It would naturally be some time before the uniform designs could be put into practice, and ‘until such time as they could be handed over to the Imperial War Graves Commission for permanent construction’, the cemeteries were the responsibility of the Directorate of Graves Registration and Enquiries, which both organised and maintained them, assisted by such bodies as the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. The Directorate also remained responsible for searching the battlefields for bodies once the war was over. The vast area to be covered was systematically divided up and allotted to individual ‘Graves Concentration Units’ consisting of twelve soldiers under a senior NCO, who went back and forth looking for corpses and for isolated graves, the occupants of which they exhumed and transferred to recognised cemeteries. Some 8,000 men were employed in this task, and by the time they had finished in September 1921, 204,650 bodies had been removed from the battlefields and reburied in these cemeteries.
Many relatives of the dead expressed a wish to visit graves as soon as possible after the Armistice, and so a number of religious organisations began conducting groups of the bereaved to France and Belgium. The best known of these was the St Barnabas Society, named after the patron saint of consolation, founded by a clergyman in 1919 in order to subsidise the travel of those who could not afford trips offered by commercial travel companies. Such pilgrimages proved popular. In the seven months between November 1919 and June 1920, for example, the Church Army arranged for 5,000 people to travel to the places where their men lay buried. During this period such places must often have seemed all too redolent of the circumstances in which such men had died. For all the good work carried out by the DGRE, most of the cemeteries were little more than a neat array of wooden crosses standing on bare earth in a bleak landscape where very little was growing. To reach them, mourners would have had to travel through villages that had been reduced to piles of rubble, along rutted roads lined with splintered trees, across ground still churned up by high explosives and littered with barbed wire, burned-out vehicles, abandoned weaponry and all the pitiful detritus of recent warfare. For those who had been unable to attend any sort of funeral for their husbands, sons, fathers and brothers, visiting graves even in these conditions seems to have provided comfort, and by 1923 some 78,500 of them had taken advantage of travelling facilities offered by the Salvation Army and the YMCA. In time these cemeteries would be tidied up considerably and landscaped with shrubs and flower beds. ‘The concept was to create a sentimental association between the gardens of home and the foreign fields where the soldier lies’, and these particular corners of France and Belgium did indeed begin to look as if they were forever England.
Elsewhere on the Western Front, a tourist industry rapidly developed independently of the pilgrimages conducted for the bereaved. While many people were content to learn about the actual circumstances of the war at the Imperial War Museum, which had been founded at Crystal Palace in 1917 and recorded over three million visitors between 1920 and 1923, others took advantage of the opportunities offered to visit Flanders and Picardy to see where the war had been fought. A number of unemployed veterans of the officer class took out advertisements in the press offering to conduct small groups of visitors round the battlefields by car, their recent first-hand knowledge of France and Belgium a guarantee of authenticity. As early as 1919, tourists could buy books such as A.T. Fleming’s How to See the Battlefields, but the most popular guides were the illustrated series to most of the major battle sites published by the Michelin tyre company, fifteen of which had been published in English editions by 1921. Prefaced with an overview of the military objectives and brief accounts of the individual attacks, complete with maps, the guides provided a detailed itinerary for the visitor. They also contained before-and-after photographs of devastated buildings and villages and recent photographs of the temporary cemeteries. These photos perhaps tell their own story – as well they might, since one would have no idea reading the Michelin guide to the Somme, for example, that 1 July 1916 was (and still is) the worst day in the history of the British army. Euphemistic phrases such as ‘came into contact with the second German positions’ abound, and the emphasis is firmly upon what few successes the Allies achieved, with figures given for numbers of Germans taken prisoner but none whatever for the 60,000 British casualties. ‘The first assaults on July 1 gave the British Montauban and Mametz, while Fricourt and La Boisselle were encircled and carried on July 3,’ we read. ‘Coltmaison and Mametz Wood, reached on the 5th, were carried on the 11th.’ The cost of all this is not mentioned: you would not know from this book that at Mametz Wood on 7 July alone the Welsh Division lost over 4,000 men. Estimates vary as to the overall casualties for the Battle of the Somme, which dragged on until mid-November, but after 140 days the British had lost some 400,000 men and advanced 6 miles. It was not, perhaps, a statistic anyone wanted to read in the immediate aftermath of the war. The Michelin guides contained enough information to be of interest even to those who did not want to make the journey across the Channel, and by January 1922 sales figures for the guides in Britain, France and America had reached 1,432,000. Later that year George V made a tour of the battlefields and cemeteries both to pay his respects to those of his subjects who had died and to inspect the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission, of which his eldest son continued to serve as president. A heavily illustrated book about the royal tour, emotively titled The King’s Pilgrimage, became a bestseller when it was published in 1922.
Others who visited the battlefields had been there not long before. While it is easy to see why veterans might wish to visit the battlefields and cemeteries many years later, the notion of them returning to places where they had so recently endured appalling conditions, and which nature had yet to heal, may strike us as odd. Many veterans were haunted by their experiences at the front, experiences they would be unable to forget however long they lived. These were not experiences that were easy to talk about or share with civilians, even if they were friends or family. Siegfried Sassoon made his notorious public protest against the political conduct of the war in 1917 on behalf of his suffering fellow soldiers partly in the belief that ‘it may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realise’. Now that the war was over, veterans were naturally wary of harrowing their families and friends, or worse still boring them, with stories from the trenches. ‘There was nobody interested anyway,’ George Louth recalled, ‘so it was useless telling them and if you did they would only laugh at you, say it wasn’t true. It wasn’t a conscious thing, nobody talked about the First War in those days, even my wife, even she never heard my story and we were married seventy years.’ Louth had joined up in 1915 at the age of eighteen and survived the first day on the Somme in 1916, but was invalided out in December of that year. He would live to celebrate his 103rd birthday in 2000, but ‘only once spoke about [the war] from 1918 until 1990’. This was to a woman enquiring after her husband, who had been ‘blown to pieces’ but was officially listed as ‘wounded and missing’. Harry Patch too never spoke about the war. He married happily in 1919, but not once in fifty-seven years of wedded life did he mention the war to his wife. ‘I don’t think she had any idea about my service, and never brought it up.’
Many veterans felt as if they had been set apart from civilian life altogether, and that the only people with whom they could truly share their feelings were those they had served alongside. The veterans’ organisations not only campaigned for the rights of ex-servicemen, they also provided former soldiers with a community and would organise visits to France and Belgium. Ex-servicemen had been among both cemetery pilgrims and battlefield tourists from the very outset, paying their respects