Unknown Warrior – November 1920

An unknown fighting man, bearer of no great name, builder of no great fame…yet no illustrious general ever had a great homecoming, for a King followed humbly on foot behind his coffin…

Despite the ending of war and the Peace Parade it was clear that while the dead had their memorials in the Cenotaph and the war cemeteries, there were still many families whose menfolk were missing or unidentified and who needed something to reconcile them to their loss. The idea of an unknown soldier to represent all those men is thought to have originated with the Rev David Railton, who served as an army chaplain in France. In 1916 he saw a burial with a cross marked ‘An Unknown British Soldier,’ and had the idea that a national memorial in Britain to an unknown soldier could come to represent all those who had fought and died, especially those with no known grave, and bring comfort and courage to those who had no body to bury to bring home to them the finality of death. As Nicholson observed: “His invisible face could be invested with thousands of familiar faces, all much missed and much loved.”

In 1920 he wrote to the Dean of Westminster, who was enthusiastic about the notion and started campaigning for the unknown warrior to be buried in Westminster Abbey. The church establishment in England had been deeply unhappy about the secularism of the war cemeteries and the Cenotaph – what the Catholic Herald called ‘that pagan monument insulting to Christianity’ in the middle of Whitehall. Public demand for the Cenotaph to be made permanent were derided in the Church Times as a cult of ‘Cenotaphology’: by having the unknown warrior buried in the Abbey as a rival shrine to the Cenotaph was the church’s riposte to the secularism it deplored and enable it to have its own focus of mourning.

Railton’s idea was accepted by the government as long as he would be known as the ‘Unknown Warrior’ to include sailors and airmen. The Prime Minister Lloyd George was enthusiastic about the idea, but George V feared the proposal would open the mental and emotional wounds that were starting to heal, and that the idea was distastefully sentimental. As with the Cenotaph, he was talked around to the idea by Lloyd George.

Once the idea had governmental and royal approval a body had to be chosen, and under conditions of the greatest secrecy, so he could never be named. All that was known was that four (some reports say six, one eight) bodies were disinterred from the four battlefields on the Western Front where the slaughter had been greatest – Somme, Aisne, Ypres, and Arras. Identified as British by insignia and uniform buttons, the bodies were taken to St Pol en Ternoise, where one was chosen on November 8, 1920, by Brigadier LJ Wyatt, general officer in charge of troops in France and Flanders. Some accounts have him making the selection blindfolded, others not, but however the selection was made, the body chosen was from then on treated with all the solemn honour and mourning due to a warrior king fallen on a foreign battlefield. Placed in a pine coffin, he was transported to Boulogne, and placed in a coffin of English oak. The coffin carried a crusader sword from the Tower of London as a gift from George V, and an iron plate bearing the epitaph ‘A British Warrior who fell in the Great War 1914-1918 for King and Country’; and was draped in the much worn and mended Union flag used so often by Railton during the war as both altar cloth and funeral pall.

November 10 1920 – Accompanied by six barrels of Flanders earth (to be packed around the body at burial so that in the words of Brigadier General Wyatt ‘the body should rest in the soil in which so many of our troops gave up their lives’) and bidden farewell by Marshal Foch, the body was transported to Britain on HMS Verdun, with a destroyer escort flying lowered flags  and was greeted by a nineteen gun salute at Dover. The man who when alive would have travelled crammed into a carriage with wooden benches or with his pack for a seat now was carried in the same luggage van that had carried the bodies of nurse Edith Cavell and merchant seaman Captain Charles Fryatt. Draped with purple cloth and strewn with flowers, the van had a white painted roof, so the thousands watching along the line could identify where the coffin was. When the train arrived at Victoria Station on the evening of 10 November, police were almost overwhelmed by the numbers waiting to greet it. Sentries from the Grenadier Guards kept vigil by the casket overnight.

November 11 1920 – when the funeral cortege left Victoria en route to the Cenotaph and Westminster Abbey it was accompanied by the highest ranking officers in the army and navy. Four admirals, six senior generals were the pallbearers, as guns in Hyde Park boomed a salute to a field marshal. A silent crowd twenty deep watched as the casket was carried on a gun carriage drawn by horses of the Royal Horse Artillery, and resting on top a battered steel helmet, a webbing belt, and a bayonet. This was the real significance; the accoutrements on the casket drew attention to the fact that this was an ordinary man who anyone might identify with and claim as their own – father, son, brother, fiancé. As a reporter for a newspaper, the Daily Chronicle, Philip Gibbs describes the scene:

It was the steel helmet – the old tin hat – lying there on the crimson of the flag, which revealed him instantly…as one of those fellows, dressed in the drab of khaki, stained by mud and grease, who went into the dirty ditches with this steel hat on his head.

And nearly a hundred years later, Jeremy Paxman mused that “[t]he corpse being buried could have been anyone – sniper or cook, hero or malingerer. That was the point, of course. The grave contained a body which anyone who had lost a son or husband could regard as theirs.”

The cortege passed the newly unveiled Cenotaph followed by pallbearers, clergy, royalty, former servicemen and ministers of government to an Abbey crammed with mourners; among them a guard of honour of Victoria Cross winners, one thousand widows, and one hundred nurses wounded in service. In his wildest dreams he would not have imagine a homecoming like this.

After a brief but deeply emotional service – Queen Mary, usually so stoical and controlled, wept openly – service flag and accoutrements were removed, and the casket was lowered into the grave, which had been  positioned so that anyone approaching the altar, whoever they were or are, would not be able to avoid that memorial and would have to step aside – a move of deep importance in a society so hierarchical and intent on everyone knowing their place. The Times called it ‘the saddest, stateliest, most beautiful ceremony that London had ever seen.’

Once the ceremonies were over, the public homage began. The queue started at the Abbey and stretched to the Cenotaph and was four deep; over the week the grave remained open people stood for hours, day and night, in queues stretching for 7 miles, for the chance of a few seconds at the gravesite. People from all classes, and the majority women. An estimated 1,250,000 people paid their respects and left their tributes of flowers – everything from ornate wreaths to single flowers before the grave was finally sealed.

Further reading:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8922819/JONATHAN-MAYO-outlines-Unknown-Warriors-body-chosen.html

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/from-the-archive-blog/2020/nov/10/the-funeral-of-the-unknown-warrior-november-920

As Gavin Stamp says in ‘Further Reading’ in his book about the missing of the Somme, there is a depressingly huge literature on the Great War. The blogs posted are no more than the most cursory accounts of events, using the books below:

Richard Van Emden. The Quick and the Dead (London, 2012)

Simon Heffer. Staring at God: Britain in the Great War (London, 2019)

Juliet Nicolson. The Great Silence: 1918-1920 Living in the Shadow of the Great War (London, 2010)

John Lewis-Stempel. Where Poppies Blow: The British Soldier, Nature, the Great War (London, 2017)

Neil Oliver. Not Forgotten: The Great War and Our Modern Memory (London, 2006)

Jeremy Paxman. Great Britain’s Great War (London, 2015)

Andrew Richards. The Flag: The Rev’d David Railton and the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior (London, 2017)

Gavin Stamp. The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme (London, 2007)

Sarah Ridley. Remembering the Fallen of the First World War (London, 2015)

Illustrated London News –  The Illustrated First World War

English Heritage –  London’s Great War Memorials

Notes:                                                

For a detailed account of how the body was chosen, repatriated, and buried, along with a discussion of the different accounts about how any bodies were exhumed; the organisation behind the process and the day itself – The Flag pp 165-200.

The Great Silence pp 333-342 has a moving and detailed account of the selection, final journey from France and the events of 11 November 1920.

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.

History Repeating Itself

Over the past 23 months, parallels have been drawn between the response to the Covid crisis and Nazism, Stalinism, and assorted dictatorships regarding measures such as lockdowns, assorted restrictions, forced masking and vaccinations, as well as vaccination passes; not to mention as well the censorship of alternative voices and the crushing of dissent in places like Canada and Australia.

In our case however, the insanity of the last 23 months and the current geopolitical situation have led us to see parallelisms closer to home, how history has repeated itself from Britain’s response during the First World War.

SETTING AN EXAMPLE

As the First World War went on the government was eager to keep the wartime economy productive, and one of the measures that was undertaken was to regulate the consumption of alcohol. Due to claims that war production was being hampered by drunkenness, pubs were ordered to close at 11pm and weak beer was produced to discourage drunkenness and disorder that could harm production.

Going further, King George V on his own initiative wrote to the Prime Minister David Lloyd George offering give up alcohol for the duration of the war to set an example. He did so willingly and mealtimes at the royal residences already described as “austere” and “frugal” became even more so as wine and other alcoholic drinks disappeared from the menu.

Whilst the King was conscientious with setting an example, the politicians and the government did not. Alcohol continued to be served at the Houses of Parliament while the aristocracy, plutocrats and others carried on with having alcohol served with their meals and during dinner parties. Even the general public were not interested and years later the King admitted that he felt like a fool for his abstention, especially as Prime Minister Asquith, who was a heavy drinker, declined to follow the royal family’s example.

Over 100 years later, his granddaughter Queen Elizabeth II was forced to disinvite extended family, friends and representatives of various charities and organisations to the funeral of her husband Prince Philip Duke of Edinburgh in May 2021. She also wore a face mask even though she could claim exemption. This was due to Covid regulations that the government had imposed on the country and unsurprisingly the Queen and the royal family felt duty bound to follow the regulations no matter how illogical and insane they appeared to be. According to satirical magazine Private Eye, the government offered to waive the rules for the Prince’s funeral, but the Queen declined, on the grounds she wanted to set an example rather than be an exception to the rules.

A few months’ later it was revealed that several parties were held at Number 10 Downing Street contravening Covid rules and regulations all while the country was locked down, schools were closed, and people couldn’t visit loved ones in hospital and care homes. The predictable furore over “Partygate” resulted into accusations of hypocrisy and laid bare the lies and propaganda peddled by the government, its advisors, and the media. It’s interesting to speculate what the Queen thought of the government and civil servants breaking the very rules they imposed on everyone else when she thought that she was doing her duty and setting an example. Pictures of her sitting alone at her husband’s funeral were widely posted on social media as an example of the government’s heartlessness and hypocrisy and comparing it very unfavourably with the Queen’s adherence to the rules that the entire country had to follow.

ANTI (INSERT COUNTRY HERE) HYSTERIA

When the First World War broke out in 1914, Britain found itself allied with France and Russia fighting Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. The arms race between Britain and Germany that began during the 1890s finally culminated into a full-scale war.

Anti-German feeling had already been bubbling under the surface before the war due to the plethora of scare stories and spy novels, but this feeling became a wave of hysteria as soon as war broke out and over the next four years of the conflict.

Germans living and working in Britain were subjected to hostility and vilification while German owned shops were attacked and vandalised. The hysteria also reached ludicrous heights when dachshunds were kicked in the street, German Shepherd dogs were renamed Alsatians, and orchestras refused to play music by Beethoven and other Germanic composers. Even prominent people with German connections fell foul of this anti-German hysteria: Prince Louis of Battenberg who was married to King George V’s cousin Princess Victoria of Hesse was forced to resign as First Sea Lord despite having lived in Britain and been a British citizen since he was 14 years old. The author D.H. Lawrence had to go into hiding with his wife, Baroness Frieda von Richthofen especially after they were accused of espionage.

The British Royal Family also became caught up in the anti-German hysteria. Thanks to Queen Victoria’s marriage to Prince Albert, the royal family were virtually German in blood and their dynastic name was Saxe-Coburg-Gotha which came from Prince Albert. King George V and Queen Mary however never saw themselves as German, the former being a career Royal Navy officer was more at home in Britain and its people than abroad and his continental relations while the latter born and raised in London once wrote to her former governess Mme. Bricka following a visit to Germany, “thank God I am English.” Finally in 1917, by Letters Patent, the King changed the family name to Windsor and ordered his German relations such as the Battenbergs, Tecks and Gleichens who were British citizens to adopt British surnames and titles.

With the current geopolitical situation and with the rush to support Ukraine, we are seeing a similar hysteria and moral posturing. The supermarket Sainsbury’s has rushed to rebrand “Chicken Kiev” as “Chicken Kyiv” whilst the world of sports and culture rushes to cancel Russian athletes, opera singers, conductors among others. An orchestra in Cardiff dropped a Tchaikovsky concert from its roster of programmes which can be seen as an echo of orchestras refusing to play Beethoven. Even certain institutions of higher learning are rumoured to be dropping Russian authors such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky from their syllabus and in a move reminiscent of dachshunds being kicked in the street, the organiser of a cat show has barred cat breeds that have Russian origins from entering this year’s competition.

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Successive governments have always used the royals for propaganda purposes, and I would not be surprised if Herbert Asquith, David Lloyd George, and Boris Johnson counted on George V and Elizabeth II’s strong sense of duty in order to chivvy the British public along with accepting the deprivations imposed by governments in response to crises be it war or a pandemic. That said as my examples have shown, these gestures never worked as planned as George V was later to realise with his laudable effort to give up alcohol to set an example. Or they end up serving as a mirror to the government’s hypocrisy such as the parties and gatherings flying in the face of restrictions that carried punitive fines vis a vis images of a 95 year old lady at her husband’s funeral, clearly in discomfort at having to restrict her breathing and being deprived the company of loved ones next to her.

As for the current anti-Russian hysterics, they clearly have parallels with the anti-German hysteria over a hundred years ago. People back in 1914 did not choose where they were born and had no say over what their leaders said and did. It’s no different now. To demonise a people and their culture for the actions of their leader is dangerous and counterproductive.

The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana once wrote: “those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.” How sad it is that his words still ring true over a hundred years later and especially during the last 23 months.

Remembrance Sunday

“When you go home tell them of us and say

For your tomorrow we gave our today”

Tomb of the Unknown Warrior. Photo taken by blogger during a visit to Westminster Abbey on 1 November 2021

Film Review – 1917: When Less is More

I haven’t gone to the cinema much for years now and it’s not just the high prices that put me off but also very few films really appeal to me. I would rather watch a documentary or a play or sit through a classical music concert rather than a film for the sake of it.

So when I read that the director Sam Mendes was going to make a film inspired by his grandfather who served during the First World War, I was rather curious and after seeing the trailer pop up on my Facebook news feed, I decided to go and see it as it looked promising.

The plot of the film revolves around two lance corporals Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay) who are sent on a mission to inform fellow soldiers who are about to launch an assault against the Germans that they are walking into a fatal trap. For almost two hours the viewer, through the seemingly one long continuous shot employed by Mendes and his team follows Blake and Schofield as they make their way through enemy lines in order to deliver that crucial message.

Although one of the premises behind Blake and Schofield’s mission was a bit contrived, the film succeeds in portraying the conditions in the trenches – the acres of barbed wire, piles of decaying corpses both the human and animal kind and life in the trenches. There is also the contrast between how the British and the Germans built their trenches and the camera angles do emphasise that.

I came across one review that described 1917 as like watching or playing a computer game and some of the scenes do remind me of my childhood playing Super Mario Brothers where the two intrepid characters dodge bullets, enemy soldiers, and mud as well as trip wires. Given the urgency of the mission, the script sticks strictly to the main plot and avoids going into introspections and backstories (which are instead woven into the conversation between the two men). Better yet is the absence of subplots that would have detracted from the narrative.

Too often several movies and TV programmes fail because they are poorly written, suffer from the lack of narrative coherence as well as attempt to ram down an agenda down its viewers’ throats. I see 1917 as a breath of fresh air – not only is it good old fashioned story telling but is also proof that sometimes, less is indeed more.

If you haven’t seen the film yet, I highly recommend it. Below is the trailer that gives you an idea of what it is about:

My thoughts on War Horse

Originally a novel by the writer Michael Morpugo, War Horse is a story set during the First World War and told through the eyes of a horse Joey. First published in 1982, it gained a wider audience thanks to a stage version which premiered at the National Theatre in 2007 and a film version directed by Steven Spielberg which was released in 2011.

All three versions follow a basic premise – the bond between Albert and Joey, how they are separated because of the war and an emotional reunion following the Armistice. Having finally watched both the film and stage versions, I can say that I enjoyed both and the narrative worked both on stage and on film.

War Horse of course has taken a much greater significance owing to the recent observation of the centenary of the First World War. Both the play and the film highlighted the roles played by animals during the war.  Not just horses but also pigeons, dogs, camels and even goats who served in a variety of roles: from being used for operations or to simply boost morale and adopted as pets. What we see in both versions are the important roles played by horses at the front. Despite the presence of motorised transport, horses were still seen as an important part of the war machine especially with transporting men, supplies and equipment.

Both film and stage versions also present a snapshot of what rural life was like before the First World War. As idyllic as the countryside might look, there’s poverty and hardship as exemplified by Albert’s father using the rent money to purchase Joey – much to the exasperation of the mother. Money issues again surface during the outbreak of war, when Joey is sold to the army as a cavalry horse. Another point that is raised by both the film and the play is how warfare changed irrevocably with the arrival of bigger and more efficient weapons that rendered horses and cavalry redundant, in a scene where Captain Nicholls leads a cavalry charge against the German infantry is a textbook case of the phrase “suicide troops.”

However, as much as I enjoyed the film version, for me I was more touched by the stage version. The horses were puppets but were executed so skilfully that towards the end, I stopped seeing the horses as puppets and began to think that I was seeing real horses instead. And while the narrative begins and ends with Albert and Joey, the middle part shows the war from the opposite side’s point of view through the eyes of Friedrich, a German officer who forms a bond with Joey and Topthorn. As the war progresses, we learn that he misses his wife and daughter, while he begins to question what they are fighting for and why. He also befriends a young French girl Emilie and her mother despite the language barrier but in the end Friedrich, Emilie and her mother all become casualties of war.

There are also flashes of humour in the stage version that I didn’t really see in the film – the interaction between Albert and another soldier was a case in point; while the latter reminisce about his girlfriend back home, Albert dreams about Joey and this leads to a classic banter between both men about the most important being in their lives.

Although it is a work of fiction, War Horse has shown the deep bond between man and beast as well as how everyone suffers during war – not just humans but also animals.

 

Film Review: They Shall Not Grow Old

Several of our enduring images of the First World War come courtesy of film footage: which is not surprising as the Great War was the first conflict that was captured in moving images. The Battle of the Somme, which was released in 1916, is considered to be the first war movie and had a massive impact on the British public when it was shown in cinemas, and for the first time brought the horrors of war home.

More than a hundred years now, we see the films – silent, jerky and in black and white – then wonder what it would be like if it was coloured or to learn what were the soldiers saying. Thanks to the wonders of today’s technology, the award winning director Peter Jackson has just done exactly that, and had produced a very moving film based on material held in the archives of the Imperial War Museum.

Produced in cooperation with 14-18 NOW and BBC Films, They Shall Not Grow Old contains much never seen before footage taken during the First World War. Instead of various historians, commentators and academics as talking heads, we get war veterans guiding us through the film which makes it powerful and compelling as we are watching it through their eyes. The commentary ranges from optimism when war was declared, with many men viewing enlistment and being sent to the front as a relief from unemployment or their boring jobs back home. As these eager soldiers are finally sent to France, the amazement and wonder is palpable in their voices given that the vast majority of those who served in the war had never left their hometown or village, let alone visit London or travelled abroad.

The film starts out in black and white but as the men are marching towards the trenches, the black and white fades away and the images are in full colour; which makes these men and what they are experiencing somehow real to us, as if we are in the trenches with them as well as encountering the devastation before our very eyes. Thanks to professional lip readers, we see a soldier shout “Hi Mum!” while waving at the camera while in another scene, we hear an officer shout “fix bayonets!” as his troops are getting ready to go over the top. There’s also the boom of the huge guns and hearing them gives one an idea of what it was like in the front during the heat of the battle.

One interesting fact I learned from this film is how many of the soldiers who died at the front did so not because of being killed in battle or due to their wounds but because of mud. Bad weather made the trenches unbearable. Apart from the dangers of frostbite and trench feet, water and flooding resulted into mud which was made worse by the rain. The mud became so thick that many soldiers who became stuck perished.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom though. The trench also became a sort of community with one soldier musing that if there was no fighting, the trenches were a fun place to be – there was kindness; sharing; bonding over jokes, music, stories and sports. Down time was also an opportunity to get to know their enemy and for the vast majority of the troops, this was their first encounter with a German and the overall feeling was one of sympathy as well as learning about the nuances of German regional identity.

As the war went on, it’s clear to the soldiers that not only has their initial romantic notion of war gone but also the death and destruction on an unprecedented scale demonstrated in the words of one soldier, that the “veneer of civilisation has dropped away.” By the time 1918 rolled along it was obvious that the troops were exhausted; so much so that when the Armistice was signed on the 11th of November, there wasn’t as much rejoicing as relief that it was over.

Disappointment and disillusionment was palpable when the troops went home and were demobilised. Despite the promise of a “land fit for heroes,” many veterans struggled to find employment and readjust to civilian life; they certainly struggled to relate to people back home no matter how well meaning. As one veteran puts it, he and his fellow soldiers were “a race apart” what they saw and experienced were something that a great many people did not and could never understand.

The First World War to us is now a distant memory but with They Shall Not Grow Old, briefly makes history come alive in an informative, meaningful and deeply moving way.

 

Note: Screen caps from They Shall Not Grow Old taken by blogger.