Ware was without question a visionary and idealist, but the real quality that enabled him to achieve things was an eye for the main chance, a politician’s instinct for popular movement, an intuitive sense of the zeitgeist, and at no time was that more obvious than in the summer of 1915. Over the late spring and early summer of that year there would be two decisions taken in France that were absolutely seminal to the future of Britain’s war graves, but if anyone other than Ware so much as glimpsed the implications of them or the social and political transformation they foreshadowed, then he kept very quiet about it.
Ware could not possibly have seen the future or even the full consequences of all the decisions he was taking, but then who in 1915 could be sure that there would be a future? In the popular consciousness the year forms a muted intermezzo between the high hopes of 1914 and the horrors of the Somme, but for those who lived through it this was the year of Neuve-Chapelle, German gas and Loos, of the naval and military disasters of Gallipoli, the year in which even the sinking of the Lusitania and the Armenian Massacres failed to shake Woodrow Wilson’s high-minded neutrality – the year that ended for Britain with the silent evacuation of one beaten army from the beaches of Turkey, the hopeless and disease-ravaged rump of another besieged in the Iraqi city of Kut, and any hopes of an Allied breakthrough on the Western Front looking more delusory than ever.
For Vera Brittain, for Rudyard Kipling and his wife Carrie, for the relatives of the 11,500 dead of Aubers Ridge who had died for nothing, of the 16,500 of Festubert who at least had their thousand yards to show for it, of the 43,000 lost at Loos, the greatest battle yet fought by a British army – it was the year that the world stopped and for the volunteers of 1914 it was their welcome to Erich Remarque’s universal enemy, Death. ‘The dug-outs have been nearly all blown in,’ Roland Leighton, Vera Brittain’s fiancé and one of the brightest of those golden youths who had sat listening to Uppingham’s headmaster only a year before, wrote bitterly home,
and in among the chaos of twisted iron and splintered timber and shapeless earth are the fleshless, blackened bones of simple men who poured out their red, sweet wine of youth unknowing, for nothing more tangible than Honour or their Country’s Glory or another Lust of Power. Let him who thinks War is a glorious, golden thing, who loves to roll forth stirring words of exhortation, invoking Honour and Praise and Valour and Love of Country with as thoughtless and fervid faith as inspired the priests of Baal to call on their own slumbering deity, let him but look at a little pile of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull and a shin bone and what might have been his ribs, or at this skeleton lying on its side, resting, half crouching, as it fell, perfect but that it is headless … and let him think how grand and glorious a thing it is to have distilled all Youth and Joy and Life into a foetid heap of hideous putrescence!
Leighton himself would be dead by Christmas, shot through the stomach, but if this year of disillusionment and rising casualties brought home the grim paradox at the heart of Ware’s steady rise up the military ladder, that only made him the more resolved to ‘stick to it’. ‘I told you in my last letter I regarded things then as on the knees of the Gods,’ he wrote to Milner at the end of April, just a week after the first gas attacks against French and French African troops north of Ypres.fn2 ‘Well the work is going well (touching wood, very well). Macready is very pleased … I am absolutely persuaded of the importance of the work out here.’
There were any number of sensitive and potentially divisive issues that fell within his new remit – cremations, exhumations, the proliferation of unauthorised private memorials – but at the centre of Ware’s negotiations was the key question of land expropriation for the burial of the Allied dead. Initially it had been possible to deal with these matters at local level, but as the cemeteries and churchyards immediately behind the front line filled, the problem of acquiring new land and establishing rights over old burial grounds had become a matter for the state and not the municipality. The kindness and gratitude of the French people had been a constant theme of Ware’s early letters and reports, and in the crisis summer of 1915 their government followed suit with an inimitably Gallic elan, claiming for France not just the duty but the right ‘to adopt as her child and to honour … every soldier who has fallen on her soil for justice and the freedom of the nations’. It would be the best part of a year before Ware’s negotiations finally bore legislative fruit in an ‘expropriation bill’, but in all the complex and often fractious wartime dealings of the Allies, it would be hard to find a more signal act of friendship and imagination than France’s response to the British dead.
There would be difficulties and frustrations ahead, delays and amendments in the bill’s committee stage, rumblings in the Senate, legal questions and unease over the effective appropriation of French land by a foreign government, but Ware was at least determined to make sure that his own side did not make things worse. ‘I have warned the Press to tell their correspondents to be on the lookout for M. Millerand’s speech,’ he wrote to his deputy Captain Messer at a crucial stage at the end of June, when the French Minister of War was ready to move the bill, convinced, as ever, that if he did not tell people what to say and when to say it, then no one – not the Army, the Paris Embassy, the politicians at home, the newspapers, not even the Royal Family – could be trusted to do or say the right thing at the right time, ‘and I have also been privately promised that the Prime Minister will make a suitable reply in the House of Commons to M. Millerand.’
Could the Adjutant General put some pressure on the Embassy to be a little more gracious? Could a telegram of thanks from the King be sent at the right time? Could Britain not be more generous with her decorations to French civilians? It was the old Ware of the Morning Post again, prodding and cajoling, dropping a ‘hint’ to the Times editor here, soothing a minister’s vanity there, and if there was a touch of megalomania in it all, it clearly worked. By September, Millerand’s bill had been carried through the Chamber of Deputies on the back of an emotional appeal from the Rapporteur, and in December at last became law in a form that enshrined all the most disinterested intentions of the original bill with the addition of one crucial clause that would give Britain control over the future upkeep of its war graves.
Ware never did anything more important in his life and that last clause had a lot to do with it. ‘The law of 29 December’ was all and more than he could have hoped for – ‘perpetuity of sepulture’ for Britain and her Empire’s dead, the cost of all lands to be borne on the French budget, but it was this last provision for a single ‘properly constituted’ British authority to supervise and finance the maintenance of the cemeteries that proved the key to their enduring character.
It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of this provision and difficult to imagine what Britain’s war cemeteries would have looked like without it, because in relieving France of the financial burden of their maintenance, Ware had secured control over every detail of their future. At this stage of the conflict it remained a largely theoretical concern of course, but the concession guaranteed that when the time came there could be no conflicts of authority over decisions that up until this point had been matters of chance and private initiative.
It would be hard to say who Ware saw as the principal danger to this future – British units who seemed bent on turning France into a giant memorial park or French advocates of giant ossuaries – but another issue had already underlined how vital that control was. In the early months of 1915 the rising numbers of unidentified dead had presented the French authorities with an almost insuperable problem, and in the middle of June, a scientific committee set up to explore alternatives to burial, had released a report that had sent Ware scuttling around the Ministries of the Interior, War and Hygiene in panic.
The solution