it is possible to state at once how many burial grounds are in existence, how many graves are in each, and in what units they belong. The register also enables crosses destroyed by shell fire or otherwise to be replaced, and it is practically impossible for any grave once located to be lost sight of.
All enquiries, half of them from France, half from home, were also dealt with at their chateau headquarters at Lillers, but the real spade-work, as it were, was carried out by the sections. In the first reorganisation Ware had envisaged that there would be four of these, but by the August of 1915 those four had swelled to seven – ‘A’ and ‘G’ at Bethune for instance, ‘D’ at Aisne and Marne – with the officer in charge of each district responsible for marking and reporting burials to headquarters, tracking down and verifying old graves, collating daily returns from chaplains, units and hospitals, and finally preparing and erecting wooden crosses with their machine-punched metal identification plates.
In tandem with this work, often carried out under conditions of great risk, as Haig noted, went a growing number of local enquiries, and the first rudimentary improvements to the appearance of cemeteries sparked off by a torrent of requests for photographs from families back in Britain. Macready had already exempted the Graves Registration Commission from the prohibition against photography, and with funds from the Joint War Committee of the Red Cross and St John Ambulance a separate department was set up and three ‘first-class’ professional photographers put to work over the summer months to begin the task of photographing all the graves.
Six thousand graves photographed, 800 photographs despatched to families in England, 18,173 graves registered, it was an extraordinary workload that had been completed by the middle of August. However there was a limit to what even Ware could do. In the first days of the GRC he had wanted the old Mobile Unit to continue its ambulance duties, but with his resources stretched to the limit by the expanding GRC work it was probably as well that a rare breakdown in his relations, and an even rarer show of offended dignity from Ware, forced his hand.
It was a sad end to a fertile partnership, but it cleared the way for Ware to concentrate on his graves work. It also foreshadowed another equally inevitable development in the story of the GRC. Macready and the Old Army – with memories of the chaos in South Africa – had never been entirely comfortable co-operating with the Red Cross and a change of status was needed. With the volume of work growing by the day, and a volunteer manpower inadequate to the task, the existing compromise made no sense. ‘I saw the AG the other day,’ Sir Arthur Lawley wrote in mock outrage to Ware at the end of August,
who hinted at an act of Piracy so audacious that I am still dumb with horror at the mere suggestion.
He proposes to swallow at one gulp the GRC and all its merry men.
Could you ever endure to be torn from the sheltering arms of the Red Cross?
‘Now!’ I hear you say.
I will do all I can to save you.
Within weeks it was a faint accompli. On 6 September, Macready recommended to the War Office that the GRC should ‘be placed on a proper footing as part of His Majesty’s forces’, and a month later its old hybrid existence came to an end. It marked the end of the first phase of Ware’s life work. The enduring, impressive and controversial aspects of that work – the questions of repatriation, commemoration, permanence, uniformity, imperial involvement and authority – still lay ahead but without the Mobile Ambulance Unit none of it could have happened.
‘I am sorry and at the same time glad that it should be so,’ Lawley wrote again at the end of October, after the Army’s ‘piracy’ had become official,
sorry of course that we can no longer look upon your achievements as ‘our’ work and claim a share in its reflected glory; glad on the other hand that the excellent quality of your work and its value has received the flattering recognition which is manifested by the Army’s absorption of your entire organisation.
It was a rightly generous tribute to the work that had been done, and a sober recognition of what lay ahead. The war had changed and the Army with it. By the end of 1914, the four infantry divisions and the one cavalry division of the BEF who had crossed the Channel in August had almost trebled in size to a force of two armies and a cavalry corps of more than 270,000 men. By the spring of 1916 this would rise to a million and a peak in the summer of 1917 of 1,721,056 men. Already a newly arrived officer like Cameron Highlander Ian Mackay, who only reached France in the spring of 1915, could look back with a sense of awe on the achievements of the BEF at Mons and its aftermath as if they belonged to a wholly different conflict. They had been ‘marvellous’, he told his mother – the perfect answer ‘to the crokers who lamented the decadence of the race. No troops in the world could have done what they have done.’
Mackay’s war, until it ended in an unmarked grave in 1917, would be very different. The romance, the pride, the glamour, the professional elan of the early days had died with the Old Army and all that was left to their successors was to endure. From the Channel coast to the Swiss border, an unbroken line of earthworks, stretching for 475 miles, marked the front line. This line would define Mackay’s experience of France as it still largely shapes the collective memory of what the war was like. It would also be the phase of the fighting that projected the work of Ware and his men on to a scale that makes the world of orchards, farms and solitary and scattered graves that Broadley and his colleagues searched in late 1914 seem to belong to an unimaginably remote past.
There were possibly any number of administrators who could have put the work of the Graves Registration Commission on an efficient footing in 1915, but how many could also have dealt with the political complexities and negotiation that went with it is a very different matter. In the early spring of 1915, Ware had begun talks in Paris with the French government on the status of British war graves, and over the next weeks and months he was in constant contact with the different government departments involved, assuaging cultural differences and repairing real or imagined slights with the finesse of a born diplomat and the political savvy of an old newspaperman.
There were the usual ‘us and them’ gripes – the War Office were ‘blighters’, he told Milner, and their clerks should be shipped over to the trenches for a week – but as ‘the sole intermediary between the British Army in the Field and the French military and civil authorities on all matters relating to graves’ he had the complete authority he wanted. In the earliest days with the Mobile Ambulance Unit his work had inevitably been essentially reactive, but here, for the first time, was a chance to think and plan for the future on a scale appropriate to his energy and vision and to the growing magnitude of the Allies’ sacrifice.
It is impossible to do much more than guess what the Army had in mind when it placed Ware in charge of the negotiations. They knew that in Ware they had found a man with the experience and tact to smooth over difficulties, but if they imagined that they were taking on a kind of glorified Undertaker General to the Forces to put an acceptable face on Death for the benefit of a disturbed public back at home, then they had hopelessly underestimated their man.
He would certainly do that for them – no one in the history of warfare has transformed the horrors and suffering of a battlefield into oases of peace like Ware – but from early in their alliance he and the Army had different objectives in view. There was nothing stupid or blinkered about a man like Nevil Macready, but where he saw a problem Ware saw an opportunity; where the soldier and administrator simply recognised a failure in procedures that would come back to haunt the Army, the visionary saw the glimmer of an answer to all those