GREAT WAR CENTENARY

Euphemism-free: in John Singer Sargent’s ‘Gassed’, blinded soldiers hold on to the man in front to find their way.

AN exhibition earlier this year at the Imperial War Museum (North) – best described as Lest We Forget – was a memorable and deeply sad tribute to the fallen of the Great War. At the end of the display, visitors were asked whether we’re in danger of forgetting the First World War.

There isn’t much chance of that. Not in this centenary year of the Armistice, following four years of remembrance of the anniversaries of Ypres, Gallipoli and all those blood-soaked, out-of-the-way names we’d never know but for the history of war.

This particular exhibition shows how quickly and how very effectively our ways of remembering the war today were set in stone after 1918. Literally, in the case of the Imperial War Graves Commission. By 1919, they had already come up with prototypes of the curved headstones, which they presented to Parliament that year and which were on display, in pristine condition. The headstone epitaphs, too – ‘A Soldier of the Great War’; ‘Known Unto God’ – were also worked out in 1919, thanks to Rudyard Kipling, who lost his son in the war, and his advice on memorial wording in The Graves of the Fallen (1919).

The commission’s diktats were direct and unremitting. Soldiers’ bodies were not to be repatriated but were to be buried where they died; officers were to be buried alongside their men. It was an early burst of progressive, democratic emotion and feeling.

At the time, these orders caused understandable heartache and pain among the bereaved, who had no consolation of a nearby grave to visit, or a tombstone design to even choose. Lady Florence Cecil, who lost three sons, instigated a petition to the Prince of Wales by seeking the use of crosses instead of headstones. Her attempts failed.

Families were permitted only three lines of their own composition on tombstones; and, even then, the commission had copy approval, to prevent ‘the sentimental versifier, or the crank’ – as Sir Fabian Ware, the commission’s founder, put it. However cold all this may sound, the result today is a funerary triumph. Those serried ranks of identically shaped tombstones across the fields of northern France give a sharper picture of the breathtaking scale of the losses than an asymmetrical free-for-all – Highgate Cemetery writ large – would have done.

This enforced burial of soldiers abroad led to an explosion of memorials over here: from the Cenotaph, caught on film at this exhibition, with George V laying the first wreath in 1919; to the heartbreaking visiting cards, and even fire screens, engraved with the names of the dead. In the 1920s, the flood of relatives aching to see the war graves began. The green cemetery signposts and printed guides to the battlefields have a hauntingly jaunty look to them.

Most moving of all was the idea (first proposed by army chaplain the Rev David Railton) of the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, one of the few bodies brought back from the Front, in 1920.

For the Warrior to be claimed by all the bereaved as something of their own, he had to belong to no one. As Henry Williams, a British officer charged with selecting the body, said, ‘We examined them very, very carefully to make certain there was no possible identification, even by teeth.’ Brutal, but more affecting for it.

We’re hungry to remember the dead of the Great War today, even though we never met them. The popularity of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse, for example, is testament to this. The much more intense desperation of loved ones to remember lost soldiers they knew so well was also palpable during this display. They longed for photographs of their sons’ tombs or first-hand reports of how they perished.

By the end of the war, there were a staggering 559,000 unidentified bodies on the Front: that makes for millions of relatives who didn’t know the true fate of their loved ones. Some went years, wrongly believing their sons, husbands and fathers were still alive. Many fewer were in the happier, but still agonising position: like the family of Lt HD Bird, pictured in the exhibition, wrongly reported as killed in 1918, but in fact taken prisoner and repatriated in 1919.

Euphemisms – or gentle lies – were necessary in the telegrams to mothers from officers who did know the truth. After the Third Battle of Ypres, Jessie Nicholson was told by the CO that her husband ‘suffered no pain as he was killed instantaneously by a fragment of shell’. This was a well-worn line, unverifiable in the fog of war.

The Great War poets – original manuscripts by Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen were on show – held concordance with the art on display – admirable, harrowingly euphemism-free. John Singer Sargent’s Gassed. The line of blinded boys walking, hand on the soldier in front, past piles of bodies, so shocked the first viewers in 1919 that many felt physically ill.

Paul Nash’s The Menin Road reveals an utterly smashed, dead moonscape on the Front. CRW Nevinson’s The Harvest of Battle is unrelenting in its depiction of open-mouthed bodies, outstretched arms stiff with rigor mortis.

The impressive thing is that these paintings – the polar opposite of triumphalist art – were government-approved, commissioned in 1918 by the British War Memorials Committee.

The most famous of the war’s memory symbols was the poppy. Before it became an official totem, with the first Poppy Appeal of 1921, the poppy was the soldier’s rare, informal blast of beauty on the Front. The show had four cards sent back to sweethearts, enclosing a fragile poppy. One, describing war as ‘Hell on earth’, sent the flower with the words, ‘This I plucked while I was convalescent, a souvenir from France.’

The show was well-balanced. It was neither jingoistic, nor was it a lions-led-by-donkeys agitprop. But it makes a difference in that Britain won. The British won’t forget. How could we?