Moi and I have made several tours to WW1 and WW2 sites in northern France and Belgium. We never had to travel far before a war grave cemetery appeared at the side of the road, sometimes with just a few gravestones but many with thousands, all representing a son, a father or a brother. Each country uses a slightly different design and material. The British ones are of an upright arched top rectangular design, usually but not exclusively made from white Portland Stone.
The photo below was taken during one of our visits to Tyne Cot in Belgium, not far from Ypres, the largest Commonwealth war grave site in the world. There are 11,961 servicemen buried there, of whom 8,373 are unidentified, and a memorial bears the names of almost 35,000 men whose graves are not known.
Staggering numbers of soldiers with no known graves
There are several of these war grave and memorial sites in northern Europe and the numbers of soldiers with no known graves are staggering. At Thiepval, the memorial includes the names of 72,000 soldiers, at Menim Gate 54,000, and 11,000 at Vimy Ridge, to name but a further three. The number of known graves changes each year as more bodies are found, often as they stood in their trenches or deep dugouts just before they were entombed by a huge artillery shell or underground mine.
Many of the graves from the smaller grave sites have been re-interred to the larger sites nearby, so that new roads or housing estates can be built, or so the French farmers can plough in a straight line again. The reason that there were so many soldiers without a known grave was because WW1 was a static war, and if either side made an attack resulting in horrific casualties, there was often no way of recovering the dead for some time – often for months, if at all. If a body was left where it lay or buried nearby, a subsequent artillery bombardment would obliterate any evidence that a body had been there. It is estimated that over 165,000 Commonwealth soldiers are still unaccounted for on the Western Front.
Bitter enemies – who agreed on fencing
A good example of the irony of war can be found at the Hooge Crater Cemetery and museum near Ypres. Leading to the reconstructed trenches there are information boards, on one of which it describes the screw design picket posts which were used to hold up the barbed wire fencing. Both the allies and German lines used a very similar design, the only difference being that the German picket post had a longer point at the top. And both sides employed the same company, Crown Iron Works Co, Minneapolis, USA, to manufacture their particular posts, over ten million of which were made.
Repatriation: an exception made for the hero of Trafalgar
Britain had always been reluctant to repatriate our military dead.Over the centuries this was an impractical undertaking anyway, for we have waged war on many countries in the world and bringing our dead heroes home was never going to happen, a fact in the main understood by the families left behind. The most famous exception to this was of course Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson.
Nelson was mortally wounded during the final stages of the battle of Trafalgaron 21 October 1805.During the time he was on the main deck, still conscious and giving orders, he witnessed his secretary and friend Rev. Alexander John Scott cut in half by a cannon ball and his body then thrown overboard, which was common practice in the height of battle. Nelson then gave orders that his own body was not to be thrown overboard.
This put Captain Hardy and in particular William Beatty, the ship’s surgeon, in a huge dilemma, as in 1805 there was little knowledge available anywhere on how to preserve a body for any significant length of time. William Beatty therefore had to guess the best practical way of preserving Nelson’s body and his best guess was to place the body in a barrel of brandy. Some accounts mention rum or spirit of wine –ya pays your money and ya takes your choice which of these is true, but my choice is brandy.
There are also stories that the crew drank some of the brandy or rum or some other spirit from the barrel and over the following generations of sailors, their rum ration became known as Nelson’s blood, which in turn has added to the confusion.
Following the battle, the fleet had to put into Gibraltar for repairs and to shelter from the approaching storms. As a result, it took more than eight weeks to get Nelson’s body back to England aboard his flagship HMS Victory.
A fascinating account of the battle
The account of the battle and of Nelson’s death was written by his second in command Admiral Collingwood aboard his own flagship HMS Royal Sovereign. Following the battle, his report was sent to England on the fastest ship available, which was the schooner HMS Pickle, though even then it took eight days for the news of the victory and of Nelson’s death to reach the admiralty. Collingwood’s report was published in the London Gazette (a forerunner to The Times) on 6 November.
I own a copy of this report and fascinating reading it is. Not only is it factual, but he also writes about the horrors of battle. He describes the demise of one poor chap on his own ship in this way: “A man was completely cut in two by a double headed shot that the whole of his body with the exception of his legs up to his knees was thrown some yards into the water but strange to tell his legs were left standing on the deck with all the firmness and animation of life”.
Repatriation or burial in situ: a debate now resolved
In March 1915, when it was in fact a practical possibility to repatriate our dead from the war in France and Belgium, the government banned the exhumation and repatriation back to Britain, claiming it was unsanitary. However, an illegal exhumation was carried out by the influential family of an officer, which then emphasised the difference in the treatment of people of different social standing. This apparent injustice in turn became the core principle of the War Grave Commission: “The equality of treatment”.
In a debate in the house as recently as Tuesday 5 April 1955 (recent to me anyway), the MP for Salford East, Mr E A Hardy, put a question to the house. He said he found it disgraceful that the families of bereaved military personnel were being asked for £143.15s to repatriate their fallen family member and it seems a further £12.10s to provide a coffin. Luckily this nonsense has stopped but it was the Falklands War in 1982 that marked the real turning point: bereaved families were given the option of repatriation or burial near where their loved one fell. Since then, the families of 16 of the dead have kept with tradition and preferred that their sons’ remains should stay on the islands.
Remarkably, there have only been two years since 1945 when no British military personnel have been killed on active duty – 1968 and 2016. So far, 2023 will be another, with a bit of luck.
