One of the most engaging things about Fabian Ware was that he never lost the idealism or enthusiasm that had fired his youth. In an interview with him in 1924, Violet Markham wrote that to see him again was to be face to face once more with one’s own younger self, and nothing would ever change him in that respect, nothing dim the visionary gleam.
When Kipling wrote his great hymn-like ‘Recessional’ for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, the Reverend F .W. Macdonald, the last of his family to cling to their dissenting origins, wrote to tell him that the Methodist community proudly claimed it and him as its own, and in an odd sort of way the Plymouth Brethren would have said the same of Ware. In the forty years since he had escaped the narrow ‘cell’ of his parents’ faith, he had travelled as far as possible, but the visions that had once filled that cell with glimpses of another and transformed world would burn as bright for him at sixty as they had at six.
Like Lutyens, Ware was something other than he seemed, a religious zealot masquerading as a secularist, a missionary parading as a politician, and his opponents might have made a better fist of opposition if they had only recognised this. It was once said of Baker that he had a ‘conviction … of the rightness of British Imperialism so strong as to be almost a religion’, but there was no ‘almost’ about Ware, no Anglican fudges or compromises, only that same all-consuming instinct for the ‘absolute’ and the ‘Godhead’ that fired Lutyens’s art.
Visionaries come in different forms, however, and nothing better illustrates either the fierce power or the limitations of the chiliastic dream that Ware had inherited from his parents than the work of an artist who was to leave Britain with its finest memorial of the First World War: Stanley Spencer. Spencer had served through the conflict as a medical orderly with the RAMC in Bristol and Macedonia, and at the end of the 1920s was asked to paint a series of murals for a memorial chapel that had been commissioned from Charles Holden’s architectural partner, Lionel Pearson to commemorate a lieutenant who had died from an illness contracted in Macedonia.
The result was the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere, near Newbury, a plain brick structure from the outside, and inside as close as one will ever get in England to fourteenth-century Italy. The formal inspiration for Spencer’s murals was Giotto and the Arena Chapel in Padua, but it is Giotto mediated through a peculiarly English sensibility that locates the divine and the spiritual in the everyday. Along the flanking walls, the murals record the unheroic world of Spencer’s war, of hospital orderlies and delousing, of bathtubs, iodine, stray dogs, idling soldiers, ration tins and angels. And on the end wall, above the altar, Spencer has painted a Resurrection at the last day that is unlike any commemoration of war ever painted. In the foreground, crowding the plane of the painting, tumbling almost into the chapel itself, is a jumble of white crosses and behind it soldiers emerge sleepily from their graves to find themselves in the Macedonian landscape in which they fought and died. Again, though, there is no violence here. They look around them. They carefully unwind their puttees. One, still only half out of his grave, stretches out a hand to stroke a tortoise. Another leans back against a mule, taking silent stock of the situation. At the centre, two white mules, mirror images of each other, stir slowly into life again, and framed between their arched necks, and receding into the background, a long procession of soldiers climbs towards a small and unmemorable seated Christ, carrying their grave crosses with them.
This is the Last Day, but it is the last day in the here and now, and that is where Spencer and Ware’s visions are at odds. Spencer dreamed of the resurrected man and painted the ordinary soldier; Ware buried the soldier and dreamed for him a brighter world. It was the future he was concerned with. There was nothing of Spencer’s sense of the numinous about him, no sense of the holy in the everyday. He did not see God in the simple act of a soldier unwinding his puttees or treating a wounded man, or cleaning a bath. He did not see God in Spencer’s soldier – Ware’s double identity discs about his neck – skimming a stone across a shallow stream. He did not see God in the world; like his father he wanted a new world, a world that in its promise of human perfectibility offers an oddly secularised version of a re-made world that fuelled the faith of his father’s Plymouth Brethren.
‘Each stage reproduces the development of that which has produced it,’ he had written before the war, his political vision of the British Empire growing into something still greater, infused with the visionary fervour of his youth,
and … under the influence of some force from the infinite – incomprehensible to the human intelligence because it transcends it, but seized in momentary flashes by the instinct – each succeeding stage … passes something of its spirit down … And so, in ascending collectivities the human race progresses, the limit – if limit there be – being a united humanity.
It was probably as well that Ware also inherited all the more bruising features of the Brethren tradition because in the years before the struggle with Hitler’s Germany came to revalidate his dreams, the street-fighter was as badly needed as the visionary. ‘Do you think that they [“the Gallant Dead”] would have wished these Millions to be spent when their Comrades are on the dole?’ demanded one furious, six-times wounded veteran, of ‘Major-General Sir Fabian Ware, KCVO, KBE, CB, CMG’, as he contemptuously addressed him.
I am unable to ascertain the gallant corps you commanded or is it just an honorary rank you hold like so many more out here in the Commission … I wonder what General in the regular army draws your salary? Look at the great Marshall [sic] Foch who could have availed himself of a Field Marshall’s [sic] pay of £1,692 a year from our country but patriotically refused although his own pay was far less a sum – look at the great Marshall [sic] Joffre’s salary and realise for one minute what the great French nation must think of this gigantic squandering which is going on …
Captain Chanter had only just begun, and in bilious, caricature form, every charge of high-handedness and waste thrown at the Commission in the years between the wars was rolled out. ‘Let me invite the public to go to the length and breadth of France and Belgium and see the country plastered with Cemeteries and Monuments and signposts specially designed broadcasting what Britain did in the Great War,’ he continued,
– is it dignified? Is it military? Is it British? The French Nation, I would remind you, also fought in the War and … they have not got their cemeteries all over the country but have concentrated them in certain places … Imagine your country plastered from North to South with French Memorials but it is lost on you … to see you arrive at an unveiling ceremony puts Napoleon in all his glory in the shade. Those who do not know imagine you to be some Veteran Warrior or 13th Apostle of the Great War.
Ware could cope with a man like Captain Chanter – Chanter was running a business out of La Panne, laying wreaths (or not, as the suggestion was) for relatives too poor to cross the Channel, but his diatribe is just the crank’s version of some far wider concerns about the War Graves Commission. From the earliest days there had been a strong feeling in some circles that the Commission’s money would be better spent on public projects, and the distressed state of many of the cemeteries by the early 1930s – an inevitable result of the speed and inexperience with which they had been constructed – inevitably added fuel to the sense that this was money that had been misdirected. ‘I have just returned lately from placing my wreaths for relatives on the actual graves and what I have seen is simply one gigantic disgrace,’ Chanter wrote again – and his letter is dated February 1931, only ten years after the first of Blomfield’s ‘experimental’ cemeteries had been finished,
there are piles of cheap bricks and stones at nearly every Cemetery where shelters or tool sheds are being built and which look just like Pill Boxes … thousands of Headstones are toppling over and you are aware of the numbers that have already cracked in two and which will go on cracking … the stones look as if they had been bombarded by shrapnel and in the same Cemetery you see the plain simple White Cross of the French graves which stand out in prominence to the dirty stained Headstones erected by the Commission.
A great deal of this was true, but the real challenge for Ware and the Commission in the inter-war years was not subsidence or crooks or public indifference but the old enemy of the Treasury. As early as 1921 the Treasury had signalled its hope that as interest faded, the cemeteries ‘might ultimately be allowed to disappear’, and over the next fifteen years a semi-permanent state of war existed, with successive Chancellors determined to control and curb the Commission’s expenditure and Ware equally bent on preserving its independence.
As far as the Treasury was concerned, the notion of an independent controlling body was ‘inconsistent with the principles of British Government finance’ and even when an endowment fund was set up in 1925 they did their best to make life for the Commission as difficult as possible. The other participating governments had all agreed to contribute their shares within six and a half years, but with eighty per cent of the total to find, the Treasury was determined to hold out for longer, insisting that Britain should have fourteen years to pay its instalments – £4,076,000 of the Endowment Fund in mounting increments – and that their contributions to the fund should be confined to investments in UK government securities.
For the Treasury, searching for cuts and economies at a time of depression, the issue at stake was one of money, financial control and the principle of responsibility, but for Ware it was a battle between utilitarian officialdom and the larger imperial dream that had always underpinned his work for the Commission. ‘For Ware,’ his old friend from South African days, Leo Amery, declared at his memorial service,
the thought of what the war cemeteries could give in individual consolation was never separated from the thought of what they might mean as a spiritual link between our peoples and an example and model of how a common task might be effectively carried out by a jointly established organisation.
‘Think what this organisation of ours means as a model of what Imperial co-operation might do,’ he had told Violet Markham in 1924, and in speeches, memorial services and broadcasts he took every opportunity to make the dream a reality. Who can remember their 200,000 dead ‘and falter in his faith in our Empire?’ he had asked in a BBC radio address on Armistice Day 1926, calling on a bitterly divided Britain to recall its common heritage of sacrifice,
Never in the world’s history has there been anything like it. And let us here, in this dear land, remember that the imperishable glory and unsurpassed heroism of the greater multitude of dead of the Mother Country, men nurtured in these islands, the home and focus of the freedom … gains an added brilliance from the devotion and sacrifice of their fellow-subjects from overseas.
On anniversary after anniversary he would return to the same themes. It was not just a call to unity for a Britain torn apart by the General Strike but for the wider Empire too. ‘Can we possibly visualise them to-day, these Anzac graves,’ he asked his listeners in an Anzac Day broadcast on 24 April 1933, blissfully unaware, as ever, of the double-edged sword he was unsheathing,fn18
They are literally scattered over the world … they lie in cemeteries whose names are to you household words, names given by these dead themselves and their comrades to nooks and plateaux of that stern promontory lapped by the blue Aegean Sea, to heights on those arid slopes to which they desperately and heroically clung. Listen to the names of some of them. Just a few: Lone Pine … Shrapnel Valley, the Nek … Thousands of years hence some of them will still be there to remind [the world] of a British Empire that was one and indivisible when assailed.
To Ware the Empire was not just the political cause that he had espoused in the pages of the Morning Post but a religion for which the war and its cemeteries had provided the Holy Places. ‘On former Novembers I have given you a general account of the work of the Commission,’ he began another of his traditional eve-of-Armistice broadcasts, unashamedly decking out the day’s commemorations in the language and rituals of a solemn Holy Day,
But to-night [the ‘vigil’, as he called it, of ‘the greatest human anniversary the world has ever known’] I want you, in preparation for to-morrow, to let your thoughts dwell for a few minutes on some of those who fell so far from these Islands (almost as far away from England as from the overseas Dominions) that their graves can rarely be visited, and then only by a few of those to whom they are dear. I have just returned myself from an inspection of the cemeteries in the Near East and it is about them that I should like to say a few words …
Over the last month, he explained in a voice, with its slight lisp, redolent of a pre-war world, he had visited all but one of the thirty-one cemeteries on the Gallipoli peninsula, as well as Constantinople, Aleppo, Damascus, Beyrouth, Haifa, Jerusalem, Ramleh, Beersheba … Cairo, Alexandria. ‘I give the individual names to you as some of you who are listening to me may be interested in a particular one,’ he went on,
and I want you to know that in each I found the graves perfectly tended. To get a general idea of the extent of our graves in the Near East, might I suggest that when I have finished you take a map and draw a line round the Gallipoli Peninsula passing through Constantinople to Baghdad, then on to the Persian Gulf and back through the Red Sea across Egypt. Within that curve you will notice almost all the Bible countries, as we called them when I was a boy; within it are 135 of our cemeteries containing 62,727 graves, and in addition twelve monuments commemorating 82,273 men of the British Empire who have no known grave, 33,000 of them Indians. To these lands of ancient holy places the Great War has added our holy places, and believe me, so much they are increasingly regarded by the local inhabitants whatever their race and whatever their creed.
‘Enter this zone by the Dardanelles at daybreak as I did,’ continued ‘the Great Commemorator’, deftly drawing in his listeners to share his vision,
and as you pass the Southern end of the Gallipoli Peninsula, you will see, lit up by the rays of the rising sun, placed on the highest cliff and dominating the blue Aegean Sea, the great British Memorial to 12,000 of the Gallipoli Missing. They are not forgotten these dead, even by other nations than our own – for some, if not all, of the ships, foreign as well as British, salute the Memorial as they pass, dipping their flag and asking all passengers to observe two minutes silence.
The glamour and physical associations of the classical world had long had a seductive, Byronic pull for Britain’s soldiers – many a Philhellene had gone to a miserable end mistaking modern Greece for the Greece of the Iliad or Herodotus – but this Armistice it was not Troy but a very un-Homeric ideal of Christian sacrifice Ware wanted to evoke. ‘I have only a few minutes with you and cannot describe … all the cemeteries in lands within our curve,’ he apologised,
I will therefore select one. At first I was tempted to choose the cemetery in Jerusalem on the Mount of Olives, a very noble monument which we have endeavoured, for reasons which you will appreciate, to make the most beautiful. But I am taking one situated among conditions as foreign as they can possibly be, in a land where the English language is rarely heard and even British visitors are few … I have chosen Damascus.
It was not just a single cemetery, however, but a single grave around which he invited his listeners to stand. ‘I want to tell you of one selected grave, equal in honour, no more and no less, to all,’ he went on, uniting Empire and Motherland, Past and Present in one great continuum spanning the centuries that conjures up the shade of Evelyn Waugh’s Guy Crouchback,
In a cemetery in the south of Palestine stands a simple white headstone with its fern badge marking the grave of a trooper of the Dominion cavalry. In the old days of sailing ships, before most of us were born, he left England for New Zealand, the eldest of fifteen children, his father an officer bearing the name of one of the oldest English families; surmounting through years of hardship the obstacles which faced the pioneer in a new colony, he had established himself in that country and founded a branch of his family to carry on its traditions of the New World. The War came; it found him an old man; he enlisted, refusing to accept the rank that was repeatedly offered him, and set out on the homeward journey. He fought gallantly in Palestine – where he fell, in that Holy Land where had fallen before him ancestors who had set out in the ranks of the Crusaders from his own English country … In to-morrow’s Silence, give a thought to the children of many such men as this; they will not be here in the Motherland by our sides, but their spirits in the great trial were at one with ours and with us to-morrow they will celebrate the eternally binding community of sacrifice.
As Ware got older, his sense of what could and must be done through the Commission’s work took on an enlarged and increasingly visionary tone. ‘In the course of my pilgrimage,’ King George V had famously told the crowds at Terlincthun Cemetery at the end of his tour of the Western Front in 1922,
I have many times asked myself whether there can be more potent advocates of peace on earth … than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to the desolation of war. And I feel that, so long as we have faith in God’s purpose, we cannot but believe that the existence of these visible memorials will, eventually, serve to draw all peoples together in sanity and self-control, even as it has already set the relations between our Empire and our allies on the deep-rooted bases of a common heroism and a common agony.
The speech may have been the King’s, the words Kipling’s, but the sentiments were Ware’s and over the next sixteen years he returned to this vision of the healing power of the dead with ever greater urgency. It is possible that the ideal had been somewhere at the back of his mind from an even earlier date. He would certainly have seen photographs of the ageing Gettysburg veterans, snowy-bearded Unionists and Confederates in their grey and blue, shaking hands over the Stone Wall at the ‘Angle’ on the fiftieth anniversary of the battle in 1913 in a gesture of reconciliation that provided the romantic theatre for a politically driven belief in the unifying and ‘regenerative power of sacrifice’. ‘Cold must be the heart of that American,’ Champ Clark, the Speaker of the House, had insisted at the ceremonies,
who is not proud to claim as countrymen the flower of the Southern youth who charged up the slippery slopes of Gettysburg with peerless Pickett, or those unconquerable men in blue, who three long and dreadful days held these … heights in the face of fierce assaults. It was not Southern valor nor Northern valor. It was, thank God, American valor.
America had set another precedent with its Civil War cemeteries, too, and for Ware the common sacrifice that out of different wars had brought Union and Confederacy and Empire and allies closer, could perform a wider alchemy. ‘I am here to speak to you of another and stronger union,’ he told his audience in a 1930 broadcast, summoning to the cause his own, ghostly League of Nations formed of the Empire’s million dead.
There is a strength in the League of the Dead based on realities and finalities, that can never be equalled either in faith or in courage by any union of living members. And I want to tell you why our Empire, yours and mine, has determined that those dead voices shall not be silenced, nay that they shall be given tongues on earth for all time.
Other countries were following the Empire’s example, Ware went on: America, France, Belgium and now even Germany, propelled by a popular desire for commemoration. ‘The one real common heritage of the war,’ – the dead – he insisted,
is drawing the Nations together, as nothing else can; drawing them together on no debatable ground, in no spirit of military rivalry. Drawing the peoples together to give constant warning to their governments; for this standing and visible record of the cost of war is the most potent and insistent reminder of the dread consequences of the political conditions which obtained in the world before 1914.
For a man of his intellect and sophistication, a man, in fact, with a good, healthy streak of cynicism running through his nature, Ware could be extraordinarily naive. He was hardly the only senior figure who refused to recognise what was coming in the 1930s, but his schooling in South Africa under Milner, dreaming with the rest of the Kindergarten of a peaceful world order firmly resting on the great ‘quadrilateral’ of the white Dominions, had possibly made him more desperate than most to keep faith with a dream that was dissolving in front of his eyes.
Milner had died in 1929, but his Kindergarten was still there, and through it the religio Milneriana still made itself felt in political circles. By the end of his life Milner had abandoned his dream of a supra-national imperial government for a looser ‘moral’ union, but as his disciples went their different ways, some clinging to the idea of a world government, some to a vague internationalism, some to an embryonic Commonwealth and others to die-hard imperialism, it was notable how many like Ware refused to see the danger that was emerging in Hitler’s Germany.
Geoffrey Dawson, the ‘appeasing’ editor of The Times through the 1930s, Philip Kerr, now Marquess of Lothian and soon to be Britain’s Ambassador to the USA, even Leo Amery, an imperial pragmatist when it came to central and eastern Europe: Ware was among old and influential friends in his stance, but it still seems remarkable that a man who saw what was happening in Germany at first hand could have kept his head in the sand as long as he did. It was partly age, perhaps; it was partly that he had lived so long with the carnage of the Great War that another must have seemed unthinkable; it was partly the optimism of an idealist and partly the blindness of the zealot, but whatever the reasons he seemed incapable of seeing that his dream of the healing role of the Imperial War Graves Commission was quite simply a dream. ‘Yes, here is heard truly the voice of the Dead,’ he told his listeners on the indissoluble ties binding Empire and its allies together – an address given to an audience that within little more than ten years would see those same ‘old allies’, Italy and Romania, siding with Hitler’s Germany, Japan overrunning Britain’s Empire in the East, Salazar’s Portugal shamelessly profiteering with Nazi Germany, America neutral and – most unimaginable of all to the Francophile Ware – Britain and Vichy France at war in those same doubly-sacred Holy Places of the Middle East that had filled his Armistice ‘Vigil’ addresses: ‘friends speak to friends of a peace that cannot be broken; for, so long as there is any generous impulse in the soul of man, these silent cities of our Dead make impossible any hostile contact between our Allies and the descendants of these Dead’.
I am ‘tired of this gush and pretence’, one old American Civil War brigadier protested against the sentimentalising fictions of ‘healing’ and ‘reconciliation’, outraged that anyone should believe that his own Union dead were the same as Rebel dead. It is uncertain if Ware ever really acknowledged the force of this kind of clear-eyed hostility. It was, in one sense, relatively easy for Britain to forgive an enemy that had never set foot on her soil, but it was asking a lot to expect a Belgium or France that had seen their country occupied, their cities reduced to rubble and their civilians murdered in their thousands, to rise to the same heights of sympathy.
It was asking even more to expect that the victors and the defeated should see their war cemeteries in the same way or hear the same message from their dead. It was all very well for Ware to invoke the authority of the Empire’s fallen in his search for peace, but what did that peace mean to a German army that believed it had never been beaten in the field? What did the ‘tongues’ of men who fought and died so fiercely in the final weeks of 1918 say to the survivors of an army that had been humiliated by the peace forced on Germany at Versailles?
The answers were coming thick and fast in the late 1930s – the Saar and the creation of a new German air force in 1935, the reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936, the Anschluss and Sudetenland in 1938 – but they only left Ware more convinced of the Commission’s role in securing peace. In 1935 the Anglo-French Mixed Committee, set up to oversee their mutual concerns, had been extended to include Germany, and over the next four years Ware lost no opportunity, either in Britain or at conferences in Germany, to preach the doctrine of peace and the sacred trust that the dead of both sides had bequeathed to the living. ‘It was like trying to turn back the tide,’ the Commission’s historian – seldom Ware’s sternest critic – wrote of these efforts,
He did not realise that the Nazis must have taken his stress on the horror of war as an indication, like the Oxford ‘Peace Vote’, that Britain would not fight. He did not seem to notice that they were perverting ceremonies of remembrance into occasions for banner-waving nationalism and the glorification of German arms. In Belgium they knew better. After German ex-servicemen had laid a wreath at the Menin Gate, the ribbon with the offending swastika was stolen.
It would be absurd to single out Ware from a decade of appeasement, but if the history of war graves teaches one lesson it is that while the ‘tongues of the dead’ might say what they must, the living will hear what they want. It seemed entirely axiomatic to Ware that a grave – especially a Commission grave – was an irresistible argument for peace, but from the German soldiers who desecrated those same graves in Greece in the Second World War down through Eire and Palestine to the destruction of Commission cemeteries in Libya during the ‘Arab Spring’, the British soldier’s headstone has carried a very different meaning.
Even within the Empire, too, the commemoration of the dead could be as divisive as it was healing. Within weeks of the first landings in April 1915, Gallipoli had become ‘sacred ground’ to Australians, but in a country split between those who had volunteered and those who had not – mainly Irish Catholics it was believed – the annual commemoration of the campaign on Anzac Day became a reminder of old sores as well as a celebration of nationhood.fn19
During the war, two plebiscites on conscription, narrowly won by the ‘antis’, had divided the country almost exactly down the middle and the Australian practice of recording not just the dead but the ‘returned’ on their war memorials at home gave a name and a face to both ‘hero’ and ‘shirker’. It was rumoured that over ninety per cent of the Australian Imperial Force had, in fact, voted against conscription, but the stigma attached to those who had not fought effectively politicised the one day ‘of any holiness’ in the Australian calendar along fissure lines that would still be there when the country next went to war.fn20
Ware could hardly have been unconscious of other currents that eddied around the base of the Cenotaph – the calls in Parliament for an end to the Armistice Day commemorations, the White Poppies, the notorious Oxford debate – but nothing ever seems to have dented his faith. There is an historical gap between an imperialist and post-imperialist age that makes his kind of belief hard now to understand, and yet in the end it is not so much what he believed that distances us from him as the chasm which separates the visionary from the dull clay with which he has to work. ‘His legs bestrid the ocean; his rear’d arm/ Crested the world,’ Shakespeare’s exultant Cleopatra says of the dead Mark Antony, metamorphosing a defeated soldier into a figure of divine majesty,
His voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
He was as rattling thunder … in his livery
Walk’d crowns and crownets, realms and islands were
As plates dropp’d from his pocket …
Think you there was, or might be, such a man
As this I dream’d of?
What Ware had dreamed was what Cleopatra had dreamed, and if Dolabella’s answer – ‘Gentle madame, no’ – is the reductive answer of the man-in-the-street down the ages, it is not the imaginative truth anyone remembers. The same is true of Ware and his achievements. The cemeteries of the Great War might not have worked the alchemy that he hoped or sealed an Empire’s unity, but as an aspiration or dream his ‘Silent Cities’ remain a kind of Camelot of the Dead, a mythic evocation of those human possibilities that a Dolabella or Office of Works never sees.
They remain more than that, too, because if Auden and his ‘horizontal man’, Sassoon and his ‘sepulchre of crime’, Owen and his ‘old lie’, will always be waiting in the wings, Ware had come as close as any man to making his vision a reality. ‘He was called Legion, or nothing,’ Edmund Blunden wrote of the fate of the common soldier before Ware and the Commission changed it for good,
He was merely the means by which someone else pursued the glory of a name. It has been the faith of the Commission that those who fought and died in 1914–1918 were – what we know them to have been – several and separate personalities, each in human measure ‘the captain of his fate’, each claiming individual comprehension. We well remember our old friends as cooperating without thought of personal advantage in the main cause. But their characteristics are clear, as various as their number; and so it is entirely laudable that the Imperial War Graves Commission has carried out its task with a vivid sense of the individual grave.
The Menin Gate … Villers-Bretonneux … the Canadian Memorial at Vimy Ridge, with its two immense pylons, symbolising Canada and France towering over the Douai Plain like a giant stone tuning-fork … Beaumont-Hamel and Captain Basil Gotto’s bronze Caribou, high on a rock outcrop, looking out to the lone tree which marked the farthest advance of the Newfoundlanders … Chunuk Bair, on the Gallipoli peninsula where the New Zealanders had fought so desperately – from one end of Europe to the other the proof of Ware’s success is there to see but nothing would be less true to him or to the battles he fought than to leave his story on such a note of bland affirmation. For more than thirty years he achieved what he did in the teeth of bitter opposition, and if he finally carried a country and Empire with him – so finally that we are now incapable of seeing ourselves in any other way but his – there is one grave above all others that serves as a reminder of the bruising struggle and compromises that lay behind that victory.
It is ironic, in fact, that the most imaginative and influential expression of the Imperial War Graves Commission’s principles should lie in a grave that at first sight seems the denial and negation of everything they had set out to do. From the early days of the war Ware had set himself against the idea of repatriation on grounds of equality, and the policy was firmly and publicly enshrined among the Commission’s post-war principles when, in the August of 1920, the Reverend David Railton MC, a former Army Chaplain and now the vicar of St John the Baptist’s, Margate, wrote to the Dean of Westminster with the suggestion that three months later would lead to the ‘creation’ of the Unknown Warrior.
The idea had come to him four years before in France when, returning from a burial service in the line, he saw a single lonely grave dug in a tiny garden near Armentières. ‘At the head of the grave,’ he recalled,
there stood a rough cross of white wood. On the cross was written in deep black-pencilled letters, ‘An Unknown British Soldier’ and in brackets beneath, ‘of the Black Watch’. It was dusk and no one was near, except some officers in the billet playing cards. I remember how still it was. Even the guns seemed to be resting.
‘How that grave caused me to think,’ David Railton remembered, and four years later he was still thinking over that unknown soldier of the Black Watch. Towards the end of the war he had almost written to Douglas Haig proposing that the body of an unidentified soldier should be taken home to represent all the Empire’s dead, but in Herbert Ryle, the Dean of Westminster, he had found an altogether more likely candidate. After a certain amount of royal and official scepticism had been overcome, Lloyd George’s Cabinet unanimously agreed to set up a committee under the chairmanship of the Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, to supervise the ceremonial details.
The appointment of the superb Lord Curzon might seem an odd choice to oversee the burial of the ‘common man’ but that only reflects the ambivalence that still surrounded the idea. ‘I attended a large luncheon party at around this time,’ one senior Army officer remembered, ‘and at it I was asked what I thought of the proposal to bring over a body. Only one person out of twenty-four agreed that it was a wonderful idea. The rest said it would never appeal to the British.’
The story has been often told – with the details, appropriately for an event of mythic transformation, different in almost every telling – but probably the most authoritative account is that left by the officer commanding the Army in France and Flanders at that time, Brigadier General Wyatt. On 7 November 1920, four small burial parties armed with shovels and sacking left the Army Headquarters at St Pol for four of the great battlefields of the Western Front, and there exhumed four – sometimes six – unidentified bodies from the earlier battles of the war and brought them back to a hut that had been turned into a temporary chapel for their reception.
The battlefields were those of Ypres, Arras, the Somme and the Aisne, the bodies, ‘mere bones’ beyond identification, and the burial parties who had carried out the exhumations, ignorant of what they were doing. From the start the whole operation had been marked by an odd lack of paperwork and absolute secrecy, and as each body was brought in and placed on a stretcher in the hut that secrecy was maintained, with no party overlapping another and no one able to say from which of the battlefields the bodies came.
At midnight on the same day a Colonel Gill, and Wyatt – blindfolded in the more poetic accounts – entered the chapel where in silence Wyatt placed a hand on one of the sacks of bones. The remains were placed in a plain English deal coffin, the chapel locked, and a guard placed on the door. The next day the three other bodies were taken away for reburial in a nearby cemetery and after a simple prayer returned to the obscurity from which they had been plucked; meanwhile the extraordinary metamorphosis of the fourth had already begun.
The timing was tight, the arrangements hasty, but the performance faultless. At noon a joint service was held in the hut over the body, and then the coffin, accompanied by a military escort, was carried in a ‘somewhat battered’ ambulance to Boulogne where a temporary chapel had been prepared in the castle library. There the body lay under guard of a company of the French 8th Infantry Battalion until the morning of the tenth when two British undertakers arrived to place it in a heavy coffin of Hampton Court oak, banded with iron work, and inscribed on the lid in an elaborate Gothic script with the text, ‘A British Warrior who fell in the Great War 1914–1918 for King and Country’.
At 10.30 a.m., as all the bells of Boulogne rang out and bugles and trumpets played ‘Aux Champs’, the Unknown Warrior, as he now was, coffin draped in a tattered Union Flag, the military wagon on which it lay pulled by six black artillery horses and escorted by a detachment of the 6th Chasseurs of Lille, set off in a funeral cortege a mile long to the Quai Gambetta where Marshal Foch and HMS Verdun were waiting.
‘11.17’ reads the ship’s log, ‘Embarked coffin of “Unknown Warrior”,’ – the quotation marks nicely capturing the residual unfamiliarity with the phrase – and at 11.29 the Verdun slipped from her jetty and began her brief passage for Dover. As she left Boulogne harbour an escort of French sloops joined her in a last act of Allied respect, and then at 12.40, with a final nineteen-gun salute, fell astern to leave the Verdun and her six accompanying destroyers of the Royal Navy’s 3rd Flotilla to mourn the Empire’s dead alone.
Flags and ensigns at half-mast, another nineteen-gun salute from the castle, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, a teeming quayside, a guard of Connaught Rangers – nobody had known quite what they were doing or what to expect when they took up Railton’s idea but by the time that afternoon that they ‘Disembarked Coffin of “Unknown Warrior”’ they were beginning to see. The response of the French in Boulogne must have given them their first inkling of the scenes that lay ahead, and as the body made its way up to London in the same railway carriage that had brought home the murdered Edith Cavell and Captain Fryatt, the country prepared to receive the son and husband, brother, father, that Ware and the Commission had denied her. ‘The train thundered through the dark, wet, moonless night,’ wrote the Daily Mail,
On the platforms by which it rushed could be seen groups of women watching and silent, many dressed in deep mourning. Many an upper window was open, and against the golden square of light were silhouetted clear cut and black the head and shoulders of some faithful watcher … In the London suburbs there were scores of homes with back doors flung wide, light flooding out and in the garden figures of men, women and children gazing at the great lighted train rushing past.
At 9.20 the following morning – Armistice Day, 11 November 1920, the day chosen for the official dedication of the now permanent Cenotaph in Whitehall – a bearer party of Coldstream Guards entered the Cavell carriage at Victoria Station where the coffin of the Unknown Soldier had rested overnight. Drawn up outside was the gun carriage and six black horses to take him on his final journey to Westminster Abbey, and as the flag-draped coffin was lowered into position, the guns of the Royal Horse Artillery roared out their salute from Hyde Park and the armed services’ twelve senior officers took their place in a great funeral cortege of service detachments, mourners and massed bands. ‘Admirals Meux, Beatty, Jackson, Sturdee and Madden,’ – whatever its poetic inaccuracies, Ronald Blythe’s evocation of that day cannot be bettered,
Field Marshals French, Haig, Methuen, Wilson … Generals Horne and Byng … Air Marshal Trenchard. The day was gentle and fair. The soot-encrusted buildings were rimmed in the gold sunlight and late leaves rustled in the gutters. It was curiously quiet everywhere, not so much silent as hushed and muted. Although the West End pavements were packed with a vast multitude it was a subtly different crowd than the authorities had seen before. What had happened was that this most stately public show was being observed with an intense private emotion. The dead man who had set out without a name, a voice, or a face only a few hours before was being invested with a hundred thousand likenesses.
With the massed bands playing Chopin’s Funeral March, and to the sound of muffled drums, the gun carriage began its slow journey towards Constitution Hill, then eastwards along the Mall and through Webb’s Admiralty Arch into Trafalgar Square and Whitehall, where the King, the Royal Family and the country’s leaders were waiting at Lutyens’s Cenotaph.
After the dedication of the Lutyens empty tomb and a two-minutes silence – a silence that was honoured across the country, even in prison cells and in the court-room dock – the cortege continued on the last short journey to the Abbey. Inside the west door a guard of a hundred holders of the Victoria Cross flanked the nave where, at its west end, the Unknown Warrior’s grave had been prepared. The service was brief and simple – ‘the most beautiful, the most touching and the most impressive … this island has ever seen’, The Times called it – and to the words of ‘Lead, Kindly Light’ the coffin, a crusader sword given by the King now resting on it, was lowered into the grave. ‘The reckless destruction of young life over four mad years and the platitudes which sought to justify it were momentarily engulfed by the tenderness flooding into the tomb of this most mysterious person,’ wrote Blythe. ‘The formal programme broke down into a great act of compassion and love … The authorities had made certain that it would be dignified; they never dreamt it would be overwhelming. They had intended to honour the average soldier and instead they had produced the perfect catharsis.’
Blythe was right, it was a catharsis. Over two hundred thousand filed past the open grave that day, half a million within the month, and all superimposing their own image on this symbol of national grief. But where among all this outpouring compassion and love were Fabian Ware and the War Graves Commission, who for years had struggled with the Empire’s million dead? It is extraordinary that in the official history of the Imperial – then Commonwealth – War Graves Commission there is not a single mention of the burial of the Unknown Warrior, but then on the face of it a ceremony overseen by Sir Lionel Earle and the hated Office of Works, centred around a coffin designed by the Office of Works and holding a body exhumed against the stated trend of Commission policy, might seem the negation of everything their work stood for.
It took the egotism of a Lutyens to see it all – Chasseurs, nineteen-gun salutes, destroyers, escorts, Abbey, King – as an elaborate Church conspiracy to steal his thunder at the unveiling of the Cenotaph, though he did have a point. There was, as he said, ‘some horror in Church circles’ at the flagrantly pagan classicism of his austerely elegant pylon, and if the tomb of the Unknown Warrior was not the deliberately contrived ‘rival shrine’ that he imagined, it spoke a different language and offered different consolations to the empty tomb he had given the nation.
To the paranoid, in fact, every detail of the ceremonial trappings – the archaic Gothic script as opposed to the lucid War Graves Commission lettering, the ancient crusader sword instead of rifle and helmet, the numinous feel of the Abbey nave against the harsh, cold light of the public space, the sacred against the profane – might seem a calculated challenge and a year later the Dean himself came to add a certain substance to Lutyens’s suspicions. The grave had been originally closed on 18 November with a slab of dark Tournai limestone carrying almost the same inscription as the coffin, but for the first anniversary, Dean Ryle had it replaced with a new stone of black marble, inscribed in gold with a prolix dedication that makes one pine for Kipling, and five texts chosen by the Dean himself.
If it was a deliberate provocation, he did not have long to await the backlash. ‘Very Rev. Sir’, the Principal of the Liverpool Hebrew Schools wrote to him on 22 November 1922,
At the foot of the new stone over the Unknown Warrior’s grave in Westminster Abbey there is the line, ‘In Christ shall all be made alive’. Beneath the stone rests the body of a British Warrior unknown by name or rank. Unknown also was the faith of the Unknown Warrior. Heavy was the toll of Jewish life on the battlefields of France. In many Jewish homes today a missing son is mourned. The line, ‘In Christ shall all be made alive’ does not meet the spiritual destinies of both Jew and Gentile.
Among the ‘unbounded wealth’ of the Bible, he insisted, it could not be hard to find a neutral text, but not even an appeal on behalf of mourners’ religious sensitivities was enough to move the Dean. ‘On a gravestone containing five texts,’ he replied, ‘it is not unreasonable that one of these should contain the Christian resurrection hope’ and besides – the Church Militant in full cry, not to be denied his victory – for all Mr Levey knew, the man ‘might have been a Moslem … or a Mormon’.
It was the old argument in miniature, the ‘headstone versus cross’ in caricature form, and not for the first time their opponents made the Commissioners’ point for them rather better than they did themselves. The intemperance of Dean Ryle perfectly underlined the humanity and inclusiveness of the Commission’s stand and for anyone who could see beyond the trappings and accidents of ceremony, the burial of the Unknown Warrior advertised the debt that Britain and her Empire owed to the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission as nothing else could.
A war that had started with The Times printing casualty lists of officers only had ended with a nameless, rank-less, classless soldier enshrined ‘among Kings’ in the ‘Empire’s parish church’, and for that Ware and his fellow Commissioners were largely to thank. And if Lutyens suspected sabotage Ware was astute enough to see the greater victory. Twenty-two years later, in the middle of a total war that claimed civilian and service casualties indiscriminately, he would write to another Dean of Westminster, proposing a new roll of honour for the Abbey. ‘The symbolic significance,’ he told the Dean, of ‘the admission of these civilian dead to the adjacency and companionship with the Unknown Soldier … would give a right inspiration’.
‘Adjacency’ and ‘companionship’ – these are not words anyone would use of France’s Unknown Warrior, exhumed from one of the nine battlefields that had taken the lives of 1,398,000 Frenchmen and buried in lonely pomp beneath the Arc de Triomphe on the same Armistice Day as Britain’s – but they are right. There had been something touchingly ‘domestic’ about the Abbey service for the Unknown Warrior – it was essentially a ‘family affair’ of Empire – and from behind their simple protective walls the Commission’s cemeteries exert the same emotional ‘tug’ of the familiar and the communal. The Unknown Warrior ‘belonged’, in different ways, to every person who filed past his open grave but he also ‘belonged’ to the country.
The same is true of every gravestone that the Commission raised. Anyone who wants to know what the Great War did to people, what politicians, generals and nations could consciously and deliberately do to their own people, should go to Verdun, and peer through the grime-smeared portholes of Douaumont’s monstrous ossuary at the millions of fragments of shattered bones and skulls: anyone, though, who wants to know who those people were need only go to a British cemetery. Each headstone preserves an individuality – the ‘E. W. T’, the ‘W. J. C’, the ‘A. G. V’ whose memory and uniqueness Blunden yearned to rescue from the obliterating anonymity of death – but each makes a claim and recognises a debt. ‘He’ is the E. W. Tice who went to Christ’s Hospital with Blunden, and he is also an officer in the Royal Sussex Regiment. ‘He’ is the Wilfred Haeffner commemorated by his family – German-speaking intellectuals, models for E. M. Forster’s Schlegels, pilloried during the war for their German ancestry – in the stained glass of Hampstead’s parish church but he is also Lieutenant F. W. Haeffner of the Royal Artillery, killed on the seventh day of the Somme and buried in Cerisy-Gailly Military Cemetery in France.
The ‘individual’ and the ‘collective’ – the great battleground of Ware’s life, the battleground around which swirled all the arguments and the bitterness of the Commission’s early years – nowhere do their rival claims come closer to being reconciled than in the grave of the Unknown Warrior. He is not the refutation of the Commission’s work but the fine point and justification of it. Between Ware’s Mobile Ambulance Unit and the Armistice Day service of 1920 there is as direct and unbroken a line of connection as there is between the unknown soldier of the Black Watch in the little garden near Armentières and the tomb in Westminster Abbey. He is what Ware spent his whole life fighting for.
There must have been another life – a cottage in the country, a wife, two children, the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, Gloucestershire Rural Community Council – but his wife’s rather puzzled response to a request for information after his death says it all: his life was, she said, his work. Before the war he had written that for Milner work was his ‘mistress’ – not, as it turned out, the whole truth – but for Ware it was. It, the work of the Commission, the Canadian Prime Minister said, was all thanks to him and he was right. His methods were not always over-scrupulous, but the world needs its St Bernard as well as its St Francis. He did not achieve all he set out to do but that is no more than saying that he was a man of his time. The apostle of Empire would have hated to see a separate Canadian or an Australian Unknown Soldier diluting the imperial significance of the tomb in Westminster Abbey, but the author of The Worker and His Country would have seen it coming and found a way of dealing with it. For a fierce idealist and visionary, he was an unusually skilled politician; for a born autocrat, he was a smooth performer in committees; for a natural leader, he was, as he once told the New Zealand High Commissioner, a willing servant to six masters. And for an ardent patriot who had dedicated the greater part of his life to making an immense corner of a foreign field forever England, what compromise or symbolism could be more apposite than that enshrined in the tomb of the Unknown Warrior? A soldier of the Empire, resting in a coffin of English oak among England’s Kings and Queens – and the soil in which he is buried? – soil from the battlefields of the Western Front. A corner of Thorney Island shall be forever Flanders.