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

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СКАЧАТЬ had been laid to rest in Westminster Abbey, the Imperial War Graves Commission had made considerable progress in the enormous job of providing permanent burial sites for his comrades left behind in Flanders and even farther afield. Most countries in which the war had been fought had followed France’s generous lead in handing over land in perpetuity to the IWGC, which meant that cemeteries could now be constructed in Belgium, Italy, Greece, Iraq, Palestine and Egypt. Similar arrangements would be made with Germany and Turkey.

      Once the land was acquired, it was necessary to come to some decision about how the dead should be commemorated. At the invitation of Fabian Ware, Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker (with whom Lutyens had designed a new capital of British India in Delhi before the war) had visited the battlefields in July 1917. Lutyens left a wonderfully touching account of what he found in France:

       The grave-yards, haphazard from the needs of so much to do and so little time for thought. And then a ribbon of isolated graves like a milky way across miles of country where men were tucked in where they fell. Ribbons of little crosses each touching each across a cemetery, set in a wilderness of annuals and where one sort of flower is grown the effect is charming, easy and oh so pathetic. One thinks for the moment no other monument is needed. Evanescent but for the moment almost perfect and how misleading to surmise in this emotion and how some love to sermonise. But the only monument can be one in which the endeavour is sincere to make such a monument permanent – a solid ball of bronze!

      Bronze balls were not what Ware had in mind. He subsequently asked Sir Frederick Kenyon, Director of the British Museum, to become an adviser to the Commission. After visiting France and Belgium himself, Kenyon submitted a report laying out the principles upon which he believed the cemeteries should be created. They should be surrounded by low walls, within which uniform headstones would mark individual graves arranged without regard for rank or status. In death all men would be equal, officers and their men lying as they had fought, side by side, the headstones merely recording rank, name, regiment, date of death, and age if known. The details, however, were left to Lutyens and Baker, who did not always agree about the design of the cemeteries. Lutyens wanted to avoid all religious symbolism and so came up with the Stone of Remembrance, a sort of non-denominational altar, or (as he described it) a ‘great fair stone of fine proportions’, raised on a shallow flight of broad steps. Inscribed on the stone were some biblically derived but religiously neutral words chosen by Kipling: ‘Their Name Liveth For Evermore’. The more traditionally inclined Baker felt that something specifically Christian and military was called for and designed a huge stone Cross of Sacrifice standing on an octagonal base and faced with a downward-pointing bronze sword. In the event, both designs were used, the Stone featuring in every cemetery containing over four hundred graves, the Cross in all but the smallest plots. In most cases the headstones would be set into concrete beams, buried invisibly beneath the earth, which would keep them both upright and aligned in proper military order.

      Appointed alongside Lutyens and Baker for the work in France and Belgium were Reginald Blomfield, who was both a distinguished architect and a garden designer, and Charles Holden, who had served in the war both with the London Ambulance Column and the Directorate of Graves Registration and Enquiries, and would go on to design many buildings for the London Underground. These four men allotted work on individual cemeteries to young British architects, with priority given to those who had served in the war. Elsewhere, John Burnet, who had worked for Kenyon at the British Museum, was given responsibility for cemeteries in Gallipoli, Syria and Palestine; Sir Robert Lorimer, who was best known for redesigning large country houses in Scotland, would work in Italy, Greece, Egypt and Germany; and Edward Warren, who designed numerous buildings for Oxford University, was allotted Iraq. The Director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew was appointed horticultural adviser to the Commission, and Lutyens asked his old associate Gertrude Jekyll, doyenne of the Edwardian country garden, to provide planting plans for a number of cemeteries.

      It would naturally be some time before the uniform designs could be put into practice, and ‘until such time as they could be handed over to the Imperial War Graves Commission for permanent construction’, the cemeteries were the responsibility of the Directorate of Graves Registration and Enquiries, which both organised and maintained them, assisted by such bodies as the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. The Directorate also remained responsible for searching the battlefields for bodies once the war was over. The vast area to be covered was systematically divided up and allotted to individual ‘Graves Concentration Units’ consisting of twelve soldiers under a senior NCO, who went back and forth looking for corpses and for isolated graves, the occupants of which they exhumed and transferred to recognised cemeteries. Some 8,000 men were employed in this task, and by the time they had finished in September 1921, 204,650 bodies had been removed from the battlefields and reburied in these cemeteries.

      Many relatives of the dead expressed a wish to visit graves as soon as possible after the Armistice, and so a number of religious organisations began conducting groups of the bereaved to France and Belgium. The best known of these was the St Barnabas Society, named after the patron saint of consolation, founded by a clergyman in 1919 in order to subsidise the travel of those who could not afford trips offered by commercial travel companies. Such pilgrimages proved popular. In the seven months between November 1919 and June 1920, for example, the Church Army arranged for 5,000 people to travel to the places where their men lay buried. During this period such places must often have seemed all too redolent of the circumstances in which such men had died. For all the good work carried out by the DGRE, most of the cemeteries were little more than a neat array of wooden crosses standing on bare earth in a bleak landscape where very little was growing. To reach them, mourners would have had to travel through villages that had been reduced to piles of rubble, along rutted roads lined with splintered trees, across ground still churned up by high explosives and littered with barbed wire, burned-out vehicles, abandoned weaponry and all the pitiful detritus of recent warfare. For those who had been unable to attend any sort of funeral for their husbands, sons, fathers and brothers, visiting graves even in these conditions seems to have provided comfort, and by 1923 some 78,500 of them had taken advantage of travelling facilities offered by the Salvation Army and the YMCA. In time these cemeteries would be tidied up considerably and landscaped with shrubs and flower beds. ‘The concept was to create a sentimental association between the gardens of home and the foreign fields where the soldier lies’, and these particular corners of France and Belgium did indeed begin to look as if they were forever England.

      Elsewhere on the Western Front, a tourist industry rapidly developed independently of the pilgrimages conducted for the bereaved. While many people were content to learn about the actual circumstances of the war at the Imperial War Museum, which had been founded at Crystal Palace in 1917 and recorded over three million visitors between 1920 and 1923, others took advantage of the opportunities offered to visit Flanders and Picardy to see where the war had been fought. A number of unemployed veterans of the officer class took out advertisements in the press offering to conduct small groups of visitors round the battlefields by car, their recent first-hand knowledge of France and Belgium a guarantee of authenticity. As early as 1919, tourists could buy books such as A.T. Fleming’s How to See the Battlefields, but the most popular guides were the illustrated series to most of the major battle sites published by the Michelin tyre company, fifteen of which had been published in English editions by 1921. Prefaced with an overview of the military objectives and brief accounts of the individual attacks, complete with maps, the guides provided a detailed itinerary for the visitor. They also contained before-and-after photographs of devastated buildings and villages and recent photographs of the temporary cemeteries. These photos perhaps tell their own story – as well they might, since one would have no idea reading the Michelin guide to the Somme, for example, that 1 July 1916 was (and still is) the worst day in the history of the British army. Euphemistic phrases such as ‘came into contact with the second German positions’ abound, and the emphasis is firmly upon what few successes the Allies achieved, with figures given for numbers of Germans taken prisoner but none whatever for the 60,000 British casualties. ‘The first assaults on July 1 gave the British Montauban and Mametz, while Fricourt and La Boisselle were encircled and carried on July 3,’ we read. ‘Coltmaison and Mametz Wood, reached on the 5th, were carried СКАЧАТЬ