The Empty Tomb

After the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919 the Prime Minister David Lloyd George suggested that a Peace Parade should be held to celebrate the signing and the end of the Great War; not only to celebrate victory and the coming of peace but commemorate the dead and make sense of the sacrifice of over a million Imperial soldiers. It was felt that the parade needed a central object and a symbolic heart on which people could focus their attention; in Lloyd George’s words in early July 1919 “a point of homage to stand as a symbol of remembrance worthy of the reverent salute of an Empire mourning for its million dead;”* and he asked architect Edwin Lutyens to design a monument to be ready for the parade on 19 July. It was to be non-denominational and carry no Christian symbolism. This decision was opposed by the Church, but Lutyens was aware from his work with the IWGC that many soldiers who had fought and died for the British Empire were not of the Christian faith, and he wanted his memorial to encompass the sacrifice of all.

Lutyens had already discussed the building of a suitable monument with the Commissioner of the Board of Works, and he had a design ready. The speed of the building meant that it was built of materials easy to use – plaster and wood – but the structure was not meant to be permanent. Lutyens called it a Cenotaph – from the Greek meaning ‘empty tomb.’ It was ready for the Peace Parade ceremonies and the official unveiling by George V.

The Cenotaph : original design for the structure in Whitehall (Art.IWM ART 3991 a) Lutyens was first approached informally by Sir Alfred Mond, First Commissioner of Works in Lloyd George’s government in June 1919, to design a monument to mark the signing of the Peace Treaty. Following discussions with Clemenceau and the Peace Celebrations Committee, Lloyd George met Lutyens in early July 1919 and asked him to design a catafalque for Whitehall, to be part of the Peace Day events… Copyright: � IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/17076

THE CENOTAPH AT WHITEHALL, 1920 (Q 31488) The unveiling of the permanent Cenotaph at Whitehall, by King George V, 11 November 1920. Copyright: � IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205191592

Once the official ceremonies in July 1919 were over, people started to project their own grief onto the monument – it provided a symbolic coffin in which people could imagine laying their dead and where they could come to grieve. As Juliet Nicolson describes in The Great Silence:

“To be in the silent presence of the Cenotaph, the mind paradoxically was free to express anything it chose…lacking any inner substance of its own, it seemed to be the silence of grief made visible the absence of the missing men made real…The Morning Post noted that ‘Near the Memorial there were moments of silence when the dead seemed very near. “

The temporary Cenotaph became a place of pilgrimage, ever since its unveiling heaped with wreaths, bouquets and floral tributes laid ten feet high, with people queueing for hours to leave their flowers; poignantly one little boy who brought flowers saw it as if standing in its own garden cried out “Oh mummy, see what a lovely garden my daddy’s got!”

Officialdom was taken by surprise at the depth of the emotional and spiritual public response, as officialdom so very often is. First, it was suggested that the temporary Cenotaph should be moved. Then the Commissioner of Works, Sir Alfred Mond, irritated by the smell of decaying flowers in the hot summer of 1919, suggested that the laying of flowers should be severely restricted – too messy and too popular. The Cenotaph was too mournful a memorial, it disrupted the traffic, which was missing the point. Lutyens had placed it where it was deliberately, to intrude upon day to day life and make people think about what it represented. It was not meant to be triumphal and celebrate victory, it was a memorial to what that victory had entailed in terms of human sacrifice – men dead, maimed, missing, women widowed, children fatherless, parents bereft. Where it stands is a permanent reminder even now to government and passers-by of that cost, both in 1914-1918 and later.

Demands by the public and MPs to make the Cenotaph a permanent memorial started almost as soon as the Peace Parade was over, and Lutyens was commissioned to recast his memorial in Portland stone less than two weeks after the parade.

The Cenotaph was finally unveiled by the King on Armistice Day 11 November 1920 just before the cortege of the Unknown Warrior passed on its way to Westminster Abbey. Such was the hush as people waited to see the unveiling that onlookers recalled the rustling of autumn leaves as the only sound. Described by one journalist as ‘grave, severe and beautiful,’ this memorial did not hold a body or exalt a victorious general. It had no statues of soldiers trampling fallen enemies, no boasting of battles won, or lands conquered; nothing that might disturb or alienate the onlooker. It held three words only – The Glorious Dead – and the only decorations were carved wreaths of ribbon and three flags along each flank (Lutyens wanted these to be carved in stone but was overruled). The lack of imagery or religious symbolism allowed each mourner to project their own personal grief and derive their own meaning and consolation. In the words of one writer, Richard van Emden: “with the decision to leave the remains of all who had died where they lay overseas, the Cenotaph was carefully representative of the nation’s acceptance that there would be no bodies to bury at home.” The Church establishment did not approve at all of this secularism – one reason why it was so ready to accept the idea of the burial of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey as an alternative shrine.

*The loss to the British Empire was actually 1,104,890 dead. Commentators at Armistice and later Remembrance Sunday broadcasts used a visual metaphor to indicate the magnitude of the loss if the dead of the Great War marched in rows of four past the Cenotaph, the head of the column would be in Whitehall while the tail would still be in Durham (270 miles/448 km).

The Dead

In August 1915, two days after his death and thanks to an appeal by his family to both the Prime Minister and the King, the body of Lieutenant William Gladstone, a grandson of the great prime minister, was brought home from a cemetery in France and reburied with full military honours at Hawarden. His loss was keenly felt by the crowds who watched the funeral procession, but Lieutenant Gladstone was to be one of the few men killed in action to be buried at home; in 1915 his case prompted Fabian Ware to ask the Adjutant General of the army to issue a blanket ban on all repatriations of the dead. (This was later reinforced by an announcement from the government in late November 1918 that bodies would not be repatriated, and that the IGWC believed that this would have been the wish of the soldiers themselves ‘in whom the sense of comradeship was so strong.’ (Times article, 28 November 1918). The message was clear and firm – the Empire had asked these men to fight and die for it, the Empire would look after them in death. As Gavin Stamp in Memorial to the Missing of the Somme observed: “Equality in death… had to be enforced by the state, and the British people had to learn that liberty is incompatible with war, and that once a man had enlisted, dead or alive, his body belonged to the King.”

Although difficult, the original decision was psychologically and logistically sound. There was not just the consideration of the blow to national morale and mental well-being of thousands of coffins arriving week after week, but also the stark reality of the state of the bodies within – shattered, maimed and in many cases mere fragments gathered into a sandbag. The death lists were distressing enough, but the arrival of bodies would have been a brutal reminder of the scale of conflict and the numbers of deaths. There were also practical issues to consider. Who would contact the families of Imperial troops and fund the repatriation of their bodies? To whom did a body belong, the family or the dead man’s wife? Whose wishes took precedence in the event of a family dispute, and what about the families who could not afford to bring their dead home? And of course, not everyone had the influence to appeal to the prime minister or monarch for permission, or the money to erect a fitting memorial. To a society that placed enormous significance on the rituals of death, however, having no funeral to attend or a grave to visit was a deeply wounding and upsetting experience.

Repatriation would have also breached the guiding principle of the Imperial War Graves Commission – that of equality and comradeship in death. Rich families would be able to bring home their dead, erect a memorial and have a focus for their mourning, poorer families would not. It was hoped that families would come to look on the war cemeteries as the proper place for the dead, and that they would appreciate both the solace afforded by the ambience of the gardens and the reflection that their menfolk were lying with the comrades with whom they had fought.  In May 1920, a parliamentary debate made the decision to recognise the principles of the IWGC, among them that the dead lay abroad and there they would stay; a policy that was unique to Britain.

There may have been another unspoken political reason for the government’s stance in 1918. Russia and Germany were in the throes of revolution, and in 1917 more than one million days had been lost to strikes in Britain, which intelligence reports attributed to discontent stirred up by revolutionary organisations. Whether it was a fear with any basis in reality or not, government and monarchy might have been apprehensive that allowing those who had the influence or money to bring home their dead while many poor families could not, might be an excuse to harness working class discontent and incite revolution.

It was inevitable that the government and IWGC stance would be bitterly opposed by many families who had sacrificed their menfolk and who were now denied, as they saw it, even the right to bring them back to their families to be buried at home. Not only could they not bring back sons, fathers, and husbands but they could not even erect a headstone or memorial of their choosing and were limited to a few lines of personal message, and one for which they had to pay. One mother wrote bitterly that she had sacrificed her son to be butchered, and was livid that the government, not his mother, would decide where he was buried, erect the memorial over his grave and limit the space in which she could leave a message. Presumably, she raged, she was also to be told how much time she could spend at his graveside.

Families issued powerful emotional demands for the return of the bodies of their loved ones, and some became fixated on the issue. In 1919 the British War Graves Association was set up by a group of parents, and for the next six years the Association made repeated requests and conditions that the government re-address the issue of exhumation and repatriation of war dead. Petitions were raised and sent to Queen Mary, the Prince of Wales and the IWGC, which would not change its stance when the establishment of war cemeteries using public money was well under way. Not until 1925 did the Association give up its demands for their dead to be returned to them.

The Cemeteries

There are no cemeteries for the soldiers of Agincourt, Blenheim, Culloden, or Waterloo. The bodies of aristocrats and later, officers, if they could be identified, might be buried with some note of their name: or if very fortunate and their families could afford it, their bodies would be brought home to lie in their local church or family vault. The common soldier was shovelled into a hole, along with any possessions the battlefield looters had left, and was forgotten by anyone but his family.

The global scale and impact of the Great War and the numbers of soldiers killed brought about a revolution in how war dead were treated. Every dead soldier, whatever his social status or army rank, received the same burial and the same headstone in cemeteries that were designed to be places of great peace and beauty; and was buried with his comrades as they’d fought in life, shoulder to shoulder.

On the outbreak of war, Sir Fabian Ware offered his services to the Red Cross and assisted the French army with private cars and drivers. A teacher, educational reformer, and man of strong social conscience, he became concerned about locating and recording the graves of dead soldiers. In 1915 he set up the Graves Registration Commission to record and maintain the growing number of war graves and their location. By 1915 over 31,000 graves had been registered and Ware began negotiation with the French government to acquire land for military cemeteries.

The Imperial War Graves Commission was founded in 1917 to care for all members of the British and Imperial armed forces who died on active service and was essentially Ware’s creation. It decreed very early on that in memorials and graves there would be no distinctions of rank or status. The radical and guiding principle of the IWGC was equality in death: fearing that there would be a disparity of types and size of private memorials erected if there were no central body to lay down rules, all the dead were to be remembered, not just those with families wealthy enough to pay for their own memorials. Headstones would be engraved with name, rank, and regiment, as well as regimental insignia and date of death. Families might add a commission approved inscription, no more than four lines at three and a half old pence a letter, and unidentified soldiers were given a headstone with the inscription ‘An Unknown Soldier of the Great War, Known Unto God,’ devised by the noted writer Rudyard Kipling.  As Richard van Emden observed in The Quick and the Dead:

No-one was careless when it came to the words…as every vowel and syllable was paid for…poorer families resorted to RIP as the best they could afford…some families chose the parting words of the dead soldier, some the memory of a parting kiss….there are patriotic phrases and staggeringly personal tributes. Not all dedications appeal to modern sentiments and there are those that have greater literary merit than those that scan poorly, but that did not matter. Behind every inscription there was a story.

Sir Frederick Kenyon, chairman of the British Museum, was chosen to lay out the IWGC’s mission and principles. In the Kenyon Report of November 1918, he expressed the hope that the effect of the cemeteries would be to express “the common spirit of the nation, the common purpose of the Army, and the common sacrifice of the individual,” and laid out a vision for the cemeteries. ‘An enclosure with plots of grass and flowers, set with orderly rows of headstones, uniform in height and width.’ The closeness of the headstones was a deliberate design, to give the appearance of a battalion on parade. Graves should face east and there was to be a large ‘Altar Stone,’ a stone cross and a building for the safekeeping of the register of graves.

The cross of sacrifice represented the Christian faith of most of the dead, with a great bronze sword to represent war. In contrast the altar stones of Lutyens’ design were not meant to convey a specifically Christian message, but to recognise that many of the dead were of many faiths or none – a philosophy he continued to observe in his design for the Cenotaph – and it was carved in large letters with the words ‘The Glorious Dead,’ chosen by Kipling.

The IWGC demanded the finest materials for the cemeteries and recruited leading architects – Edwin Lutyens, Herbert Blomfield, Reginald Baker, and the famous garden designer Gertrude Jekyll. From the start it was intended that these should be more than cemeteries – they should be gardens of remembrance that honoured the sacrifices of the dead while being places of comfort, pilgrimage, and peace for the living; to convey something of the character of the England that the dead had fought for, an ideal country full of beautiful gardens and landscapes. To reinforce this message, the horticulture and layout of each cemetery was designed to be shaped by the landscape and to reflect the nationality of the majority of the burials enclosed within it. Lutyens wanted them to be planted with the best and most beautiful flowers and shrubs and was anxious that the cemeteries should not be gloomy or sad places.

By 1921 the IWGC had over 1,000 gardeners at work; many of IWGC’s early gardeners were ex-servicemen who chose to stay on and live and work in a devastated post-war landscape to ensure their comrades would not be forgotten.  In 1923 alone, over 4,000 headstones a week were being shipped to France, and not until 1938 were the temporary grave markers removed and memorials completed. A necklace of 1,000 separate war cemeteries mark where British and Imperial troops fought and died – France, Belgium, Palestine, Greece, Iraq (Mesopotamia), and Turkey where they are still maintained to this very day. King George V during a visit to Terlincthun war cemetery in 1921, paid tribute to these volunteers and his words still rings true to those involved to this day via the Commonwealth War Graves Commission:

Never before in history have a people thus dedicated and maintained individual memories to their fallen, and…I have many times asked myself whether there can be more potent advocates of peace upon earth through the years to come than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to the desolation of war.

The Silence – November 11th 1919

In November 1919, Britain was entering its second year of peace and there were no public announcements about any plans to mark the anniversary of the armistice on November 11^th. Many had hoped that the scars of the war were receding; that that first unsteady year was passing and the country could look forward to a new and peaceful life and return to a pre-war normality.

A former soldier, Donald Howard, wrote to the Times pointing out that as a day that marked the end of the greatest conflict in history, Armistice Day should be celebrated: and he suggested (ironically for a former soldier and for a day that marked the end of fighting) a gun salute; a flag display; or playing the National Anthem in public places.

An Australian journalist called Edward Honey suggested a less triumphalist and celebratory way to mark the day – one that concentrated on those bereaved, those who survived, and one that required no travel, no cost and was open to everyone, wherever they were and whatever they were doing. Honey suggested five minutes of silence, in his words ‘a very sacred intercession’ of collective memory  in which people could stop, remember, reflect, mourn, salute the sacrifice of the fallen or give thanks for survival. A silence was also suggested by Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, High Commissioner to South Africa, who wrote to Lord Milner about the silence that had been observed every day of the war in that country:

During the War, we in South Africa observed what we called the Three minutes’ pause. At noon each day, all work, all talk and all movement were suspended for three minutes that we might concentrate as one in thinking of those — the living and the dead — who had pledged and given themselves for all that we believe in.

The idea of a communal silence to bring people together in reflection was not new; it derived from the Quaker tradition of sitting in silence and opening one’s heart to hear God. The Prime Minister David Lloyd George took up the idea enthusiastically, but he needed royal approval, and King George V was not only dubious about its practicality nationwide but being himself obsessively punctual, fretted that five minutes was too long, and that people might not observe the allotted time. Lloyd George persisted, assuring the king that maroons would be fired at the start and the end of the designated time so the population would be alerted to the exact moment and duration.

An announcement was made from Buckingham Palace on Friday 7^th November:

Tuesday next, 11 November, is the first anniversary of the Armistice which stayed the worldwide carnage of the four preceding years and marked the victory of Right and Freedom. I believe that my people in every part of the Empire fervently wish to perpetuate the memory of the Great Deliverance and of those who have laid down their lives to achieve it. To afford an opportunity for the universal expression of this feeling it is my desire and hope that at the hour when the Armistice came into force, the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11^th month, there may be for the brief space of two minutes a complete suspension of all our normal activities. No elaborate organisation appears to be required. At a given signal, which can be easily arranged to suit the circumstances of the locality, I believe that we shall interrupt our business and pleasure, whatever it may be, and unite in this simple service of Silence and Remembrance.

Whether he realised it or not, George V had inaugurated the day that became Armistice Day and later Remembrance Sunday, and given the monarch the role of chief mourner for the nation; a role that has continued to the present day.  Juliet Nicholson in The Great Silence describes below the very first Armistice Day ceremony:

Just before eleven o’clock there was a tremendous burst of synchronised noise across the country…cities that even in the small hours of the night were never silent, were about to experience something unprecedented.

Silence when it is called for is seldom absolute. Apart from the people involved in the event the silence commemorates, life keeps moving. Absolute silence, especially in the city, remains elusive. Our annual two minute silence on Remembrance Sunday, when some of us may keep silent but the world goes on, is a mere shadow of the silence that reigned for two minutes at 11am on 11^th November in 1919 and the years after the Great War – a silence that was audible, that descended on the entire country and Empire as the hour struck and sirens, bells, trumpets and guns announced the beginning of the Silence. All traffic, all work, all human activity, whatever it was – stopped. Men bared their heads. Pedestrians stopped in the middle of the road. Telephone exchanges were unplugged, cars stood obediently at junctions. Factory workers switched off machinery and trials were halted; trains delayed their departure. Even gardeners turned off their hoses so that the sound of the water would not intrude as people stood silent in two minutes of national focussed attention. After 1919 the Silence became the centrepiece of annual Armistice Day events.

To break the Silence, or worse, not to observe it at all, was unthinkable and it was informally policed – any man neglecting to remove his hat as 11am struck might find a passer-by tapping him on the shoulder to remind him or physically removing it from his head. Police stopped traffic and remembrance ceremonies were held in schools, offices and factories: newspapers carried reports of people breaking the Silence and being shamed by their peers, but social conformity was too strong and the Silence was universally observed until the mid 1930s, when another war loomed and conflicts in China, Abyssinia and Spain proved to many that the lessons supposed to have been taught by the war to end all wars needed to be learned again.

After World War II the British government officially replaced Armistice Day with Remembrance Sunday in honour of the dead of two world wars, and in 1956 the date was fixed as the second Sunday in November. The two minute Silence instituted in 1919 remains a central part of national and local remembrance ceremony, and has become a unifying act of public and private remembrance; not just on 11 November but on all occasions of national solemnity and mourning.