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i i i Managing the remains of citizen i soldiers: France and its war dead in 1914 and 1915 HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE Adrien Douchet Independent researcher [email protected] Taline Garibian University of Oxford [email protected] Benoît Pouget Aix-Marseille University [email protected] Abstract The aim of this article is to shed light on the conditions under which the funerary management of human remains was carried out by the French authorities during the early years of the First World War. It seeks to understand how the urgent need to clear the battleeld as quickly as possible came into conict with the aspiration to give all deceased an individualised, or at the very least dignied, burial. Old military funerary practices were overturned and recongured to incorporate an ideal that sought the individual identication of citizen soldiers. The years 1914–15 were thus profoundly marked by a clash between the pragmatism of public health authorities obsessed with hygiene, the infancy of emerging forensic science, the aching desire of the nation to see its children buried individually and various political and military imperatives related to the conduct of the war. Key words: identication, corpses, soldiers, First World War Introduction With over ten million military deaths, the First World War represented an unprece- dented challenge in funerary terms for the countries involved.1 The French army alone lost nearly 1.5 million soldiers (18.75 per cent of its numbers). The con- centration of ghting and of troops, primarily due to the war of position that dominated the Western Front, explains the massive presence on the battleeld of corpses and scattered body parts – one in two corpses could not be identied – that, as far as possible, were to be given a dignied burial.2 This management of human remains responded above all to a public health imperative: measures had to be taken quickly to prevent the spread of epidemics.3 It was also well understood Human Remains and Violence, Volume 7, No. 1 (2021), 37–51 © The Authors, published by 37 Manchester University Press http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/HRV.7.1.4 This is an Open Access article published under the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence https://creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-nd/4.0 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/30/2021 06:02:57AM via free access i i i i i i i i Adrien Douchet, Taline Garibian and Benoît Pouget HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE that the accumulation of corpses on the battleeld had a detrimental eect on the troops forced to ght in these areas of mass graves: ‘these nightmarish visions, and their feverish frequency, ate away inexorably at the soldiers’ morale’.4 This was exac- erbated by the unending procession of bad news that preceded the return of soldiers’ remains to their families, in those cases where this was possible.5 Removing corpses from areas of ghting and paying them the respect owed to their sacrice by giving them a dignied burial clearly resulted from the need to maintain at all costs the solidarity of a nation that was fully engaged in the conict, and to come together in mourning the war.6 Finally, from a strictly legal point of view, the armed forces had a responsibility to identify and bury their soldiers and to deal with the corpses of allies and enemies killed in action.7 The history of the handling of the dead in the Great War therefore sits at the crossroads of several histories. Recent research has furthered the social history of the onerous process of ‘demobilising’ the dead. French historian Béatrix Pau details multiple cases and scandals, and explains the tireless eorts of families to retrieve the remains of their loved ones, as well as the ingenuity of the unscrupu- lous proteers they came up against.8 Recent archaeological excavations have also shed light on funerary rituals and practices implemented close to the battleelds.9 These studies, based on material evidence, supplement historical approaches that uncover the anthropological upheavals caused by mass death.10 The study of the military handling of soldiers’ corpses, previously explored by the historian Vincent Viet,11 reveals the tensions arising from the public health, cultural and legal imper- atives relating to the death of soldiers at the front. But, rather than the scientic progress made by the clearance teams, this article seeks to understand the inuence of public health imperatives on the production of funerary norms and practices. The handling of corpses, from the development of (sometimes amended) protocols to their implementation on the battleeld, therefore provides a window onto the early stages of a shi towards formalised management of human remains in a context of mass death. The colossal logistical and public health challenge posed by the management of these cartloads of corpses was evident ever since ‘the appalling losses of the early weeks of combat’.12 In addition to the issues posed by the huge volume of human remains to be dealt with, the length of the conict and the wide range of contexts in which soldiers met their death largely explain the trial-and-error nature of funerary practices. As such, we felt that within the limited space of this article it would be useful to focus on the rst two years of the conict. This short period allows us to look at the procedures for managing corpses while these were still in a confused and incomplete state, at a time when there was an urgent need to implement protocols that had been thought up during peacetime. Most of the men assigned to this task were attached to the French Military Health Service (Service de Santé des Armées). Military chemists, physicians, pharmacists and gravediggers had to urgently implement protocols for handling the endlessly renewed supply of human remains. The entanglement and scattering of bodies on the battleeld resulted in a chaotic mess from which human remains had to be indi- vidualised and identied as far as possible. The task of identifying soldiers was beset 38 Human Remains and Violence 7/1 (2021), 37–51 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/30/2021 06:02:57AM via free access i i i i i i i i Managing the remains of citizen soldiers HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE by severe limitations, both technical and logistical. These dynamics point to the individualisation of methods within forensic expertise, a process that gathered pace during and aer the Second World War.13 Public health emergency versus the imperatives of identification and dignified burial The handling of the large number of corpses produced by the conict responded both to a public health emergency and to social, cultural and political imperatives. Many families assumed that bodies would be exhumed, identied and eventually brought back to their place of origin, or, failing that, buried in an individual grave in the local cemetery. But this was not directly stated in international law.14 Neither the 1864 Geneva Convention nor the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 specied how the remains of enemy soldiers killed on the battleeld should be handled. At most, the Hague Conventions and the 1906 Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armies in the Field stipulated that armies must mutually inform one another of the deaths of injured soldiers or prisoners of war. Similarly, dead prisoners of war should be buried ‘on the same conditions as for soldiers of the national army’.15 Instructions on the attitude to take towards those who died on the battleeld had in fact been drawn up in 1880 in the Laws of War on Land, a manual written by the Swiss jurist Gustave Moynier on behalf of the Institute of International Law in Oxford. However, when war broke out, these instructions had not been incorpo- rated into legally binding texts. In an international public law treatise written een years aer this manual was published, the French jurist Henry Bonls distinguished between three obligations that fell to the warring parties, and in particular to the party with control of the battleeld aer the end of ghting: rst, they must ensure respect for corpses and personal items; second, remains must be identied prior to any burial; and third, armies must bury soldiers killed on the battleeld.16 ‘General instructions’ developed in peacetime17 The political and military authorities had long been aware of the public health risks posed by inadequate burial.18 The Military Health Service regulations issued in 1913 set out the procedure to follow for battleeld clearance.19 The complex design of the graves and the detailed nature of the procedure envisaged in these regulations demonstrate a methodical approach to burial that would turn out to be dicult to reconcile with the devastation that was to follow. The proposed approach, which symbolised a desire to rationalise the management of bodies in both administrative and public health terms, was clearly inuenced by what had been learned from the Franco-Prussian War.20 A physician was required to conrm the death before an administrative ocer from the Health Service could produce the death certicate. The identity tag worn by soldiers around their neck had to be sent to the army records and intelligence Human Remains and Violence 7/1 (2021), 37–51 39 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/30/2021 06:02:57AM via free access i i i i i i i i Adrien Douchet, Taline Garibian and Benoît Pouget HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE oce in the same parcel as their military passbook. The Health Service was respon- sible for choosing the burial site, which was to be located close to where the soldier had fallen, while following certain public health requirements (distance from water sources and dwelling places).

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