properly constituted’ British authority to supervise and finance the maintenance of the cemeteries that proved the key to their enduring character.

      It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of this provision and difficult to imagine what Britain’s war cemeteries would have looked like without it, because in relieving France of the financial burden of their maintenance, Ware had secured control over every detail of their future. At this stage of the conflict it remained a largely theoretical concern of course, but the concession guaranteed that when the time came there could be no conflicts of authority over decisions that up until this point had been matters of chance and private initiative.

      It would be hard to say who Ware saw as the principal danger to this future – British units who seemed bent on turning France into a giant memorial park or French advocates of giant ossuaries – but another issue had already underlined how vital that control was. In the early months of 1915 the rising numbers of unidentified dead had presented the French authorities with an almost insuperable problem, and in the middle of June, a scientific committee set up to explore alternatives to burial, had released a report that had sent Ware scuttling around the Ministries of the Interior, War and Hygiene in panic.

      The solution proposed by the committee was for a continuous chain of plein air crematoria, a hundred metres square in size, and sited between the front line and the artillery parks at ten-kilometre intervals along the whole length of the front. Around the perimeter of each area the committee had recommended that a portable canvas screen two metres high should be erected, and at the centre of the field a large pit dug in the shape of an inverted and truncated pyramid that could be layered for cremations – ‘in the simple manner of Indians’, the report adds with an engagingly Rousseau-ian note – with successive strata of wood and naked bodies. Fifty crematoria in all, petrol or tar to expedite the process, ready access to wood and transport, twenty-five gravediggers to each site, twenty woodsmen, twenty carriers, one doctor, one engineer officer, several NCOs, one priest and, ‘if possible’, one rabbi ‘to provide for the satisfaction of every religious sentiment’: death on an industrial scale met death as gloire in a final exhortation that blended French swank, Enlightenment rationalism and a proto-Nazi thoroughness in a way peculiarly designed to disquiet John Bull.

      ‘In all ages from the earliest times up to our own day cremation has been practised in time of war,’ the report had declared,

      The hot weather is approaching. It is in the spring that epidemics develop with the greatest vigour … Myriads of worms swarm in the corpses … myriads of flies will alike sow those germs of death sprung from the dead … Great evils need great remedies. We have only just time to act …

      Soldiers sacrificed their lives without hesitation. They behaved like heroes. But with the sacrifice of their lives let them and their relatives sacrifice their bodies also. Let us honour them as the ancients honoured their heroes by burning their bodies and thus rendering their cinders imperishable. The whole of the country will be their tomb. Let us free ourselves from the prejudice of the old customs which under existing conditions may be fatal … Let us not shrink from any sacrifice for those who fight.

      It was a proposal that in the end died of its own technocratic afflatus, but Ware’s negotiations had crucially guaranteed that no similar threat hung over the future of Britain’s war cemeteries. The liberality of the French authorities had made some kind of settlement a formality from the start, but it was Ware who had created a treaty that would be a model for every subsequent agreement, Ware who had picked his way through the legal obstacles, Ware who had the tact and journalistic nous to mobilise establishment opinion, Ware who protected France from an uncontrolled rash of British monuments and – above all – Ware who had the foresight to recognise cultural differences in attitudes to the dead that all the Francophilia in the world was never going to bridge.

      If the law of 29 December shows one side of Ware, however, the second seminal development that makes 1915 the crucial year in the history of Britain’s war graves shows the other, opportunistic side of his character. In the early months of the war a number of private exhumations had been carried out by families who wanted their son’s or husband’s bodies home, but at Ware’s prompting the Adjutant General, Macready, had written to Ian Malcolm at the end of February spelling out a new stance for the BEF. ‘As regards the question in general,’ Macready told him,

      of exhuming bodies either for the purpose of identification or for removal to England, the Commander in Chief has issued instructions that this shall not be done, and it is never allowed in the British area … if it is carried out it must be distinctly understood that it is not done with the approval of Sir John French.

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