Category Archives: First World War

Arts, Books, Britain, First World War, History

Book Review: The Unknown Warrior

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

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Arts, Books, First World War, History

Book Review – The Searches: The Quest for The Lost of The First World War

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: Half a million families were left with the agony of not knowing where their loved ones lay under the battlefields of World War I – among them Rudyard Kipling, who lost his son John – but their devotion unearthed amazing tales

HIS MOTHER’S recollection was vividly clear. The young lieutenant stood tall and straight in the doorway, immaculately smart in his Irish Guards uniform. He was just 17 – two days away from his 18th birthday – but duty was calling, and so proudly he was off to the Western Front in France, in September 1915.

As John Kipling left the family home in Sussex, he called out: “Send my love to Daddo.”

“Daddo” – Rudyard Kipling, one of Britain’s foremost men of letters, poet, novelist, holder of the Nobel Prize for Literature – did not see his only son off because he was already in northern France, a journalist and foreign correspondent sending back despatches.

Six weeks later, John was dead. He had just written a letter home, telling his parents the assault he was about to take part in would end the war. (It didn’t.)

He had signed off: “Well so long, old dears, love John.” That was the last they ever heard from him.

On the third day of the Battle of Loos, he was leading his platoon over open ground when machine guns opened- up from the German line. No one knew for sure how he died. His body could not be found. Officially he was not dead but “missing”.

For “Rud” and Carrie Kipling, it was a special sort of torture – hoping against hope John was still alive, a prisoner perhaps, or lying in some remote hospital. Their pain never really ended. There was no grave they could visit, no focal point for their grief, no closure.

The trauma left Rud a broken man, dried up and drained, his vigour completely gone; he wrote no more novels but devoted his immense skills and talents to the mission of the War Graves Commission, to find and honour the missing.

It was he who chose the biblical words that became the national language of remembrance: “Their name liveth for evermore.” And for the headstones of graves whose occupants were unidentified, the simple “Known unto God”.

The story of the Kiplings is at the heart of Robert Sackville-West’s deeply moving and emotive book on the quest for those soldiers who went missing and were never found.

There were some 500,000 heart-broken families in the same position as Rud and Carrie, bereaved but cast adrift.

Of those half-million who died in this way – nearly half of all British Empire war dead – about 180,000 were buried as unknown British soldiers. A greater number, however, like John Kipling, had simply disappeared, blown to pieces, or drowned in the mud of no man’s land.

Desperate for any information, men of influence such as Rudyard Kipling were able to use their high-level contacts in the military to try to find out what had happened to a lost loved one. He even had leaflets printed in German asking for the whereabouts of his son, which were dropped by the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) behind enemy lines.

Others, such as the distraught but determined Lady Violet Cecil, whose 18-year-old son George was last seen lying in a ditch during the retreat from Mons in 1914, travelled to the battlefield while the war was still raging to search for her boy.

DESPERATION

GEORGE’S remains were eventually uncovered in a mass grave of 94 British soldiers, their faces and features brutally beaten and disfigured beyond recognition. George was identified by his initials on his vest and by the exceptional size of his feet. Three buttons from his tunic were sent home to his mother.

For most mothers there was no such consolation. Whenever trainloads of wounded men arrived home, there would be lines of women holding up photographs and pleading: Have you seen my son, husband, brother?

Documenting all these grim and sad stories with compassion, Sackville-West writes of relatives “tormented by knowing so little about their loved one’s last moments. How had they been killed? Had they suffered?”

He rightly lauds the Graves Registration Commission and its successor, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, for acknowledging this desperate desire to know, for their recognition that each of the dead was an individual and that relatives needed the reassurance that the graves were tended and properly cared for.

Photographs of headstones were taken and sent to those who could not get there in person – “consolations of death at a distance,” as the author movingly puts it.

Thousands, however, did make it to the now quiet battlefields, paying their respects at a graveside. “I came all the way from home for this,” one little old lady in a black bonnet said at her son’s grave. “Now I can die in peace.” There were tears in her eyes as she spoke, and likely in others too as they read her story.

The persistence of relatives was astonishing.

Lieutenant Eric Hayter died, shot through the head, in March 1918, and his father was told there was no sign of his body. A year later, Hayter senior received a letter from a German soldier who enclosed a map showing where Eric had been buried by the Germans. A search followed, which was unsuccessful. But Hayter continued to visit the battlefield in France, digging up land owned by a local farmer where he believed Eric had fallen.

He then tried to buy the land to erect a memorial, but the farmer said no. So, in 1924 – more than six years after his son’s death – he purchased a nearby plot for a nominal sum from a sympathetic local countess and was digging the foundations there when, amazingly, 3 feet down, he came across a body.

Regimental buttons, badges of rank and five gold teeth confirmed who it was. Father and son were reunited.

The Kiplings had no such reunion. John’s body was eventually found, though not for another 70 years, long after his father’s death in 1936.

A diligent researcher at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission spotted an entry in the register of an unknown soldier dug up in no man’s land near Loos. The body had been reburied as “an unknown lieutenant of the Irish Guards”. The coincidence was too great.

John Kipling’s name could now be taken off the Menin Gate memorial to the missing. He had been found.

If Rudyard had been alive, he might have pointed to the final words of perhaps his most famous poem, If:

“Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!”

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Arts, Books, First World War, History

Book Review: ‘As We Were’

REVIEW

Devastating Accounts Of The Great War – Image: Imperial War Museum

Intro: In some of the most raw, shattering accounts of the Great War, soldiers, medics, and those left to grieve tell visceral stories in heartbreaking letters, diaries and memoirs

ONE

PRIVATE PEARSON of the Leeds Pals, a World War I battalion, recruited from the Yorkshire city, wrote: “We were two years in the making and ten minutes in the destroying.” He was referring to the horrors of July 1, 1916, the first day on the Somme.

“For some reason nothing seemed to happen to us at first,” recalled Private Slater who was from another “Pals” battalion, the 2nd Bradford. “We strolled along as though walking in a park.

“Then, suddenly, we were in the midst of a storm of machine-gun bullets, and I saw men beginning to twirl round and fall in all kinds of curious ways as they were hit.”

By the time both men went over the top and into a hail of German gunfire, the war had already lasted nearly two years.

Famously, men in Britain had thought it would all be over by December. The German Kaiser had been even more optimistic. “You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees,” he had told his troops. In reality, the war was to last until November 1918 – the most devastating conflict the world had yet seen.

Exactly 100 years after the Great War began, the historian David Hargreaves, with his researcher Margaret-Louise O’Keeffe, launched a series of weekly articles in an online magazine. Each one recounted the events of that week a century before, from all differing points of view.

They ran for four years until November 2018, marking the Centenary anniversary of the Armistice. Now they have been gathered together in this extraordinary work.

In four volumes covering more than 2,000 pages, Hargreaves chronicles the war in remarkable fine detail.

TWO

MUCH is told through the first-hand testimony – soldiers of all ranks and nationalities, nurses, politicians and civilians on the Home Front – from private letters, diaries and memoirs.

His testimonial witnesses responded to what they experienced in myriad different ways. Some were simply horrified. “I have been living through days that defy imagination,” a German soldier wrote home. “I should never have thought that men could stand it.”

By contrast the upper-class British officer Julian Grenfell admitted to rather relishing the war. “It is all the best fun,” he wrote. “I have never felt so well, or so happy, or enjoyed anything so much.”

There is no doubting the unbelievable suffering the war inflicted on individuals. Some of the accounts Hargreaves includes are almost too distressing to read. “Everywhere there were distended bodies that your feet sank into,” noted a French soldier at the Battle of Verdun, a ghastly horror show that lasted for much of 1916. “The stench of death hung over the jumble of decaying corpses like some hellish perfume.”

A German officer was nauseated by “the most gruesome devastation” around him. “Dead and wounded soldiers, dead and dying animals, horse cadavers, burnt-out houses, dug-up fields, cars, clothes… a real mess. I didn’t think the war would be like this.”

Some of the most hideous sights were inflicted on those tending the wounded. Mairi Chisholm, working as a nurse near Ypres, witnessed “men with their jaws blown off, arms and legs mutilated” and “horrified at the suffering”, wondered how she could bear to continue her work. Somehow medics had to accustom themselves to the horror. “One eats, one drinks beside the dead,” a French surgeon noted. “One sleeps in the midst of the dying, one laughs and one sings in the company of corpses.”

Meanwhile, means were found to increase the number of those corpses. Aircraft were used for the first time to terrify the enemy. “The air fills with a strange whistling,” a German infantryman wrote in September 1914, “followed by a violent explosion.” It was a French plane dropping bombs and no one knew how to deal with “this monster of the skies”.

Later bombing raids brought death to Britain, Zeppelins were seen over London. “Great booming sounds shake the city,” one man reported. Journalist Michael MacDonagh saw an airship shot down, “a gigantic pyramid of flames, red and orange, like a ruined star falling slowly to earth.”

In the trenches of the Western Front, gas became a new terror. Private Quinton witnessed its effects. “The men came tumbling out from the front line,” he wrote. “I’ve never seen men so terror-stricken; they were tearing at their throats and their eyes were glaring out.” Nurse Edith Appleton tended to some of the victims. “The poor things are blue and gasping, lungs full of fluid, and not able to cough it up.”

THREE

A COUPLE of years later, the tank made its debut. “It was marvellous,” according to one British soldier. “That tank went on rolling and bobbing and swaying in and out of shell-holes, climbing over trees as easy as kiss-your-hand! We were awed!”

Amid all the misery of war, Hargreaves highlights the occasional lighter moment. There was the “champion clog dancer of the world” who requested exemption from conscription so he could concentrate on his dancing. And the man who claimed such terrible “sexual starvation” that he just had to be given leave to visit the brothels of Paris.

Yet the suffering continued, month after month. “When will this grim butchery of unfledged boys, German and English, end?” an army chaplain asked despairingly in August 1918.

By that time, the end was in sight: German armies were in retreat, Germany was in chaos. On November 9, the Kaiser abdicated. Two days later the Armistice was signed. For some, the moment was almost anti-climactic.

“I had been out since 1914,” one British veteran wrote. “I should have been happy. I was sad. I thought of the slaughter, the hardships, the waste and the friends I had lost.” As Hargreaves wryly notes, civilians tended to celebrate more noisily than those in uniform.

With the fighting concluded, it was time to take stock. “It seems to me,” Vera Brittain wrote to her mother in 1916, “that the war will make a big division of ‘before’ and ‘after’ in the history of the world, almost if not quite as big as the BC and AD division.” It’s hard to argue she was exaggerating.

World War I still looms large in our imaginations today. These astonishing volumes place its reality before us with exceptional clarity. Few will choose to read them from cover to cover but, with careful examination week by week, they give new and moving insights into what was meant to be “the war to end all wars”.

‘As We Were’ by David Hargreaves and Margaret-Louise O’Keeffe is published by Whitefox, 2,288pp

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