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 sense of alienation was largely mutual and if there were clearly men fired by patriotism – or at least a consistent contempt for foreigners that did just as well – the loyalties that made the British Army so formidable a fighting force were to friends, comrades, regiment and then, just sometimes, their officers. There was a good deal made in recruiting posters of the opportunities for glory in the service of the Queen or King, and yet when all is said, these were men – especially the Irish and Scots – fighting for a society that had found no room for them before they enlisted and from which, when they finished their service, they could expect nothing in return.

      From the long perspective of the twenty-first century, when within living memory two world wars have forged a covenant of army and nation, it is hard to grasp how little the armies and great victories of the coalition Wars of Austrian or Spanish Succession, for example, belonged to the nation as a whole. In an age of battlefield tourism, those conflicts are probably now better known and recorded than they have ever been, but generations of British travellers and Grand Tourists, who would happily cross Europe to gaze upon the ‘holy, haunted ground’ of Marathon and Thermopylae, would no more have dreamed of visiting Ramillies or Malplaquet than the young Byron – the first major poet of modern warfare, after all – could bother to make the small detour from his Peninsula travels in 1808 to see where Vimeiro had just been fought and won by Wellington’s men.

      This lack of connection did not stop the Votes of Thanks in Parliament, the busts and statues in Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s, the building of Blenheim Palace, the patriotic odes or the sporadic outbursts of national triumphalism, but there was no genuine sense of national identification. In the early phases of the struggle against Napoleon, the fear of invasion created something like a national consensus, and yet even Waterloo – the first British battlefield to become a shrine for tourists – was fought against a rainbow opposition of Whig, mercantile and radical opinion that left a great swathe of the country deeply resentful of the ‘abuse’ of British power in the service of a bloated Catholic despot like Louis XVIII.

      In the age of the Peterloo Massacre and the ‘Piccadilly Butchers’ – that mini-ice age when the military were used as an instrument of civil power – it is not surprising that the old historic dislike of a standing army persisted, but Waterloo still represents a watershed. It is impossible to put a date to anything so gradual as a shift of public consciousness, and yet in the diaries and travel journals of English men and women in the years after 1815 it is possible to trace a change in that triangular relationship of government, army and people that begins with Waterloo and victory over Napoleon, and is still played out in the press over every defence cut or equipment deficiency that might threaten soldiers’ lives overseas.

      This healing process that began with Waterloo – and was finally, and permanently, sealed by the fighting courage and stoic heroism of the common soldier in the Crimea – was in its turn part of a wider social change that affected the Army as much as it did every other aspect of British life. The list of the dead and wounded in Wellington’s Waterloo despatch might just as well have been torn out of Debrett’s, but the heroes of the Crimea and Indian Mutiny were made of different stuff, men such as William Peel and Henry Havelock or Captain Hedley Vicars, who were closer in their high-minded earnestness and Bible-carrying piety to the new middle classes of England from which they sprang than to their Godless predecessors of Badajoz and San Sebastián.

      This convergence of identities was important for changing attitudes to the Army, because it coincided with that growing sense of national prestige and providential ‘destiny’ that was to become such a feature of British attitudes during its imperial heyday. Since the time of the Reformation, a profoundly Protestant belief in a divinely appointed national ‘election’ had entered into the English psyche, and as the country emerged from the Napoleonic Wars as the world’s pre-eminent power, this growing sense of predestined mission helped turn her armies from the tools of arbitrary government to place them and the Empire they were creating squarely in the vanguard of Christ’s Second Coming.

      Gone were the days when Byron could sneer that ‘after Troy and Marathon’ the field of Waterloo was ‘not much’; gone the Lilliputian embarrassment of Hazlitt when he compared moderns and ancients; gone the sense that Benjamin West’s painting of the death of General Wolfe was an act of blatant lèse majesté. For the eighteenth-century artist, the proper business of history painting might have been the classical past, but to West’s successors of the nineteenth century the natural subject matter of art was not so much the doings of Regulus or Agrippina as the defence of the Coldstream colours at Sandbank Battery, or the Thin Red Line, or the bald-headed heroics of the Marquis of Granby.

      Along with this burgeoning sense of pride went a deepening sense of responsibility to the country’s army and the country’s dead. ‘Would it have been possible, think you, to have concealed and slurred over our failures?’ demanded W. H. Russell, the great Times war correspondent who brought home the incompetence of the High Command in the Crimea to a British public demanding aristocratic heads; ‘No: the very dead on Cathcart’s Hill would be wronged as they lay mute in their bloody shrouds, and calumny and falsehood would insult that warrior race, which is not less than Roman, because it too has known a Trebisand and a Thrasymene.’

      With the desolating Retreat from Kabul behind them, and the horrors of the Indian Mutiny only months ahead of them, Victorian England was getting used to extracting what comfort it could out of defeat. Here, however, is a note that would not have been heard even forty years earlier. Through the summer of 1815 there had certainly been collections and subscriptions the length of Britain for the widows and orphans of Waterloo, but the sense of responsibility and debt that Russell articulates, the recognition that the dead of the Crimea had their claim on the life of the nation was something very different in the relationship of Britain and her army.

      It was one thing to talk like this, one thing for the Americans to hallow the soil of Gettysburg – it was American soil and American dead on both sides – but it was another to turn a distant piece of Russia or Turkey or any other bit of Europe into a little piece of England. At the end of the Crimean War in 1856 there had been 139 cemeteries of varying sizes scattered on the heights around Sevastopol and the Alma, but within twenty years this number had shrunk to eleven and then to one, as a hostile world of nomadic grave-robbers, winter frosts, earthquakes, vandals and grazing cattle took its random revenge on the men who had humiliated Mother Russia and reduced Sevastopol to ruins.

      Perhaps the only surprise is not that there are so few surviving graves from Britain’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European wars, but that there are any at all. For those who cheerfully suffered the miseries of a Crimean winter, the work of the British Army in the Crimea was manifestly Christ’s work, but for all those countries that Britain fought against or even with, for Islamic Turkey or Orthodox Russia, for its Soviet successors who found themselves the custodians of Lord Raglan’s viscera, or Spanish nationalists recalling the sack of San Sebastián, the graves of Britain’s soldiers were not the sacred places of a burgeoning British mythology, but symbols of national humiliation, exploitation and desecration.

      And then, out of nowhere, all that changed. In 1914 the number of surviving British war graves from Portugal to the Ionian Isles could be counted in their handfuls. Four years later they numbered in their hundreds of thousands. A war that had been fought on a hitherto unimaginable, industrial scale had been commemorated in kind. Something like a million British and Empire soldiers, sailors and airmen had been killed and on gravestones, memorials and monuments across the battlefields of the Western Front, Palestine, Mesopotamia, East Africa, Greece and Italy the task had begun of ensuring that their names would not be forgotten. ‘Imagine them moving in one long continuous column, four abreast,’ an early commentator at the Cenotaph Armistice Day service once said, giving graphic visual meaning to the sheer scale of the task that Britain СКАЧАТЬ