The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War. Peter Parker

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СКАЧАТЬ the vast crowd of men, women and children. Men removed their hats, women bowed their heads, soldiers stood to attention and saluted. As The Times eloquently put it: ‘the very pulse of time stood still’.

      A national day of mourning seemed appropriate: there were, after all, a great many people to mourn. British Empire losses – those who were killed or missing, presumed dead – stood at a staggering 1,104,890. Frustrating as it must have been for those still in uniform long after the end of hostilities, there were many soldiers who never came back at all, since the government had decreed that the bodies of those killed in action would not be returned to Britain for burial. This would have been impractical while the war was still being fought, but the real reason behind the decision was that in the interests of national unity it was important that all the dead should be treated equally. The practice that had obtained after Waterloo, when officers’ bodies were shipped home while other ranks were shovelled into unmarked mass graves, clearly wouldn’t do in the present circumstances. While wealthier families might have been able to make private arrangements for their dead to be brought home, many of those whose husbands, fathers, brothers and sons had been killed would have been hard pushed to find the money for a funeral in peacetime, let alone to pay for a body to be transported across the Channel or from other even more distant theatres of war. Soldiers would therefore lie with their comrades where they had died.

      This noble-sounding idea was not always matched by the circumstances in which ‘the Fallen’ were dealt with during the war. Some of the dead, uncoffined and with blankets serving as shrouds, were buried in civilian cemeteries, but by early 1915 it was already clear that the scale of the casualties was such that land would have to be acquired to create new military cemeteries. In the meantime, burials took place where possible behind the lines. These may often have lacked individuality, with several bodies laid together in specially dug trenches, but they were dignified affairs with a proper religious service conducted by a padre and attended by soldiers from the same company of the deceased. Given the chaos of battle, however, and the difficulty of bringing in the dead under fire, many soldiers were quite literally buried where they fell. Even when a soldier was identifiable, and had died recently and comparatively ‘cleanly’, burials in the field could be hurried and basic affairs, with bodies tipped into convenient shell holes and covered with a few shovelfuls of earth or mud while someone said a brief prayer. Personal effects would be placed in marked bags to be returned in due course to relatives, and the man’s tin helmet would be hung on a bayonet or on a rifle thrust into the ground, barrel first. Where there was no rifle or bayonet, a bottle containing a piece of paper inscribed with identifying details of the dead soldier would be stuck in the ground. In some places burial parties had time to use bits of wood and wire to fashion crude crosses.

      Elsewhere it was a matter of gathering up remains that had been lying around for some time or had been scattered by shellfire, and doing the best you could. Even when people had been given a decent burial, the ground in which they lay was often later fought over as opposing armies advanced and retreated. The most careful burial could prove very temporary indeed as high-explosive shells churned up the earth once more, destroying graves and redistributing the dead piecemeal. Given these conditions, it is perhaps not so surprising that over 300,000 of the 750,000 British and Empire troops killed in action on the Western Front still have no known grave.

      One of the jobs undertaken by the British Red Cross was to ascertain what had happened to those who were listed as ‘missing in action’. This term was not always a euphemism, and the Red Cross was occasionally able to bring good news to distraught relatives. Soldiers unaccounted for may have been lying unidentified in hospitals, or been taken prisoner. Stories abounded of soldiers separated from the regiment during battle and found wandering behind the lines wholly disoriented, or perhaps suffering the effects of shell shock. Mostly, however, the missing were rightly presumed dead. The Red Cross’s job was hampered by the fact that at the beginning of the war no system of recording burials had been organised, so that even when a soldier was known to have died and had been given a proper burial, it was not always easy to find the site. The careless practices of Waterloo had long since been abandoned, but marking and maintaining soldiers’ graves in distant engagements such as the Boer War in South Africa remained a fairly haphazard affair. This may have been deemed acceptable for Tommy Atkins, the professional soldier, but many of the dead of the First World War were civilian volunteers and conscripts and their families expected them to be treated accordingly.

      It was while working with the Mobile Unit of the British Red Cross Society based at Lille that Fabian Ware, a former editor of the Morning Post, took it upon himself to begin making a note of British graves and their locations. The Unit had been formed in September 1914 after the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, had asked for volunteers to go in search of soldiers who had gone missing and might well be wandering lost in the chaos that often prevailed in the aftermath of battle. It was a curiously amateur yet effective organisation, made up of people in civilian vehicles who not only drove around looking for lost soldiers but also collected the wounded and transported them to hospitals. Ware subsequently persuaded the Adjutant-General of the British Expeditionary Force that his project to record burial sites should receive official War Office backing, and in March 1915 a Graves Registration Commission was created. Ware himself was given the rank of major and by October the Commission had registered over 31,000 graves, all of which had their temporary markers replaced by wooden crosses on which details were indelibly recorded. Lists of names and locations were drawn up and Ware entered negotiations with the French authorities to acquire land in perpetuity for the construction of British war cemeteries.

      Once created, cemeteries required considerable effort to maintain, and so in January 1916 Ware set up the National Committee for the Care of Soldiers’ Graves. News of this organisation’s work had reached Britain, and relatives of the dead began to direct their enquiries to this new body as well as to the Red Cross. In order to answer these enquiries, the Graves Registration Commission was reorganised in the spring of 1916 into the Directorate of Graves Registration and Enquiries (DGRE), supplying relatives with information about and even photographs of burial sites. The intention was that after the war was over people would be able to visit these graves, but at the time such pilgrimages must have seemed a very long way off.

      In May 1917, the National Committee for the Care of Soldiers’ Graves became the Imperial War Graves Commission, constituted under royal charter and with the Prince of Wales as its president. The Commission undertook the daunting task of providing a marked grave for every corpse, even those whose headstones would merely read ‘A Soldier of the Great War: Known Unto God’, a designation for the unidentified chosen by Rudyard Kipling, who had been appointed literary adviser to the Commission, and whose own son, killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915, was among those with no known grave.

      Someone who conducted many burial services at the front, both of the known and unknown, was an army chaplain called David Railton. The son of a leading figure in the Salvation Army, Railton served on the front line as a padre throughout the war and had been awarded an MC in 1916 for tending the wounded under fire. It was Railton who came up with the idea after the war that a single unidentified serviceman should be brought home to Britain as a representative not only of those whose bodies had never been found or identified, but of all those who had been killed in action. In August 1920 he sent this proposal to the Dean of Westminster, Herbert Ryle, who, in passing it on first to George V and then to Lloyd George, shamelessly claimed it as his own. The King rejected the idea as in poor taste, and there was some worry that such a gesture might reopen wounds that were in the process of healing, but it won acceptance when placed before a cabinet meeting in October. Once again, preparations had to be made hastily since it was decided that a state funeral of this representative of all the dead should take place on Armistice Day, 11 November, followed by burial in Westminster Abbey.

      By making the funeral of an unidentified soldier brought back from the battlefields the focus of the second anniversary of the Armistice, the Church had a chance to reassert itself at the centre of the commemoration. At the insistence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Thomas Davidson, there had in fact been a short service of dedication when the temporary Cenotaph СКАЧАТЬ