fn1 In Brussels, there is a Waterloo Monument over the graves of fifteen officers and a warrant officer, but these bodies had been moved there from abandoned cemeteries, and it was unveiled seventy-five years after the battle. High on the ramparts above Corunna, the tomb of Sir John Moore also comes closer to expectations, but even this – the grave of the man who did as much as anyone to drag the British Army out of the morass of its late eighteenth-century condition – owed more to Spanish punctilio than it did to the gratitude of a parliament more interested in making politics of his death than honouring his memory in the field.
fn2 ‘Talking about Gods,’ Ware flippantly added for his old chief’s benefit, ‘when the Turcos saw the yellow fumes slowly advancing towards them they thought it was a Gin and legged it!’ This was the crisis that was redeemed in large part by the heroics of the 1st Canadian Division in a series of desperate actions commemorated by Frederick Chapman Clemesha’s St Julien Memorial at ‘Vancouver Corner’, north-east of Ypres, an 11-metre-high single shaft of Vosges granite surmounted by a ‘Brooding Soldier’, head bowed, reversed arms. It bears the inscription: THIS COLUMN MARKS THE BATTLEFIELD WHERE 18,000 CANADIANS ON THE BRITISH LEFT WITHSTOOD THE FIRST GERMAN GAS ATTACKS THE 22nd – 24th OF APRIL. 2,000 FELL AND HERE LIE BURIED. ‘The Canadians paid heavily for their sacrifice,’ Marshal Foch declared at the unveiling ceremony in 1923, ‘and the corner of earth on which this Memorial of gratitude and piety rises has been bathed in their blood. They wrote here the first page in that Book of Glory which is the history of their participation in the war.’
fn3 Robert Graves, inevitably, had a rather different take on it. According to Graves, Gladstone had only volunteered in the first place because those same mourning tenants threatened to chuck him in the duck pond if he didn’t.
fn4 This was the same Earle whose brother had been reported killed in 1914. His own personal experience of the war was improbably enhanced in 1918 when a fragment of an anti-aircraft shell landed on him in St James’s Park.
fn5 ‘It was all Australia to me,’ Kipling, the poet of Empire, had written of the homesick scent of wattle (Acacia) for an Australian volunteer in the Boer War. ‘All I had found or missed, Every face I was crazy to see, And every woman I’d kissed: All that I shouldn’t ha’ done, God knows! (As he knows I’ll do it again) The smell of the wattle round Lichtenberg, Riding in, in the rain!’
fn6 The horrors had been, if anything, worse at Gallipoli, where in the fierce summer heat the state of a bloated and blackened corpse often meant that a burial party simply could not bear to rescue identity discs.
fn7 The Office of Works had not forgotten old enmities either. ‘My Dear Ware,’ Lionel Earle wrote on 13 December 1916, an average enough sort of day on the Western Front: ‘It has been brought to my notice that Colonel Stobart of your department, whose staff occupy Room 21 on the ground floor of Winchester House, insists on open fireplaces being used as well as radiators. As this is absolutely contrary to the instructions issued by order of the First Commissioner, I feel bound to call your attention unofficially in the first place, to the deviation from the rule, and shall have to do so officially unless I am absolutely convinced that it is necessary to disregard the rule in this instance. I have various reports before me as to the temperatures of the room at various times, and I find that, even at 8.10 a.m., the radiators were hot and the temperature stood at 60 [degrees].’ Earle, himself, was the hardy soul who had had to flee the bathroom in his French inn when he found a cockroach in it.
fn8 There was one abortive attempt at compromise when at a private meeting with Balfour (another of the Cecil clan) it was agreed that he should present designs to their artistic advisors for an alternative cruciform gravestone. There was a very strong instinct within the Commission to rest its argument on principles, but nothing could have made the aesthetic case for their own simple headstone better than the squat and bulbous confection that looked as if it might have been the product of a game of ‘Consequences’ among Balfour’s ‘Souls’. ‘I should much regret its adoption, both on artistic grounds and as a matter of principle,’ Kenyon responded to his design. ‘Artistically it seems to me thoroughly ugly.’ It was open house at the IWGC, with Commissioners, artistic advisors and Principal Architects competing in their abuse. MacDonald Gill did at least made an effort to find ‘a good word for it’ before giving up the attempt as impossible, but from Lutyens to Baker, from General Cox of the India office to South Africa’s Reginald Blankenberg and Sir Alfred Mond, there was no such charity: ‘extraordinarily ugly’ … ‘ugly and ungainly’ … ‘appalling’ … ‘disastrous’ … ‘a humpty-dumpty design’ … ‘a bottle’ … ‘a sort of thing you shoot at’ – just the sort of thing, in fact, that you could expect, as Blomfield predictably reminded the Commission, the moment that you didn’t leave everything to your Principal Architects.
fn9 It does not change the argument but it is, sadly, no longer true. Raymond Asquith, the Prime Minister’s son, is buried between two fellow officers in Guillemont Cemetery, which was constructed after the war. Lieutenant the Honourable Edward Tennant is buried in the same row, but there is no Simon.
fn10 It is ironic that a rare beneficiary of Commission flexibility on burial should in fact be a Cecil. Lady Violet Cecil – a Cecil by marriage, and a reluctant one at that – had lost her son at Villers-Cotterêts in the early fighting of September 1914. On the death of her husband she had married Lord Milner, with whom, it seems, she had been in love for twenty years. In 1922 a distressed Ware wrote to Milner to say that he had received a request from the families of the three officers buried with George Cecil in a single grave known as the ‘Guards’ Grave’. They wanted the bodies exhumed and reburied with their comrades. This could not be done without moving all four. What, Ware wanted to know, would Lady Milner wish? It is hard to imagine that anyone but Milner’s wife would have got this letter, but on 11 April 1922 the four bodies were ‘carried under a Union Jack to the Guards’ Cemetery where a service was held by the Chaplain’. Lady Milner visited her son’s grave every year until the Second World War made it impossible.
fn11 The Kiplings did not live to know it, but their son’s body was eventually identified by a process of detection and elimination some seventy years later. Another ‘Unknown’ was given a name.
fn12 During the fighting in Mesopotamia, at least one unit found its own macabre solution to the problem. The Methodist chaplain with the Leicestershires (the father of ‘E.P.’ and of Frank Thompson, executed by Bulgarian fascists and buried in a ditch after a botched SOE operation in 1944) remembered how his battalion would dig a ‘dud grave’ alongside a new burial, remove the pin from a Mills bomb, place the bomb carefully in the ‘grave’, weight it with earth, and retire to the nearest cover to await the grave-robbers and the explosion.
fn13 The redevelopment of London’s Docklands has given Lutyens’s Mercantile Memorial a second chance, though it has never really recovered from its miserable start. It offers a classic illustration of the snobberies and class assumptions that the Commission was up against in its work in Britain. Abroad, all could be treated equally: at home, Blomfield advised the Office of Works, men should be ‘classed according to their occupations’ and commemorated accordingly in some appropriate place. On this basis, the Fine Arts Commission suggested Tower Hill for Lutyens’s memorial as the area was ‘devoted to sea-going occupations’ with the result that it is the least well known of all the great First World War memorials. The decision infuriated Lutyens. The thousand men commemorated on it deserved the same treatment as everyone else, he insisted, not some ‘hole in the corner because they happen to have been low in social status’. Let the beggars be commemorated in Parliament, he added, and ‘the Earls at Shoreditch or better to the Tower’.
fn14 It is interesting that the village memorial of Lydford, examined in great detail by Clive Aslet in War Memorial, reflects the economic realities of rural life that lay behind Ware’s sense of Empire. Two of the names on it, Mancel Clark and Samuel Voyzey, were Lydford boys who had emigrated to Canada and fought and died with Canadian battalions on the Somme.
fn15 The relationship between the Commission and its constituent members was intricate. The Dominions and government of India paid for their separate memorials but the Commission were responsible for the names of the missing inscribed on them.
fn16 A fascinating addition to the standard list is Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928), a murder story set on Armistice Day in a London military club. The plot depends on the fact that the body can be moved at precisely 11 a.m. on 11 November because the whole world will be at the Cenotaph. No civilian in the story can believe anyone could be so callously indifferent to feeling and no ex-officer is in the least surprised; they are broke, unemployed, mentally disturbed and have had enough of all the Commemorative ‘gush’.
fn17 It says a lot about national character and the very different legacies of victory and defeat, that while Britain ended up with Blomfield’s cross, German artists like Otto Dix turned for their inspiration to Grünewald’s terrifying Isenheim Altarpiece.
fn18 Unfortunate timing too. This Anzac Day came in the wake of the notorious MCC ‘Bodyline Tour’ of Australia under D. R. Jardine that led to Australian threats to leave the Empire.
fn19 Australia’s was the only entirely volunteer army in the war. The 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, and the subsequent execution of its leaders, added to the antagonism of Australia’s Irish communities against Britain.
fn20 ‘If they had any shame,’ the Deputy Prime Minister wrote in his diary at the unveiling of the Australian National War Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux in 1938 – and his ‘they’ was directed specifically at Robert Menzies – ‘they should not have been there, having shirked their responsibilities during the sacrifice that was now being commemorated.’