LITERARY REVIEW

THERE are some things that to all intents and purposes are impossible to reconcile. Nothing illustrates that more perfectly than the tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey where war and closure are signified for all to see.

Alongside the graves of several monarchs lies the remains of an unidentified serviceman killed in the First World War.

More than one million British Empire soldiers were killed during the conflict and over half a million of them have no known grave.

The casket of the unknown warrior, lowered in place in the autumn of 1920, held a “somebody who was nobody to represent all the missing”, writes the historian and former RAF officer John Nichol.

Tracing the events of history, Nichol attempts to describe the reality of life in the trenches.

“The place stank of death,” wrote Anthony French, a young soldier in the Civil Service Rifles. Trenches were cleaved through corpses. “From the one side of one there hung a hand and a forearm.” Vivid and graphic literature that explains incisively as things were.

An account of French’s friendship with his comrade Bert Bradley brings home the unbearably touching narrative.

Bradley – a generous, witty, pipe-smoking man with a fine tenor voice – was killed during an offensive. “I saw Bert pause queerly in his stride and fall stiffly on his side and slither helplessly into a hole,” recalled French. Bert’s body was never recovered.

At the heart of this story is the extraordinary figure of a Church of England clergyman from Kent, Reverend David Railton.

At the beginning of the war, Mr Railton left his parish in Folkestone to become a military padre, serving on the Western Front, where he won a Military Cross for saving three men under fire. While attempting to give solace to men about to die, he conceived the idea for the Unknown Warrior.

Former airman Nichol chronicles the warrior’s repatriation like a bank heist in reverse: a crew of crack experts – ministers, clergy, undertakers, army and naval officers – worked together to put the valuables into a vault. Secrecy about the chosen body was paramount in order that, as the Dean of Westminster noted, any mourner “be encouraged to imagine that it is her own sacred dead upon whom this great honour has been bestowed”.

Yet the body also had to be “sufficiently identifiable to ensure that the King and the British people were not interring a blown-up French civilian or, perish the thought, a German, by mistake”. Four unidentified bodies were exhumed from the key battle areas of Aisne, Somme, Arras, and Ypres. One was chosen at random and brought back with barrels of French soil to cover his coffin. Nichol also talks to wives who lost husbands more recently in the Falkland Islands and Afghanistan, and draws on his own experience as a RAF navigator during the Gulf War. He very nearly joined the sombre roll-call himself when his Tornado fighter jet was shot down and he was captured, tortured, and paraded on television around the world by Iraqi forces.

Nichol’s writing style is as engaging as it is erudite. He is forensic in his research but never dispassionate, keeping his interest firmly fixed on the human story.

At the state funeral on November 11, 1920, the second anniversary of the end of the war, the tone was one of unity in grief and sorrow, rather than military pomp. Westminster Abbey filled up with mourners, including relatives of the lost – mothers, fathers, wives, and children. Not everyone could be included: 20,000 applications were received for just 1,600 spaces.

One 12-year-old wrote to the authorities pleading to be let in, declaring: “The man in the coffin might be my daddy.”

In the Abbey, one group stood out in the ranks of the bereaved, notes Nichol: “A pitiful band of 99 mothers distinguished by an almost unfathomable depth of loss. They had been selected for seats of honour because each one had lost her husband and all her sons.”

– The Unknown Warrior by John Nichol is published by Simon & Schuster, 400pp