There were excuses – Treasury reluctance to spend money on anything that did not directly contribute to victory – but it was not as if the men in command had no first-hand experience of the distress and confusion that previous failures had caused. In the aftermath of the Boer War, the Loyal Women’s Guild had done its ‘admirable’ but ‘unsatisfactory’ best to fill the gap, but ‘a lot of trouble over soldiers’ graves’, Sir Nevil Macready, another old South Africa hand, later told a War Office committee, ‘would have been avoidable had a proper organisation been created to meet the need at the commencement of the war’.
In the failure of the authorities to provide their own organisation, however, Ware saw his opportunity and it could not have come at a better moment. In the first months of the war he had been determined to keep the Army at arm’s length, but his men in the field had always found the absence of military rank a disadvantage and with the scale of work expanding all the time – by May 1915, 4,300 graves would be registered – and Ian Malcolm and the Paris office of the International Red Cross still operating to the south in the Marne and Aisne areas, the point had been reached at which Ware’s independence could best be preserved from within the Army rather than from without.
The Army needed no persuasion of the value of his work – distressed relatives’ letters in the newspapers at home were reminders that there would come a reckoning if they continued to do nothing – but what Ware wanted was a monopoly of it and in late February he secured himself an appointment with the Adjutant General to make his case. ‘Into the old-fashioned French bedroom which served as my office came a spare, dark individual, dressed in the uniform of the French Croix-Rouge,’ Nevil Macready recalled,
He explained that he had been working with the French, and was at that moment with General Conneau’s cavalry, but wished, if there was an opening, to give his services to his own countrymen. We chatted for some time, and I found that he had considerable administrative experience and was a fluent French scholar. His memory was better than mine, and it transpired that some forty years before, when we were both small boys, he had been present at a meeting house of the Plymouth Brethren, to which I had been taken by an aunt, and when I got into some difficulties over the ritual, an episode which had evidently impressed him. Before he left my room I had booked him to create an organisation to [find] and record the names of our soldiers.
There can have been few First World War generals who had been bounced on Dickens’s knee as a child, but then a son of the great Victorian actor-manager Charles Macready and the great-grandson of the artist Sir William Beechey, Nevil Macready was hardly typical in the first place. As a young boy growing up in Cheltenham he would have preferred the stage to the Army, but his father was having none of it and after Sandhurst, and a brief and bloody baptism at Tel-el-Kebir in Egypt, he had gravitated into staff work as if born to it, rising quietly and seamlessly from an appointment with the military police in Alexandria to be Assistant Adjutant General and Chief Staff Officer for Cape Colony at the end of the Boer War. If the thespian in the fastidiously elegant Macready never entirely died – it is no surprise that he was the first to take off his moustache when he lifted the injunction against clean-shaven officers in the Army – the role he always played best was that of the brusquely efficient administrator. During the South African war he had seen more than his fair share of fighting at Ladysmith, but his real métier remained the staff and it was back at the War Office with responsibility for the deployment of troops in aid of the civil power that his talents came fully into their own.
The years immediately before the war were not good ones for soldiers, years of widespread industrial violence and looming civil war in Ireland that drew the British Army into a policing role, but Macready was one of the few men to come out of them with his reputation enhanced. In 1910 he had taken command of operations in South Wales during the bitter miners’ strikes, and the name he made for himself there marked him for the top at a time when his qualities of judgment, firmness, and political impartiality had never been at a higher premium.
With their Plymouth Brethren connections, Milner’s South Africa and even political sympathies in common – Ware, a social radical in conservative clothing, Macready, by military standards at least, the next thing to a Bolshevik in uniform – the two men might have been made for each other. The result was the creation of a Graves Registration Commission (GRC) with Ware at the helm. ‘At the beginning of the present war,’ Macready later told a War Office Committee, smoothly glossing over the turf wars and bloodletting that lay behind its birth, he had,
talked over the matter with the … Chief Engineer, BEF, and decided to create an organisation to deal with the graves question. Certain members of the Red Cross Society at the time were in a spasmodic way interesting themselves in the matter and expending their energies in different directions. But there was no control and, to cut a long story short, [I] obtained the services of … Ware, and put him in charge.
Although in some ways the new GRC remained a curiously hybrid, semi-detached sort of unit – the Red Cross continued to supply men and vehicles, while Ware was given the local rank of major (with two captains and seven lieutenants under him) and the Army took on the costs of crosses, rations and fuel – the crucial thing for Ware was that the GRC had the monopoly he had wanted. In the first months of the war he been obliged to share power with the Red Cross’s Paris office, and with Macready now behind him, he moved swiftly and ruthlessly to take control of the work being done in the Aisne/Marne district by Ian Malcolm and bring it under a single unified command.
He was right to do what he did – unauthorised individuals had become involved, vital identification evidence removed, questionable exhumations carried out – but it was unmistakably the old Ware of South Africa and Morning Post days who had ruthlessly squeezed out Spenser Wilkinson. In the earliest days in France he had often found the Red Cross were actually ahead of him in their work, and yet if Malcolm imagined now that that would count for anything he was in for a sad awakening. ‘There is not, of course, much in the personal point,’ Malcolm pleaded with Lawley,
though I am bound to say I feel rather aggrieved at being completely passed over and superseded in my own area where I have worked so hard for five months [but on public grounds, to avoid replication]. Would it not, therefore, be well if the A.G., or Fabian Ware … could entrust me with their official programme? Can you not help to arrange this?
‘It would be a matter of the greatest disappointment to me if all this were suddenly taken from out of my hands,’ he wrote in the same plaintive vein to Ware on 11 March, ‘and I should feel sure that it would be far from your wish that it should be so.’
He did not know his man, and within the week all his maps, lists and cemetery concessions were on the new director’s desk, as Ware began the business of putting their old grave work on a more organised footing. At the outset Ware still had all the problems of a volunteer workforce and a War Office that ‘neither cares nor understands’, but by the middle of August 1915 plans had already assumed a ‘definite’ enough shape for him to be able to describe the organisation in a report to Macready that shows just why he had been the right choice for the job.
Ware had divided the Commission into two parts, with seven distinct sections to carry out the field work and a headquarters responsible for the compilation and update of two registers. The first of these was a registration of graves with the names of officers and men listed by regiment, with details of any existing cross or inscriptions where the sites were accessible, and a note of who had reported them where they could no longer be reached, along with a record of any outstanding enquiries.
The second, complementing the regimental lists, was a geographical register. ‘