The real work of the Commission in France and Belgium would only properly begin when the war was over, but it was against this shifting background of retreat and advance that the first tentative steps were taken. There was little to be done on the ground in areas where the fighting continued, but that was possibly just as well because there was still one key issue that Kenyon’s report had left unresolved. ‘I have not considered that question of finance came within my terms of reference,’ he had concluded, before highlighting the awkward balance between economy and quality that the Commission would have to maintain,
but it is obvious that it has an important bearing on the subject of this report. However carefully the cost of each cemetery is limited, the number of these cemeteries is so large that the total expenditure must be very great. On this ground alone, if on no other, it is essential that the general principles of cemetery design should be determined without delay … It is also essential that the architects employed should make their designs as simple and inexpensive as possible, since extravagant cost must inevitably lead to the rejection of the design. The country needs dignity and refined taste, not ostentation, and then it will not grudge the cost. It surely will not refuse the cost of one day of war in order to honour for centuries the memory of those who fell.
There was, unusually, no difficulty from the Treasury and none from the Empire – in June 1917 the representatives at the Imperial War Conference agreed to share the costs in proportion to the numbers of their dead – but the problem was that the Commission had no real idea at all as to what those costs might be. At that June conference Ware had produced a figure of £10 per grave; although this was adopted and became the measure of subsequent budgeting, it was no more than guesswork, an arbitrary figure pulled out of a hat by a Commission so ignorant of their business, according to Blomfield, that they needed the meaning ‘of specifications and quantities, and the ordinary methods of obtaining tenders and ordering of building contracts’ explained to them.
Blomfield was never one to underplay his own role in things, and the Commission had the Office of Works’ experience to call on, but he was only exaggerating an essential truth. The Commission’s remit stretched to every theatre of the war, and in June 1918 they could have had no more idea of what challenges Gallipoli had in store than they had of the costs there might be in East Africa or Mesopotamia. ‘The resting places are in every conceivable site,’ Kipling, the Commission’s literary arbiter and public spokesman, would have to remind an impatient public, ‘on bare hills flayed by years of battle, in orchards and meadows, besides populous towns or little villages, in jungle-glades and coast ports, in far-away islands, among desert sands, and desolate ravines.’
The graves on the Gallipoli peninsula, in particular, would present the Commission with a problem that could not even be addressed until after the war. For the greater part of the conflict, Britain’s cemeteries along the Western Front had been in or behind the lines, but from the night in early January 1916, when the last Allied soldier slipped away under the cover of darkness from Gallipoli, the makeshift graves and snow-covered corpses of a nine-month-long campaign had been left to the mercy of an Ottoman foe and hostile climate.
This was distressing enough for relatives who had been forced to live in almost total ignorance for three years, who often did not even know whether or not their son or husband had a grave, and it was exacerbated by the peculiar associations that had wrapped themselves around the name of Gallipoli. The campaign had been fought by a combined force of French, British and Empire units, but for the ANZAC troops and their governments and populations who had sent them to war in 1914 the peninsula and its landmarks – Anzac Cove, Lone Pine, Chunuk Bair, the Nek – had assumed a significance that transcended the military or strategic to become a proving ground of courage and a mythic part of national identity.
The 8,709 Australian dead were just the beginning of the challenge awaiting the War Graves Commission – the British had lost 20,000 during the campaign, the New Zealanders 2,721 or almost a third of their troops, the Indian units more than fifteen hundred, even the tiny Newfoundland contingent, bound for annihilation on the Somme, forty-nine – but Ware had no answers to give relatives. In the last days of the campaign, an Australian padre had scattered wattle seeds among the Australian graves and made a rough map of the cemeteries, but when the burials had almost all been at night in shallow, hastily dug holes the chances of identifications were slipping away with every year.
There was nothing either that Ware could do – approaches through American and papal channels had produced little – and even in France and Belgium the ebb and flow of battle in 1918 had made the most basic reconnaissance a challenge. ‘The cemeteries were often very difficult to find,’ recalled Reginald Blomfield, whose own prior experience of the front had been limited to digging trenches around London with the Inns of Court, ‘as in many cases the roads shown on our maps had been obliterated by shell fire, and we had to leave our cars and wander over what had been battle-fields in search of graves hastily made and planted anywhere.’
The end of hostilities on 11 November showed too the numbing scale of exhumations and reburials that the concentration of graves into selected cemeteries would entail. For obvious reasons the Commission wished to disturb as few graves as possible, but the figures involved were still staggering: 128,577 re-interments in the first fifteen months of peace, a further 76,073 over the next eighteen months and 38,000 more over the following three years, disinterred by chance and the plough after the official search programme was closed at the end of 1921. ‘The total number of graves in France and Belgium when this work has been completed will probably be over 500,000,’ Ware predicted in March 1920, writing with his Graves Directorate hat on,
and the number of cemeteries requiring architectural treatment … will exceed 1,200 …
When the Directorate has completed the marking and registration of the graves in a cemetery, and the cemetery is tidy and in good order, the complete records, after being checked and verified, are handed over to the Commission who then take charge of the cemetery. A survey is then made in order to furnish the French or Belgian authorities with the information requisite for the acquisition of the land.
Only photographs now – wooden crosses lurching drunkenly on the edge of flooded craters, the pathetic scraps of a body lying beneath a blanket, a fleshless arm jutting out of a buried dug-out, long lines of searchers steadily moving across a morass of mud with that intent air of a police cordon searching for a missing child – can give any faint sense of the reality that lay behind these figures, but after four years of war there seemed nothing that people could not endure. ‘Exhumation was a routine job despite its grimness,’ one Australian officer remembered. ‘The grave would be opened and the body uncovered. The body was checked for identity discs, paybooks, papers or anything else that could be used in identification. Then the body was wrapped in a blanket, sewn up and marked with an identifying tag for future occasions.’
The work was carried out by soldiers awaiting demob, divided into Grave Concentration Units of twelve men each under a senior NCO, but it was still the forensic skills honed by the successors to the old Mobile Ambulance Unit and Ware’s double identity discs that offered relatives the best hope of reclaiming their dead. For each soldier whom they managed to identify there would be ten who remained unknown, and yet every badge, wedding ring, tattoo or distinguishing shade of khaki that yielded a positive identification saved another family from that ‘dreadful uncertainty’ and unresolved grief that so many, including Kipling, had known since 1914.
It would be another two decades before the task of commemorating the missing would end with Villers-Bretonneux, but for the Commission’s own credibility and for public morale it was vital that a start was made on the cemeteries as soon as possible. In February 1918, the Treasury had made an initial grant of £15,000 for the construction of three ‘experimental’ cemeteries situated safely behind the lines, and in November 1918 a contract was placed for the first of these at Le Treport, a medium-sized cemetery situated on the French coast.
Le Treport offered the chance of gaining a more accurate estimate of costs and the physical and logistical realities of the task ahead and it also provided a first test for the whole design system on which the Commission’s work was to be based. Kenyon had learned only too well the difficulties of getting anyone to agree on anything, and in place of a ‘committee of architects or art critics’ he had proposed a solution that went back to the ‘medieval tradition’ of ‘master’ and ‘disciple’ idealised by the Arts and Crafts Movement, with the cemeteries divided into ‘a few large groups’ under a ‘Principal Architect’ and a team of younger architects, ideally recruited from the forces, answerable to him but – within the general principles laid down by the Commission – ‘free to work in accordance with the dictates of their genius’.
It might have seemed a quaintly medieval solution to death on an industrial scale, but Kenyon’s report dovetailed with both a wish to employ young architects and draughtsmen who had served with the Army and with the personalities the Commission had landed itself with. ‘The Principal Architects had areas assigned to them,’ Blomfield recalled with a degree of smugness that suggests how right Kenyon was to keep the three principals apart,
The three cemeteries at Ypres, for example … the great cemetery of Lystenhoek near Poperinghe, and several of the more important cemeteries in the Ypres area and the Somme district, and the large and important cemetery of St Sever at Rouen, were designed by me in this way … As far as I can recollect, the cemetery of Le Treport on the coast, which was designed by me, was actually the first cemetery that was completed. It was regarded by the Commission as in the nature of an experiment both as to cost and effect, and Kipling having said some nice things as to its beauty, this cemetery became more or less a prototype for subsequent designs.
There were difficulties and delays on the ground that are glossed over here, problems with transport and labour and the scale and speed of demobilisation, but these were nothing compared with the troubles the Commission was brewing for itself at home. The Anglican mutterings over Lutyens’s Great Stone ought to have warned them, because while Kenyon’s compromise of two central monuments – cross and stone – had successfully brought Baker into line, there was an intransigent and vociferous element that was not going to be bought off so easily.
There were other strands of opposition – the people ask for housing and we give them stones, the architect and influential teacher, William Lethaby, complained – but it was the old issues of repatriation, freedom, religious sentiment and the headstone around which the principal opposition rallied. In his original report Kenyon had strongly advocated the plain, simple stone that is now so familiar, but with the end of the war and the public’s first chance to see what was being planned for them, a thin trickle of protest letters turned into a vituperative parliamentary and press campaign against the Commission’s ‘unspeakable tyranny’.
They were ‘the most heartless and soulless’ of all official bodies … ‘no government would dare to attempt such an outrage … under the eyes of the public’ … ‘desecration’ … ‘monstrous’ … ‘bureaucracy run mad’ … ‘against the custom of all civilised nations’ … ‘Never before in the history of man has a parent or widow been deprived of her right to show their love by a personal memorial’ – week in, week out, letters in The Times show the depth of anger at the refusal ‘to allow bereaved parents, widows, and orphans to have any say in regard to the graves of their loved-ones’, and the Commission’s problem was that it was only too true. As a former newspaper editor, Ware was acutely aware of public opinion, yet whenever it came to any specific issue, whether it was the latitude allowed to the lettering on a gravestone, or a request for the Hand of Ulster or the Maltese Cross or school emblem to replace a regimental badge, the ‘Old Milner’ in him would always out. ‘I know how English people dislike (more than ever after these five years of bureaucratic control) any interference with their liberty in any way,’ he wrote to one widow who had been palmed off with the usual official high-handedness, but ‘they do not understand that such committees as this … are really designed to help them’.
The problem rested in that patronising use of ‘they’ – another relative was breezily dismissed as one of those people ‘who prefer modern translations of the Old and New Testament to the Authorised Version’ – and Lord Wolmer was not lying in The Times when he promised the War Graves Commission a fight. ‘Nothing could put a harsher touch upon the underlying sorrow with which innumerable hearts are now stricken,’ a Spectator editorial lamented, putting its finger unerringly on the weaknesses and subterfuges in the Kenyon Report,
than that there should be a bitter public dispute over the war graves. That would be a humiliation when everything should be done in the spirit that makes sorrow and sacrifice ennobling … For our part we have read the Report by Sir Frederic Kenyon, whose recommendations have been accepted by the Commission, with a full appreciation of the anxious care which he brought to his task, of his evident sense of responsibility and of his recognition of the dignity and significance which should properly belong to the war cemeteries. But when all has been said, we fear that the recommendations lack just that touch of sympathetic understanding and indulgence which would have made allowance for the almost uncontrollable individual cravings that have expressed themselves and are rapidly growing. On the artistic side we admit there is everything to be said for uniformity and for strict regulations, but this leaves out the question of what is more important than grandeur or austerity of design, and that is the passionate and incalculable longing of the individual – of the wife, the mother, the brother or sister – to express devotion to the dead in his or her own way.
It was a difficult case to answer, and all the more so for the unusual moderation with which it was expressed. ‘The last thing we want to do is to be unjust,’ the editorial went on in its measured ex cathedra tones,
but we cannot help thinking that, whether unconsciously or not, the idea of ‘equality of treatment’ – the idea that the officers and men must be treated alike is made unduly to come to the rescue of the desiderated artistic principles … Correctness of taste is good, but the sincere outpouring of a wife’s or mother’s love, may be even better than good taste. We do not know how far women were consulted in this matter, if they were consulted at all; but if a single mother had helped to draw up the Report we feel pretty sure that it would have caused less pain.
Who would have thought, one embittered mother wrote, ‘when they left us in 1914 in their boyish vigour that not even in death should we be allowed to choose for them’, and it was a cry from a pre-war world to which Ware was determined there would be no return. In the early days of the fighting he had glimpsed the democratic possibilities latent in his work, and he had no intention of seeing the vision of national and imperial unity enshrined in his cemeteries high-jacked now by what he saw as a narrowly self-interested, patrician clique, dominated by the extended Cecil clan for whom his old colleague from the early days in France, Lord Robert Cecil, was the chief spokesman.
It is important to realise too that this was as passionately a matter of ‘religion’ to Ware, who had been brought up in the evangelical dissenting tradition of Victorian England, as it was for the Anglican opposition to their plans. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, evangelicalism had lost much of the high ground in national affairs it once owned, and yet the cemeteries that he and the Commission were planning were as much an expression of that deflected Victorian evangelical energy and high earnestness as was the Empire they were built to honour.
The cemeteries seem in so many ways now the product of a new century of democracy, equality and agnosticism that it is easy to forget that they were in a very real sense the last great achievement of the Victorian Age of Faith. By the time that they were realised, the missionary zeal and dreams that had inspired that Age belonged to a fading past, but it is no coincidence that the men who shared Ware’s vision at the Commission were the same men who had given India New Delhi, South Africa its parliament building, Egypt the Aswan Dam and the Mother Country her last monumental proofs of her special place in God’s dispensation.
The opposition was not, of course, the privileged Anglican clique Ware liked to pretend it was – it was something that transcended wealth, party, denomination – but it suited him to pull out the ‘class card’ now as it had when William Gladstone’s body was repatriated to England in 1915. In the spring of 1920, a petition with more than eight thousand signatures was presented to the Prince of Wales, and yet all Ware could see, or was prepared to see, were the same old Cecil names that figured in every protest from the letter pages of The Times to the Canterbury House of Laymen. ‘Your Royal Highness,’ began Lady Florence Cecil’s petition, a gold-embossed and vellum-bound volume, ivory in colour, 10½ x 8½ inches x 3½ deep, crammed with line after line of signatures and pasted-in slips of paper,
In the name of thousands of heartbroken parents, wives, brothers and sisters of those who have fallen in the war, we, the undersigned, appeal most earnestly to Your Royal Highness as President of the Imperial War Graves Commission to help us.
We have been deeply wounded by the decision of the Commission that no crosses (other than those engraved on the headstone, which time and the weather will soon deface) are to be allowed over the individual graves of those who gave their lives to preserve the lives and liberty of others.
It was through the strength of the Cross that many of them were enabled to do so. It is through the hope of the Cross that most of us are able to carry on the life from which all the sunshine seems to have gone, and to deny us the emblem of that strength and hope adds heavily to the burden of our sorrow.
We do not ask that all should have crosses. Some may prefer headstones, but for those of us who so deeply desire it – is it too much to ask that the present wooden cross may be replaced at our expense, by more durable ones of stone …
We pray Your Royal Highness most fervently to grant that right which has been from all time the privilege of the bereaved may not be denied us.
It was a powerful and moving document – ‘Lost three sons … Three brothers … Three brothers … 3 sons killed in action … Four dear sons out of five having given their lives for King and Country … Mother of only son … Mother of two sons … Five nephews … My only child … Son aged 18 years … Bereaved of Chums … Bereaved of Pals … Fiancé …’ – but the ‘Cecil clan’ were not the only ones ready to mobilise their support.fn8
‘When the widows and mothers of our dead go out to France to visit the graves,’ a counter-memorandum from the Trades Union Congress Parliamentary Committee, representing four and a half million working men, declared,
they will expect to find that equal honour has been paid to all who have made the same sacrifice, and this result cannot be attained if differences, however restricted, are allowed in the character and design of the memorials erected.
The Imperial War Graves Commission was showing the benefit of having Harry Gosling, an old and experienced trade union activist, as one of its Commissioners, and with ‘The Comrades of the Great War’ and ‘The National Federation of Discharged Sailors and Soldiers’ weighing in with their own resolutions in favour of equality, the battle-lines were drawn. ‘As I see the position now,’ one sympathetic MP, the Unionist Member for Westminster, William Burdett-Coutts wrote in April 1920, after Lord Robert Cecil had demanded a division of the House over the war graves question,
the Commission has been roundly attacked by private influence, by a particular set of people whose names give a superficial weight to their views, and by methods of persistent personal persuasion, including not a little misrepresentation.
The House of Commons is apt to be led by sentiment, and has not a very long memory. The sentiment in this case has been confined to sympathise with the harrowing appeal on behalf of a comparative few individuals.
In all the history of the Commission there is perhaps nothing odder than the intervention of a man who in thirty-five years as an MP had scarcely so much as troubled the House. With a name like ‘Burdett’ and the constituency of Westminster, he might have seemed born to take such a stand, but this particular Burdett was not all he seemed, having only adopted the name by Royal Licence in 1881, when, to a good deal of ribald gossip, he had married the great Victorian philanthropist and heiress to the Burdett political inheritance and Coutts banking fortune, Angela Burdett-Coutts.
William Ashmead-Bartlett, as he then was, was thirty at the time of his marriage, Angela Burdett-Coutts sixty-seven and, unfairly or not, a faint air of improbability seems to have surrounded him ever after. Her closest friends always insisted on the contribution he made to her work and happiness, but even if that were true it is not just imagination that detects a note of mild surprise in Commission circles that their democratic champion in Parliament should turn out to be the sixty-nine-year-old widower of the Victorian age’s richest heiress.
Until this moment, in fact, William Burdett-Coutts had spent his whole life in the shadow of either wife or brother or, when they were both safely dead, of a war-correspondent nephew who had made his name with his Gallipoli despatches. His widowed mother had brought him and his four siblings from America to England while they were all still young, but while the older and flashier Ellis was progressing from a double First at Christ Church – where he routed Asquith for the presidency of the Oxford Union – to full-blown Disraelian imperialism and an unchallenged position as the rabble-rousing Michael Heseltine of the late nineteenth-century Conservative faithful, William was making his plodding way through Keble into the Burdett-Coutts philanthropic empire.
If Burdett-Coutts had spent thirty-five years in Parliament in virtual silence, however, he was ready when his chance came. He had first publicised his sympathy with the Commission in a letter to The Times in February, and when the following month Cecil tabled a question in the House demanding his debate, Burdett-Coutts rose ‘as one who is strongly and conscientiously opposed to the policy of the Noble Lord’, to echo the demand as the clearest way of endorsing Commission policies.
Ware had probably been hoping that someone more prominent would take up their cause, but after three weeks had produced no one else, he made his first overtures. ‘An attack on the general policy of the Commission will shortly be made in the House of Commons,’ Ware wrote to Burdett-Coutts in mid-April, thanking him for his earlier contribution in The Times,
and I understand that you intend to speak on the occasion. I should be glad to give you any information you may desire on the subject … I would be much obliged if you could give me the names of any members likely to be interested in the matter … and would care to be supplied with the facts.
Ware needed to maintain a delicate balance here, because while he was keen to maintain at least the appearance of Burdett-Coutts’s independence, he was determined that he was going to be well coached. ‘I understand that you are going to draw up a statement and send it over here,’ he wrote again on 19 April, forwarding on with his offer of help the trade union statement of support that Harry Gosling had orchestrated: ‘If you wish me to draw up a skeleton statement of headings I shall be happy to do so.’
The statement when it came at the end of the month, printed at Burdett-Coutts’s expense and over his name and circulated to MPs, had, like so many apparently independent documents, Ware’s signature all over it. ‘The Imperial War Graves Commission was constituted by Royal Charter in 1917,’ the statement began, reminding Members that the money involved was ‘imperial’ money and not simply ‘national’ money, and the principles on which it had been pledged imperial principles that the House had no business interfering with. ‘It is of the utmost importance that the House should realise the position in which the Imperial War Graves Commission is now placed by the Motions [demanding a change of policy],’ Burdett-Coutts concluded, his final paragraphs set in a bold type for emphasis,
It is not too much to say that the whole work of this great Imperial and National Memorial is now paralysed by this fatal atmosphere of doubt. The way of the Commission must be cleared once for all, so that they can be free to get on.
Under these circumstances it will not be sufficient to defeat the motion under notice, if the House should so decide, when it is brought forward. A negative decision would still leave the matter open and the commission liable to some new attack … Therefore, if the motion is made, an Amendment will be moved which will enable the House, if it so wills, to directly confirm the principle of equality of treatment … and the entire policy connected therewith.
There was the flimsiest of olive branches from Churchill in the form of a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury inviting a text for the great Cross of Sacrifice, but any last-minute nerves disappeared the moment in the late afternoon of 4 May 1920 that the Member for Westminster rose to a packed House to reply to the motion. ‘No one could be more reluctant than I am to deprive relatives of anything that can in any way assuage the irreparable loss that they will carry to the end of their days,’ Burdett-Coutts began, an elderly and childless widower transparently, almost humbly, conscious of the grief that separated him from so many of those to whom he was speaking,
They have had to meet awful trials in this War and they have borne themselves in their darkest hour with a heroism that seems to reflect and form a very part of that shown by those whom they mourn. The women: the mothers, the wives, the daughters and sisters of England and Great Britain! We used to read of the Roman women in this connection. But classic story contains no examples of mingled resignation and pride comparable to that shown by British women in the 20th century of the Christian era. Can I say less of the men – the fathers who lost their sons, often an only son. I can only say, and I think many hon. Members have felt the same thing, that when one met them for the first time after the blow had fallen, something came into your throat that almost prevented your speaking. And there they have stood, speechless too perhaps, but brave, proud, calm and uncomplaining. It has been wonderful throughout the War, but what is clear is that it is they themselves whose light has gone out who seemed to have died the death for their country. No, it is not want of sympathy that will lead a single member of the Commission to go into the Lobby, as I hope a large majority will do, to confirm once for all the policy of the Commission … It is rather the natural movement of sympathy into the largest channel, and one where it is most needed, that will do it.
It might not have been the kind of language that Kenyon or Macready would have used, perhaps, but age demands and gets a different sort of licence, and it was an astute opening from a man defending a Commission that stood accused of bureaucratic heartlessness. ‘I approached this subject with an absolutely fresh mind,’ Burdett-Coutts went on, keen to erase any impression that he was the Commission’s poodle; he ‘was only the man in the street’ … ‘knew nothing of the discussions that had taken place’ in the House over the last year and knew nobody on the Commission ‘except one man, the great poet of Empire’ who ‘kindly came down to this House the other day and made a most convincing speech to a meeting of hon Members’.
It would be intriguing to know how much of this was coaching and how much spontaneous. Whichever way it was, it is impossible to believe that Ware did not know what was coming next. ‘At the time I speak of, [Kipling] was away, and I could not get at him,’ Burdett-Coutts continued – and across the century one can see the House in the subfusc shades of mourning, many of them men who had fought in the trenches, men who had lost their own sons; men whose decisions had sent a million troops to their deaths, Asquith, Churchill, Lloyd George … and on his feet the sixty-nine-year-old Member for Westminster, only a year from his own death, the seeming incarnation of disinterested and diffident simplicity, carefully unfolding a letter as he softened up his audience for a coup de théâtre that his brother in his Gladstone-baiting heyday would have been proud of.
I cannot help, however, reading one sentence from a letter I received from him a day or two ago. The letter is marked ‘private’, but I do not think he will object to my quoting this sentence … The words are these: ‘You see we shall never have any grave to go to. Our boy was missing at Loos. The ground is of course battered and mined past all hope of any trace being recovered. I wish some of the people who are making this trouble realise how more than fortunate they are to have a name on a headstone in a known place.’
It was a crucial moment in the debate and with Kipling’s letter, Burdett-Coutts had given the Commission the human face it needed. ‘In my communications with the Commission,’ he went on, clawing back yard by yard the emotional high ground that the opposition had held unchallenged over the past year, two things had struck him: the ‘infinite consideration’ of the Commission to ‘all classes of relatives’ and,
what I call the genius of this War … which has never in history had an opportunity of expressing itself before. That is the solid and united effort, embodying its unity in forces drawn from every island and continent under the British Flag, fused and welded into one, without distinction of race, colour or creed, fighting, ready to die, and dying for one common cause that they all understood. It is that great union, both in action and in death, that the Commission seeks nobly to commemorate and make perpetual by its policy and design.
The debate had just begun, though, and if some of the rancour had momentarily gone out of it, the truce was only temporary. In his opening speech Sir James Remnant had paid a warm tribute to his ‘old personal friend’ Ware, but when Viscount Wolmer – a Cecil grandson – rose in his turn, a cursory nod in the direction of the Commission’s ‘fine’ motives was the most they were going to get. ‘I listened to my hon. Friend very carefully,’ Wolmer went on, successfully turning the whole argument of equality and compulsory uniformity on its head before going straight for the heart of Ware’s imperial dream. So long as there were clear guidelines as to size and cost there could be no conceivable objection to variety, he argued,
But there is a further point … the conception that you have in the graveyards designed by the War Graves Commission is of a great national Imperial memorial, a great war memorial, a great memorial to the British Army … By all means have memorials. Make them out of Government stone if you like. Make them uniform. But you have no right to employ, in making these memorials, the bodies of other people’s relatives. It is not decent, it is not reasonable, it is not right. A memorial is something to be seen. There will be two classes of people who will visit these graveyards: there will be the idle tourists in the first place, and secondly there will be the bereaved relatives. Are you going to consider the feelings of the bereaved relatives or the artistic susceptibilities of the casual tourist? These graveyards are not and cannot be war memorials. Have your war memorials in England or in France or wherever you like … but you have no right to take the precious remains of bereaved widows, parents and orphans and build them into a monument which is distasteful and hateful to those relatives, as in many cases it is.
It must have made uncomfortable listening for the Commissioners because Wolmer was largely right – uniformity was a matter of aesthetics and not principles; nine people of ten would choose their own stone if allowed, the English did not like conformity – and the old alliance of patrician and people was in full cry. ‘I must ask the House to bear with me while I read some of the hundreds of letters I have received from bereaved relatives … who feel most terribly and acutely on this subject,’ he continued – Hansard captures the exchange:
The hon. Member for Westminster spoke about the voice of the dead. No doubt it may be the case that some of the men who have died would have liked to be buried in the way that the War Graves Commission has decided.
Captain BROWN All of them!
Viscount WOLMER … How does the hon. Member know? What right has he to say that? I know of the case of a boy who told his mother that he would ‘hate to be buried like a dog’. Those were the words he used. The boy is dead, and that is how he is going to be treated.
‘How does the hon. Member know? What right has he to say that?’ – these were questions to which the Commission had no real answers. There was nobody on Wolmer’s side who would have denied an equal freedom to those who chose a ‘Commission stone’, and all they wanted to know was by what conceivable right – even if the Imperial War Graves Commission party were in a clear majority, even if there was only one mother, one son, one husband who did not want the stone – did a country that had publicly gone to war to defend Little Belgium against the militarist might of Germany now trample over the wishes of its bereaved relatives?
‘My hon. Friend in his most interesting memorandum calls it an Imperial memorial for the freedom of men,’ Wolmer continued. ‘What freedom is it if you will not even allow the dead bodies of the people’s relatives to be cared for and looked after in the way they like? It is a memorial, not to freedom, but to rigid militarism, not in intention, but in effect.’ It was not as though it was the ‘country’ speaking, either, Wolmer reminded the House, or as if Parliament had been given a say in the matter, only an unrepresentative and dictatorial coterie of like-minded men without a single representative of any religion on it. ‘I think it extremely unfortunate that the whole scope of the Commission’s activities was not discussed in Parliament,’ he concluded, and while the case against the narrow elitism of the Commission might have carried more weight if it had not come from a member of the extended Cecil clan, Wolmer was on solid ground on at least one point:
and it is extremely unfortunate that there is not a single woman upon that Commission. I listened with admiration to the Hon member for Westminster when he spoke about the women of England. Why are they not represented upon the Commission? Of the hundreds of letters that I have received the greater part of them come from women. Women feel more acutely upon this question than men. That is only natural. Why are women not represented on the War Graves Commission? We come here, not to ask that relatives should be allowed to display wealth or privilege upon the graves, but only that they may show their love, the love which itself is stronger than death, the only thing that is, that love which makes the churchyards of our countryside beautiful in spite of the uncouthness of many of the tombstones or the lack of taste in particular ornaments … It is that love which will carry mourners to these grave yards in France, and it is to that love to which we as a nation owe a debt which we never can repay and which we ought in a matter of this sort primarily to consider.
Wolmer’s had been an impressive performance, but for every letter produced against the Commission another could be produced for it, for every report of the Commission’s ‘intolerance and high-handed insolence’ the gratitude of a grateful widow or mother. As Wolmer sat down Asquith rose to declare his support in the shortest and simplest of terms, and one by one Members followed him with their stories and praise for the work already completed in France. ‘I have suffered in this war like my right hon. Friend,’ Colonel Burn, just back from seeing the first completed cemeteries, told the House,
I know not where my boy’s body is. His grave is not known, and whether he is buried or not is more than I can say, because the Germans came into the trenches where he was killed, and when I looked and saw the grave of a General and on either side that of an unknown British soldier, I felt proud to think that my boy may have been one of these unknown British soldiers.
‘Long before there was controversy on this question,’ Mr Thomas, the Member for Derby, took up the theme, he had received a letter ‘which reflected the opinion of humble people’. He had been visiting France shortly after the death of ‘that brilliant young man, Mr Raymond Asquith’ and had seen his grave and near it that of his cousin, ‘young Tennant’. ‘Between them were the graves of humble British soldiers,’ Thomas went on,
and as I stood there I thought of the … events that had brought the statesman’s son, the peer’s son, and the humble British soldier together, all with the same kind of tombstone, each burial place indicated in the same way … At Derby, later, I was speaking at a meeting of my constituents, and I told them of the incident … [and] a few days later I received a letter from Leicester, and it was something like this effect. ‘I see in the press that you have been near the grave of Raymond Asquith. I lost my only boy in the War. I am blind and his mother is deaf. I was told by some friends that he was buried near the grave of Raymond Asquith, and I wonder whether you could tell me that the grave is well kept.’ The name was Simon. I looked into my book and I found that was the lad whose name I had put down merely by chance. I replied … that not only could I say the grave was well kept, but that I had picked up a leaf from the grave and that perhaps he would like to have it. I leave Members of this House to imagine the reply I got.fn9
There seemed no reason why the debate should ever stop and no reason why it should go on. Few on either side had wanted to air their bitter divide in the first place but no one now was going to change sides. Something good, though, had come out of it: not an emotional exhaustion, exactly, but a sad-eyed recognition of a universal grief that made rancour and division – emotional or parliamentary – seem somehow indecent. There was more to unite than separate them. Mr Turton would have given all that he had to have brought his only son home from Poperinghe to lie in their own churchyard ‘where Sunday after Sunday we could see the grave’. Colonel Burn found solace in the thought that one of those unknown graves in France was his son’s, but in their common loss was a common call to consideration, decency and humanity. It would, Burn told the House, be an ingratitude and insult to the dead to ‘come to a division’. ‘I appeal to my hon. Friend (Sir James Remnant) with whom I completely sympathise,’ responded Mr Thorne for the opposition, ‘not to force this to a Division. A Division on such a subject would harass every one of us. Our men, officers and men alike, on every stricken field have fallen together. In their death they were not divided. Let us, their fathers, not be divided here.’
The House agreed. To the bitter end, Lord Robert Cecil promised to fight on but there would be no division.fn10 The War Graves Commission could now go ahead and Churchill, their new chairman, summing up the debate, painted for them the future. ‘The cemeteries which are going to be erected to the British dead on all the battlefields in all the theatres of war, will be entirely different from the ordinary cemeteries which mark the resting place of those who pass out in the common flow of human fate from year to year,’ he declared with his own inimitable and overweening sense of history,
They will be supported and sustained by the wealth of this great nation and Empire, as long as we remain a nation and an Empire, and there is no reason at all why, in periods as remote from our own as we ourselves are from the Tudors, the graveyards in France of this Great War, shall not remain an abiding and supreme memorial to the efforts and glory of the British Army, and the sacrifices made in that great cause.
Some decried Lutyens’s Great Stones as meaningless, he went on, but they too were part of this great feat of commemoration. ‘I have been speaking of periods of 200 or 300 years,’ he concluded,
but these great stones of which I speak are of Portland stone, weighing about 10 tons … and there will be 1,500 or 2,000 of them on the plains of France alone, and these stones will certainly be in existence 2,000 or 3,000 years hence … [and] even if our language, our institutions, and our Empire all have faded from the memory of man, these great stones will still preserve the memory of a common purpose pursued by a great nation in the remote past, and will undoubtedly excite the wonder and reverence of a future age.
Now all the Commission had to do was build the cemeteries.