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 the head of that column reaches the Cenotaph the last four men would be at Durham. In Canada that column would stretch across the land from Quebec to Ottawa; in Australia from Melbourne to Canberra; in South Africa from Bloemfontein to Pretoria; in New Zealand from Christchurch to Wellington; in Newfoundland from coast to coast of the Island, and in India from Lahore to Delhi. It would take these million men eighty-four hours, or three and a half days, to march past the Cenotaph in London.

      It is hard to know what is more extraordinary, the success of the attempt or the seismic shift of sensibility that brought it about in the first place. A ‘corner of a foreign field’ that for centuries had been no more than a scattered collection of neglected graves could now only be bound by walls fifty miles in length. How was it that nations and governments that had squandered lives in such obscene profusion could suddenly become so protective of their memory? How was it that a post-war Britain marked by class division and mutual suspicion could achieve its most democratic expression in the celebration of its dead? How did a country and empire that was historically so inimical to militarism and regulation, find its most potent expression of ‘Britishness’ in the straight lines, regularity, and enforced conformity of its war cemeteries? What, ultimately, lies behind these cemeteries and memorials? Grief? Pride? Gratitude? Guilt? Atonement? Reparation? Political acumen? Which was it? Catharsis, or ‘the old lie’ – ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ – that the poet Wilfred Owen, killed in the last week of the war, wrote of?

      The fact that these questions are not more often asked is a tribute to the remarkable success with which the process of commemoration was carried out. Success carries with it a sense of its own inevitability and the images of Britain’s war cemeteries – the immaculate rows of graves, the memorials, the flowers and Crosses of Sacrifice, the biblical inscriptions – are so visually and imaginatively compelling that it is hard to realise that there was nothing preordained or self-evident about them. Nor, either, were they once the sacred cows that they now are. They did not appear without a struggle. They were as much the product of debate and argument as they were an expression of national unity, and they brought about divisions that were bitter and lasting. This is now largely, and perhaps properly, forgotten but it would have been surprising if it had been any other way. A traumatised society was dealing with death, grief, pride and anger on an unprecedented scale and it had little to guide it. A nation characterised by a deep and self-conscious class awareness was forced to cope with a war that was as indiscriminate in its killing as the plague. Where, in the twentieth century, was it to find the equivalent of that universality of understanding that raised Battle Abbey, or lies behind the Uccello memorial? How was it to balance the claims of the individual and of the nation? How does a Christian society remember its Muslim, Hindu or Jewish dead? How does it juggle the just claims of victory and the dictates of a wider, healing vision? How, even before you have begun to address these cultural questions, do you begin the vast task of commemorating the million casualties of a war that obliterated every vestige of human identity in the way that the great battles of the Western Front had done?

      That answers were found and took the form they did is largely the work of one man. They came at the end of a century that had seen a gradual but profound change of attitude to its armies. They came too just a year after the centenary of the Battle of Leipzig and the fiftieth anniversary of Gettysburg had raised the Western world’s consciousness of its historical debts. And they emerged, of course, from long cultural traditions, from the country’s Christian roots, and from a human piety that is older even than those. If history can ever be said to belong to the individual, then it is the history of Britain’s war cemeteries and the process by which they came into being. Along with the trenches – their mirror image and polar antithesis – they are how most of us now see the First World War. And yet the identity of the man responsible for them is largely forgotten. Almost everyone, asked for the name of the commander responsible for the slaughter of the Western Front, would, fairly or not, come up with Haig. Most, asked for the architect of the Cenotaph, could make a stab at Lutyens. But the man who mediated between them, who made it possible for a country to come to terms with the slaughter and unbearable debt it owed its dead, is scarcely better known now than the unidentified thousands whose graves only bear the inscription ‘Known unto God’. His name was Fabian Ware.

       ONE

       The Making of a Visionary

      ‘Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,’

      RUPERT BROOKE

      On the afternoon of Saturday 19 September 1914, a spare, dark-haired man in his mid-forties arrived at Lille in northern France to take command of the motley collection of vehicles and drivers that made up the British Red Cross’s ‘flying unit’. For the past four years he had been largely out of the public eye, but if there were few in the unit who would have recognised the face, they would undoubtedly have known the name of the man who for five turbulent years had been the erratically brilliant, ‘warmongering’ editor of the right-wing, imperialist Morning Post.

      If they imagined that this was all that was to be said about him they would not have been entirely wrong – he did not idolise Napoleon for nothing – but it was by no means the most interesting thing about him. There were certainly men at the Morning Post who had only ever seen the bully in him, but Fabian Ware was a dreamer as much as a doer, as much a scholar and visionary as a bruising newspaperman. Which side of ‘this Rupert of the pen and sword’ had brought him to France would be hard to say.

      It is very possible that he did not know himself, but if ever a man was made for France and what lay ahead, it was Fabian Ware. There are natural warriors who only come fully alive in battle, and then there is another, more alarming kind of man altogether: the romantic idealist and patriot who can glimpse among the horrors of war spiritual absolutes that the shabbier and greyer realities of peace deny; who can find in the call to sacrifice and suffering, in the democracy of death and the comradeship of war, not just a realisation of nationhood, but a healing balm for all the divisions, inequalities, subterfuges, and selfishness of ordinary political life.

      For the best part of a decade Ware had been warning the country against the German menace, but then his whole adult life had been lived under the shadow of Britain’s decline. The generation before his that had grown up in the rich afterglow of Waterloo could reasonably expect to live and die in undisturbed possession of the world. It was Ware’s luck to take his place in public life at a moment when an era of expansive confidence and optimism gave way to that endlessly contradictory, paranoid, self-assertive and self-questioning Edwardian age, which would only finally come to an end with Jutland and the Somme.

      It was an age of political paralysis at home and the naval race abroad, of gross inequalities and bitter industrial unrest, of national shame in South Africa and looming civil war in Ireland. But if these were the crises that shaped Ware’s politics something else is needed to explain the man. This is the history of an idea and not the biography of an individual, and yet when that idea so clearly bears the stamp of one man’s personality and moral convictions, we need at least some sense of what it was that would enable a middle-aged man to transform the random command of a small, volunteer ambulance force into an empire that would change the way a whole country would see and commemorate itself.

      Fabian Arthur Goulstone Ware was born at Glendower House in Clifton, Bristol, on 17 June 1869, the third son of the second marriage of a prosperous member of Bristol’s Plymouth Brethren community and his schoolteacher wife. There is as little known of these early Clifton years as there is of his own married life, but if one was looking for a single clue to Ware’s character and development, one influence СКАЧАТЬ