IT HAS become the custom to say that the old world died when the shots were fired in Sarajevo, but a world doesn’t die as easily as all that. Certainly it doesn’t collapse and vanish with the neat poignancy of a murdered archduke. All that is certain is that the bullet which entered Franz Ferdinand’s throat ricocheted on for thirty-seven days like a comet to announce the end of the cosmos. Engineering the actual destruction of the cosmos, however, was a very different matter. It required the apprentice virtues of perseverance and blind devotion, and it got them. The lights went out all over Europe and in the fifty-one months of darkness which followed the heirs of the West were marched, like the Tollund man, to a vast quagmire on the Belgian border and suffocated. Altogether, eight and a half millions were slaughtered and twenty-one millions were hurt. It was a world which ended with a bang and without a whimper. In what Wilfred Owen called ‘carnage incomparable and human squander’ encumbered with a morality which no longer worked but which, like Christian’s load, couldn’t be jettisoned, and with a fine naïve patriotism, an immense company of the young was immolated in the dark arterial trenches. No more innocent generation was ever destroyed so ignorantly or so thoroughly. The particulars of its destruction were disgusting and were bowdlerized by the official obituarists. They had to be; the truth was obscene. A popular print which found its way into thousands of British homes showed a handsome Tommy sprawling at the foot of the Cross. It was called ‘The Great Sacrifice’ and it invited comparison. Neither body of God nor man exhibited outrage or indecency, and so it was with all the official written and spoken references to what was happening. Sons and lovers simply ‘fell’ like cut flowers and the tireless scything of young life went on.

The trench system of the 1914–1918 War was based on certain primitive military ideas stretched out on a vast scale. Besides trapping the armies of the Allies and their opponents in a complex muddy grid which made them virtually immovable, the trenches defiled the spirit as well as the flesh of the ordinary civilian-soldier. The main trench line stretched from Switzerland to the Channel coast just above Ypres in a great double artery which was so close together in certain places that friend and foe could hear each other’s conversation. From the main trenches there reached back an enormous network of ramified capillaries which veined off to the supply depots and troop trains. The prizes, stark, ruined and coveted by both sides to an insane degree, were between the two fronts. No price was deemed too great for the smallest advance. In the spring of 1915 the shattered hamlets round Neuve Chapelle were captured by the Allies at a cost of a quarter of a million lives. These agonizing losses were received in both Britain and Germany with a noble stoicism which convinced their Governments that they had a moral mandate to prosecute the war in every way possible. After 1915 there is little evidence on either side to show that consideration for human expenditure, or thought for human misery, was to influence military experiments or military ambition. The front had become a rite, a mystery to which all young male Europe was committed. Recruiting offices were besieged. Jobs, families and personal identity were discarded. Kitchener’s manic gaze and pointing finger solicited the youth of England from every hoarding, and soon the rich, heady fatalism of the age reached out and took command above that of the rival politicians and generals. A few voices were raised to check the death-rush but they could not be heard above the ritual music-hall singing and uproarious patriotic cheerfulness which deafened reason. By the end of 1915 the vast trench system was choked and thrombotic with new blood and early in 1916 Falkenhayn, the German Chief-of-Staff, began to put into practice his belief in military attrition. This was simply to inflict more casualties than one suffers oneself and the spread of this doctrine to the Allied Command marked a new phase of moral recklessness. It justified the deaths of ten men for the deaths of twelve. Je les grignote, as Joffre used to say.

Falkenhayn’s first application of his attrition tactics was very much more than a nibble, however. He lured great masses of French troops to Verdun, where they were massacred over a period of six months and in this way the fate of Kitchener’s Army—perhaps the noblest fighting force ever mobilized—was sealed. Because, before Verdun, the French and the British had worked out a grand attack on the Somme. It was to be the first genuinely all-out attempt by the two touchily chauvinistic powers at military brotherhood, and much depended upon it. But the shocking Verdun losses made it impossible for the French to take up their full commitments in the Somme offensive, and the whole plan should have been halted and revised.

But the entire history of the First World War is an itinerary of compulsive fatalism. On July 1st, 1916, the Somme attack began. The Allies attempted to move forward and lost a hundred thousand men on the first day. Eventually they did move forward—for three miles. It took three months to achieve this and it was here, within sight of Crécy and Agincourt, that the old world died. British losses alone were more than half a million. They included nearly all the promise and what was best of the nation, and the wild patriotic gallimaufrey of the brave and the brainless pouring through the recruiting stations was momentarily checked. The casualty lists broke all the bounds and precedents of private and public grief, and Edith Cavell’s ‘Patriotism is not enough’ began to be vaguely comprehended.

Kitchener and Rupert Brooke, the Zeus and Adonais of the old order, were gone too. Public mourning for Kitchener did not entirely conceal the long thankful sigh of official relief at his passing. Brooke’s death evoked a wave of passionate sadness which was genuinely and perfectly attuned to the clean patriotism of his elegiacs. He was buried on St. George’s Day on the Greek island of Skyros, where Achilles once lived as a girl in order to escape the Trojan war. He died with his Anglo-Hellenism intact, his beautiful image inviolable.

Lloyd George succeeded Kitchener at the War Office and the conflict entered its second stage. The whole mood of the nation had changed. The glittering, exciting and, beyond all reckoning, extravagant party was over and an incoherent misery took its place. ‘Why are we fighting …?’ sang the troops ironically to the tune of Adeste Fideles. There was a great Press campaign to unseat Asquith. On December 4th, 1916, Lloyd George resigned from the Cabinet. Then Asquith himself resigned and the King sent for Bonar Law. Bonar Law had arranged to ‘fail to form a Cabinet’ and this being formally announced, the King sent for Lloyd George. He went to Downing Street when almost every family in the country had been bereaved and at a moment when the old civilized continuity had been severed. The hour called for a realist and a vulgarian, and in the tricky, talkative Welshman it got both. By what was little less than a miracle of persuasive oratory Lloyd George brought back, if not the one hundred per cent 1914 mood, a good working model of it.

There were difficulties, of course, and most of them were named Haig. When Lloyd George was still at the War Office he had induced Haig to place himself under the French General Nivelle. It was disastrous. Both men were arrogant and proud to a pathological degree, and neither allowed himself to be in the full confidence of the other. Nor did they believe it to be their duty to allow their immediate inferiors to know their complete plans. Nivelle’s plan was not only very bad, but it had been captured by the Germans. This, however, did not deter him from putting it into action. For three long weeks he flung wave after wave of helpless poilus against an intractable barrier of barbed wire, where they hung in brief crucifixion for just sufficient time for them to be given the coup de grâce by German machine-guns. And this in spite of the fact that he had given his word not to pursue the plan if a break-through had not been achieved in a single day. At last the poilus mutinied. They expected agony—for this had always been a recognizable ingredient of la gloire—but the sheer illogicality of what they were being asked to do was intolerable. Nivelle was dismissed and Pétain succeeded him.

Though on the face of it to give Pétain a breathing space in which to soothe and tidy up his army after this carnage, Haig, as though not to be outdone in recalcitrance and in spite of all warnings about field drains and autumn rain, decided to attack in Flanders. What followed was three months of such extreme horror that nothing which either preceded them or came afterwards was comparable. This was Passchendaele.

The Haig-Lloyd George relationship was based less on mutual distrust than on total incomprehension of each other’s natures. After Passchendaele the Prime Minister began to withhold the reserves, fearing that if they crossed the Channel they would be wasted by Haig. There was a noticeable decline in the recruiting figures and an obvious reticence among males to march singing into the insatiable Flanders bog. This produced a strong resentment among the newly emancipated women against any man who, although legally exempted by the National Service Act of 1915 from military service because he was essential to war industry, still did not volunteer. A white feather in a game-bird’s tail was a sign of inferior breeding in sporting circles and the symbol had been given a wider application in 1902 with the publication of A. E. W. Mason’s popular novel, The Four Feathers. Between the numbing effects of Passchendaele and Lloyd George’s miraculous fillip the streets were regularly prowled by women with handbags stuffed with feathers which they thrust into the lapel of any man still out of uniform and not actually on crutches. There was, too, a note of undisguised accusation in the song ‘We don’t want to lose you but we think you ought to go….’

By 1917 both the mysterious lyricism and the nerve-shattering shock of the war had disappeared. Its origins had been forgotten by the common man—if he had ever known them—and he was in energetic agreement with the Government that the whole thing must be stopped. Winston Churchill had noticed that farm tractors fitted with caterpillar treads rode ruts and ditches with ease. If the tractor was encased in armour and had men inside it … The War Office dismissed the idea, though this did not invalidate it as Churchill was Minister of Munitions. He made tanks and was rewarded by deep advances into the enemy lines. The static nature of the war made any advance extraordinarily thrilling and these elephantine advances, made without the customary massacres, lifted the spirit and elated the heart of the ordinary soldier. The very novelty and lively innovation of the grotesque weapon caught the imagination of men, not the least of whose sufferings had been caused by the sacred inflexibility of the military mind and the strict observance of antiquated regimental snobbery.

And so the end approached. On March 21st, 1918, Ludendorff launched his titanic offensive. Germany was starving and there was open talk of ‘peace without conquests’ in Berlin. Hindenburg was in a great passion of rage at such talk and an all-or-nothing plan for a swift and terrible advance, a vast final flood-tide of might, was set in action. The violence and immensity of the attack surpassed anything known previously. In three days the Fifth Army commanded by General Gough was destroyed and the German avalanche rolled through the gap for forty miles in the direction of Paris. If this overwhelming onslaught lacerated the Allied line it also, at long last, unified the Allied Command. Haig and Pétain put themselves under Foch. At home the recruiting depots were besieged with volunteers and the quite incredible losses on the battlefields were made up time and time again with hurriedly trained men, some of them only boys who had lied about their age. The river lands of the Somme, the Aisne and the Marne were a delta of blood.

The final scenes were orgasmic and when the shuddering armies at last disengaged there was an enfeebled, confused and ignoble approach to an armistice which proved to be nothing more than a respite. Just before eleven o’clock on the morning of November 11th, 1918, the British troops marched into Mons and the war ended.

*

1919 was Boom Year. Inflated war industries absorbed the returning heroes. There were gratuities to be spent, homes and love and whoopee to make. Life, dear life, was seen to be so precious, so enchanting, that people experienced the conscious living of it hour by hour and day by day. In spite of the fact that few families were out of mourning there was a near-delirious happiness. This continued until the first anniversary of the Armistice, which took the country by surprise and was acknowledged with a mixture of embarrassed dignity and resentment. Families that had been decimated now began to feel the sharp ache of their loss, besides which, the world fit for heroes to live in was noticeably being run up on the cheap by a new type of hard-faced men. These were the war profiteers. In America Henry Ford handed his twenty-nine million dollars war profit back to the United States Government, though history, being bunk, seems hardly to have recorded the fact. There is no record of any such gesture in this country. The fortunes from swords were soon ploughed back into shares and honours. The truth didn’t bear thinking about, yet the official Armistice anniversary plans were such as to make thought inevitable.

Sir Percy Fitzgerald, a South African, had told Lord Milner that there had been a daily observance in Cape Town all through the war called the ‘Two Minutes Pause’ as a salute to the dead. King George V liked this idea and at eleven o’clock on November 11th, 1919, the dancing and the shouting and the spending stopped. They never quite got going again. The crippling silence, like Prospero’s island, turned out to be full of noises. It was all over, not only the fighting but the old familiar order of things. Somehow this had not been allowed for in the jubilation estimates. Life would go on, but without the ancient spiritual certainty. Tous les jours, à tous points de vue, je vais de mieux en mieux was seen to be the formula of a faith-cure which would never work again.

While sculptors worked overtime on the great stream of commissions which flowed from regiments, schools, corporations, parish councils, colleges, railway stations and every hamlet, village, town and city in the country, carving in stone the names of a million dead, adding always that their lives had been given and not taken, there was a growing sense of the inadequacy of it all. Sir Edward Lutyens’ design for an empty tomb to stand in Whitehall was approved and was a step in the right emotional direction, though its triumphant analogy could not be carried—like the lines of its stone—to a point in the sky because this must constitute a blasphemy. The ordinary man took his cap off to it, motor-cars perceptibly slowed in passing it, but its full significance never really touched the average heart. And in less than a year of its erection there was to be a poetic, macabre and brilliant rite which would cancel its whole meaning and leave it to function as a reflective architectural centrepiece for an annual ceremony.

In France the battlefields were being tidied up. Wire parties strolled in No Man’s Land cutting and baling the terrible mesh. Scarcely any of the millions of victims had been brought home and most of them lay shallowly just beneath the soil. The trenches were filled in and the grim shell-pollarded trees were levelled. At home the national economy began to shrink back to its peace-time dimensions and wages shrivelled up accordingly. Between 1919 and 1920 there were upwards of 2,000 strikes. As the second anniversary of the war drew near a moral and material shabbiness enveloped everything.

The Cenotaph was completed and the King was to unveil it on Armistice Day. It was very much more like an altar than a tomb but it was refreshingly pure in concept and quite different to any other monument in the capital. The idea had been cool, correct and adequate, and the King had liked it from the beginning. But in October a letter arrived at Buckingham Palace from the Dean of Westminster suggesting a sensational pendant to the carefully arranged Cenotaph unveiling. The body of an unidentified soldier should be dug up, the writer suggested, brought to England and buried in the Abbey. Classless, nameless, rankless and ageless, this man would be the silent ambassador of the legion dead to the courts of the living.

The King shrank from the idea; it was novel, it was emotional and it was poised most precariously on the tightrope of taste. One false move and there would be a morbid sideshow in the national shrine. Lord Stamfordham replied for him on October 7th, 1920.

The dean then approached Lloyd George and Sir Henry Wilson, who were immediately enthusiastic. The King then added his somewhat subdued approval. Lord Curzon, who had disliked the Two Minutes Silence idea, was made chairman of the Cabinet committee responsible for the ceremonial of this extraordinary funeral. He—who had stopped to observe a platoon of naked Tommies bathing in the sea and had remarked, ‘How is it that I have never been informed that the lower orders had such white skins?’—was to stage state obsequies for a farm labourer, an apprentice, a clerk—though just possibly a peer.

Armistice Day was very near and the funeral arrangements were forced to move at far from a funeral pace. To make lack of identity absolute the military authorities in France were asked to exhume the bodies of six anonymous soldiers who, so far as it could be judged, had been killed in the early fighting. On the early afternoon of November 9th, six small working parties, each carrying tools and a plain deal coffin, and each commanded by a subaltern, set out for the six main battlefields. A nameless corpse was chosen from the forest of rough crosses marked ‘Unknown’ which sprouted from the sour earth of Ypres, the Marne, Cambrai, Arras, the Somme and the Aisne. The bodies were sealed in the coffins near the spots where they were found and driven back separately in six motor ambulances to an army hut not far from Ypres. Here they were received by a clergyman, the Rev. George Kendall.

After they had been laid side by side, everybody concerned with the operation up until this stage retired to a distance and an officer who had never been inside the hut previously was blindfolded and led to the door. He entered and his groping hand touched a coffin. And so was chosen the poor nameless flesh which would be followed through the streets of London by the King-Emperor on foot and interred with every pomp and dignity known to the State in Westminster Abbey.

Immediately after its selection the body was taken to Boulogne. Its apotheosis had barely begun and its companions at this stage were humble enough—a sergeant-major of the R.A.S.C., an R.E. sergeant, two ranker gunners, an Australian and a Canadian private, a private from the 21st London Regiment and a member of the R.A.M.C. But once at Boulogne, the superb elevation began. H.M.S. Verdun had been sent to receive the corpse and bring it to England. The ship had brought a great coffin made of oak from a tree from Hampton Court and specially designed and constructed by the British Undertakers’ Association. The deal coffin was placed inside the massive oak casket without being opened and the whole thing was locked by two wrought-iron straps which went round it like string round a parcel. Where the straps crossed on the lid there was a great seal on which was inscribed in Gothic letters,

Under this was clipped an antique sword which was the King’s own idea and which he had selected from his private collection, for he was now absorbed by the plan.

The Verdun set sail with her strange burden, the man who had been nothing and who was now to be everything. A funeral convoy of six destroyers waited in mid-Channel. At Dover there was a field-marshal’s salute of nineteen guns from the castle. From Dover it travelled in a specially fitted saloon carriage to London and rested overnight in a temporary chapel at Victoria Station. The next morning, November 11th, pallbearers arrived to attend the corpse on its journey across the city, Admirals Meux, Beatty, Jackson, Sturdee and Madden; Field-Marshals French, Haig, Methuen, Wilson and Generals Home and Byng. Air-Marshal Trenchard followed alone.

The day was gentle and fair. The soot-encrusted buildings were rimmed in thin 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 from any that the authorities had seen before. What had happened was that this most stately public show was being observed with an intensely 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, and for those who could not resist a temptation to strip the symbol there was the possibility that one of the likenesses fitted. The affair was morbid, but grandly and supremely so, like the morbidity of Sir Thomas Browne or John Donne, and those who had received War Office telegrams with only a little less stoicism than that with which they had been sent were moved and grateful for this chance to express grief and personal loss.

The British have a flair for elegiacs and, once this unprecedented funeral had been approved, the entire ceremonial genius of the country was put into action. The authorities were taken by surprise by the success of the idea. They 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. As the coffin was carried into the Abbey there was a sense of release, a conviction that what was happening belonged to honour in its absolute state. 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 individual. The formal programme broke down into a great act of compassion and love. The King and his family crowded the coffin as though it literally did contain a son and brother. The King’s wreath bore a card affectionately crammed with his own scratchy, rather uneducated handwriting. It was the moment of truth.

The congregation was chiefly composed of private mourners. There was no foreign representation. A hundred V.C.s lined the nave. The service was brief and, The Times said, ‘the most beautiful, the most touching and the most impressive … this island has ever seen….’ Gramophone records were obtained of it by Major Lionel Guest and Captain Merriman and sold later at seven-and-sixpence each. These were the first recordings ever made in the Abbey.

The grave had been dug just inside the west entrance and at the feet of Chatham. It was dug deep into the sand of Thorney Island and there was no trace of any previous burial. After the committal the grave was filled in with a hundred sandbags of earth brought from the main battlefields and a very large slab of Tournai marble was laid over it. For a brief time it was simply inscribed ‘An Unknown Warrior’ but the Dean of Westminster could not leave it at this because, he said, ‘In fifty years’ time they will want to know who the Unknown Warrior was.’ So he drew up the inscription for the present word-packed memorial.

After the funeral came the homage. In five days over a million people visited the grave and left a hundred thousand wreaths at the Cenotaph, which became almost obscured by flowers. The popular Press, titillated beyond endurance by the exquisitely suppressed sensational aspects of the whole procedure, speculated fancifully on the identity of the warrior. Some anxiety was also felt that the ghostly rags-to-riches romance of these pitiful bones might make their grave a place of unhealthy pilgrimage. Though in fact this did not happen and even the King said that he was relieved to admit that his original apprehensions were unjustified.

The French buried their Unknown Warrior on the same day. They had lost one and a quarter million men and, unlike Britain, had had great tracts of their country reduced to a shambles. They chose their nameless hero from one of nine graves uncovered at Lille, Amiens, Chalons, Belfort, Nancy, Epinal, Alsace, Lorraine and a vague spot called simply ‘Belgium’. There was much argument whether he should rest in the Pantheon or beneath the Arc de Triomphe and finally, with considerably more military panache than his British comrade, and preceded by the heart of Gambetta in an urn through the streets of Paris, the soldier was buried under the fine classical arch and a significantly enduring flame. The French gesture, perhaps because it had been so hurriedly copied from the British original, or because French militarism is so surrounded by its own mystique that any honour beyond that of dying for France is thought superfluous, did not quite touch popular feeling with the same poignancy as the Westminster Abbey burial.

In 1921 the present gravestone of black marble from Belgium, crowded with texts by Dean Ryle, was laid over the grave. ‘A great day,’ the dean wrote in his diary, ‘for Westminster Abbey.’ But hardly had this stone been put in position than the dean ran into trouble. The Principal of the Liverpool Hebrew Schools wrote him the following letter.

The dean’s reply, marked Private, was to the point. The Abbey was a Christian Church and in it one would expect to find Christian texts. ‘On a gravestone containing five texts it is not unreasonable that one of those texts should contain the Christian resurrection hope….’ When Mr. Levy persisted the dean answered tartly that it was not outside the bounds of possibility that the Unknown Warrior might have been a Moslem … or a Mormon. ‘We cannot hope to please everybody.’ Mr. Levy returned to the attack and also demanded that their correspondence should be published in a Jewish newspaper. But it all came to nothing; High Anglican tact is a weapon that would reduce firmer arguments than Mr. Levy’s to silence.

The most famous text on the grave, ‘They buried him among the Kings because he had done good toward God and towards His house’, had already been in use on an Abbey tomb for close on 600 years, though the dean did not seem to realize it and he told people that he was indebted to a North-Country archdeacon for the suggestion. But Richard II had it inscribed on the tomb of his friend the Bishop of Salisbury in 1395.

The anonymous grave swiftly assumed precedence over all the mortuary magnificence which crammed the great building. Its pathos was irresistible and the dean himself became mesmerized by it. Every day he was to be found walking and watching by the dark marble slab upon which single flowers, rosaries, the United States Congressional Medal and small, private talismanic things had been dropped. Besides receiving a constant procession of foreign dignitaries, for protocol made a visit to the tomb as essential as writing one’s name in the Visitors’ Book at Buckingham Palace, the dean would go out of his way to talk about the soldier with the humblest sightseer. It was therefore curious that the dean’s official biographer, Maurice Fitzgerald, should write,

But it was very possible to say to whom the credit was due, and it was not the dean. The Vicar of Margate, the Rev. David Railton, had spent the war years as a young padre and one evening in 1916 he said,

‘I came back from the line at dusk1. We had just laid to rest the mortal remains of a comrade. I went to a billet in front of Erkingham, near Armentieres. At the back of the billet was a small garden, and in the garden only six paces from the house, there was a grave. At the head of the grave 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. Later on I nearly wrote to Sir Douglas Haig to ask if the body of an “unknown” comrade might be sent home. I returned to Folkestone in 1919. The mind of the world was in a fever. Eventually I wrote to Bishop Ryle, then Dean of Westminster … the only request that the noble Dean did not see his way to grant was the suggestion I gave him—from a relative of mine—that the tomb should be inscribed as that of the Unknown Comrade—rather than Warrior….’

Notes

1 ‘I came back from the line at dusk …’ is from ‘The Origin of the Unknown Warrior’s Grave’ by the Rev. David Railton, published in Our Empire magazine.