This brings to mind an incident when I called at a farm near Meteren and a farmer showed me the graves of two nameless heroes of the Seaforth Highlanders which were in a field. He explained that he had the greatest difficulty in keeping the cows away and added with tears in his eyes that he would give all the money in the world if these brave fellows could have been buried in his back garden instead of a field close by.
One of the enduring themes, in fact, running through the origins of the Imperial War Graves Commission is the generosity of the French state and people, and Ware was determined that nothing was going to threaten this. ‘With very few exceptions the graves which we have seen up to the present are beautifully made and kept,’ he reported again back to the chairman of the Joint War Committee, Arthur Stanley, anxious to make sure that no ingratitude was shown to a population ‘that have been so ready to take upon themselves the pious care’ of British burial plots.
The personal interest will cause many relatives to hesitate after the war before removing them. In many cases the exact circumstances of death were witnessed by the villagers and are engraved on their memories. Here a woman will relate how she saw a dragoon, whose grave is in her orchard, step under a tree to pick an apple and how while he was in the act a shell took his head off; there a woman will tell you how she watched a lancer, buried close by, kneeling on the bridge and firing on the Germans until he fell.
The other thing that sustained his searchers in their harrowing and often dangerous work – and another important thread in the IWGC’s history – was the evidence of what it meant to the fighting soldier. ‘I was endeavouring to erect a cross in a field,’ Broadley wrote, when the bitter cold of early December 1914 had made the earth ‘as hard as iron,
and my work was not progressing very rapidly. Some ‘Tommies’ who were marching down the road … obtained leave to fall out and help me. With their assistance the cross was speedily placed in position and then, without a word they all sprang to attention and solemnly saluted the grave of their dead comrade-in-arms. It was a most impressive and touching sight.
There is something in this vignette – something in its air of reverence, of innocence almost – that movingly evokes a world that was disappearing even as Broadley described it. In the last two weeks of November 1914, he alone had located some three hundred graves in an area from Laventie to Steenvoorde, and yet this was still war and death on a scale that left room for all those human pieties and sensibilities that would sink in the mud and horror of the trenches.
These would never entirely disappear – on the eve of the Somme, Sir Lionel Earle reassured The Weekly Dispatch’s readers that ‘our soldiers in the shell swept zones never tire of making reverent pilgrimages to the cemeteries where their dead comrades lie’ – but never again would the mores and social baggage of the pre-war world seem so real to men at the front.
This was partly because those men were different, but it was also because the British Army itself had changed. In the first months of the fighting it was a far smaller and tighter entity than it later became, and even in 1915 a territorial like Captain Ian Mackay of the Cameron Highlanders, coming out to France for the first time, could hardly move behind the lines without stumbling into someone with whom he had been at school or danced an eightsome at the Northern Meeting.
To officers like Mackay, the dead were not anonymous strangers but friends and estate workers with names and families: ‘Beauly and Portree boys’ with whom the Mackays had always historically gone to war; men called ‘Gray Buchanan a great Fettes pal of Ian Innes’, and Ian Innes himself; their graves places to visit, their funerals snatched moments of shared humanity in the din of war. ‘We had one poor fellow killed when walking along a road with a message some distance behind the front line,’ Mackay wrote home from Busnes in the winter of 1915,
We sent for our padre … and I went to the funeral in a little British cemetery near a ruined farm not far from our firing line. It was a regular Sir John Moore burial as our guns were thundering at the time and while we were at the grave the Germans sent over several shrapnel and high explosives … which burst unpleasantly near.
There were regiments, of course, who never relaxed their pre-war standards – Duff Cooper might have found himself in an unusually dangerous bit of Mayfair when he arrived at the front in 1918 for all the difference war made to his social life – but the old hierarchies were never so unashamedly honoured as in these early days. ‘Dear Miss F. Robertson,’ one former servant, now ‘Private Young, 4 Company, Divisional wiring, c/o Head Qrs’, wrote back in pencil from Ypres to his previous employer’s family,
Yesterday I visited the Town Major’s office for the purpose of locating Mr. Lewis’s grave, the plans of the city were handed to me and with the address you gave me the exact spot was easy to find. After making my way through the ruins of the convent I came to the grounds which are badly damaged by shell fire. I cannot express to you how glad I was to find the grave in perfect order, except for weeds, brick and various other articles lying around, the bottom of the cross is damaged by shrapnel, however I will get to work right away, and make a new cross, which can stand behind the old one, also rearrange things and clear all rubbish away. While I am here you can depend on me to see that the grave is kept in good order. I have ample time on hand and can spare an hour or more work every day it is no trouble to me whatever I am only too glad, that the little service I hoped for, for months, has at last been fulfilled. If there is any plans you would like me to carry out, just mention them, I will be only to [sic] delighted to be of what little service that is possible for me to do. Must conclude in haste, I am quite fit and happy. Sincerely yours, D. Young.
The arrival of the first Territorial battalions in November 1914, Sir Nevil Macready, the Adjutant General in France, recognised, had made this sense of ‘family’, with its attendant psychological complications, all the stronger too. Among the old regulars the response to a death might be no more than a few ‘words of rough regret’ and ‘a determination to get their own back’, but for the closely knit Territorials, bound together by every social tie of peacetime life, the brutal shock of seeing ‘hundreds of their comrades … swept away’ in battle would cause ‘a great wave of grief and depression’ which would take days to overcome.
It was a pointer to the future, and to the damage that whole communities would suffer when the Pals’ battalions went into action, and in such a climate the work of the Mobile Ambulance Unit took on a significance that probably caught even Ware by surprise. From the first he had issued instructions against the taking of undue risks, but he knew as well as his men that nothing added more to the prestige of the unit than the fact that they shared the dangers of the front-line troops. ‘It is fully recognised that the work of the organisation is of purely sentimental value, and that it does not directly contribute to the successful termination of the war,’ General Haig wrote to the War Office in March 1915, blithely unconscious of just how big a butcher’s bill he would finally be presenting to the nation,
It has, however, an extraordinary moral value to the troops in the field as well as to the relatives and friends of the dead at home. The mere fact that these officers visit day after day the cemeteries close behind the trenches, fully exposed to shell and rifle fire, accurately to record not only the names of the dead but also the exact place of burial, has a symbolic value to the men that it would be difficult to exaggerate. Further, it should be borne in mind that on the termination of hostilities the nation will demand an account from the Government as to the steps which have been taken to mark and classify the burial places of the dead, steps which can only be effectively taken at, or soon after, burial.
If