Chapter III The Unknown from the Great War The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier will be “a Mecca for all mothers of the land whose dead could not be given back to them.” – Chaplain Charles Pierce tars and Stripes, the official newspaper of the American Expe- ditionary Forces, reported: “At the eleventh hour on the elev- Senth day of the eleventh month hostilities came to an end… there followed a strange, unbelievable silence as though the world had died.”1 Later that day, as the certainty of peace became appar- ent, allied troops began to celebrate the end of the war; bands played and church bells rang, with the revelries continuing throughout the day and night. These lucky troops had somehow survived life in the trenches, a global influenza pandemic, and the horrors of combat.2 It was now time to celebrate their deliverance.3 The signing of the armistice in November 1918 effectively ended the fighting in Europe, but the psychological impact and po- litical consequences of the war would continue to haunt future gen- erations. Millions of soldiers had perished during the conflict and it would be left to the survivors to ultimately bring meaning to this whole-scale mass slaughter of humanity. 53 54 Tomb of the Unknown Soldier World War I had been the first truly technological war, a con- flict, according to one contemporary, fought by men and machines. New and terrible armaments had been developed by both sides and were used to great efficiency. These weapons included machine guns, U-boats, poison gas, tanks, long-range artillery, hand grenades, flamethrowers, airplanes, and zeppelins. All had contributed to the terrible carnage and the unprecedented number of war casualties. Individual valor, courage, and heroism seemed meaningless on the new, twentieth century battlefield. Even the bravest of soldiers could be killed instantly by an artillery shell fired from miles away or shot dead by an anonymous sniper’s bullet or killed by inhaling toxic fumes from exploding gas canisters.4 Death was ubiquitous, but it also appeared to be random and meaningless. One British soldier, Captain Llewelyn Griffith, graphically described the slaughter typi- cal on the frontlines: “There were more corpses than men, but there were worse sights than corpses. Limbs and mutilated trunks, here and there a detached head, forming splashes of red against the green leaves, and, as in advertisement of the horror of our way of life and death, and of our crucifixion of youth, one tree held in its branches a leg, with its torn flesh hanging down over a spray of leaf.”5 During the war, British Commonwealth nations sustained over 1,724,000 casualties—killed, wounded, and missing. On the single bloodiest day of fighting (July 1, 1916), 19,240 British sol- diers were killed-in-action at the Battle of the Somme.6 The sheer volume of casualties was unfathomable to the world’s civilian popu- lations, while the massive number of deaths posed serious logisti- cal challenges for the warring armies. For both hygienic and psy- chological reasons, rapid burial of the dead was essential, but this often proved problematic due to the proximity and intensity of the fighting. Dead soldiers were commonly buried at night with few, if any, religious rites or military rituals; their mangled corpses were consigned to hastily dug trenches shrouded only in a crude blanket.7 By the end of the war, there were over 2,300 allied and enemy cem- eteries scattered throughout western Europe.8 Many of these burial sites were primitive and inadequate, contributing to the stark reality that thousands of soldiers would never be individually identified.9 The Unknown from the Great War 55 Since most of the fighting on the western front had taken place in northern France, the French government made it a post-war priority to quickly reclaim the dormant battlefields in an effort to restore the old pastures and fields to agricultural use. This required the removal of unexploded ordnance, the clearing out of debris, the filling-in of trenches and bomb craters, the removing of shallow graves, and the recovering of the remaining dead.10 The allies simultaneously began a Herculean effort to prop- erly identify, reinter, and consolidate their war dead in newly estab- lished “concentration” cemeteries. In order to properly memorialize these deceased soldiers, the new cemeteries mandated uniform, stan- dardized grave markers in order to prevent what one British report warned against: “[the] hideous effigies relatives often have a ten- dency to erect.”11 The recently created British War Graves Commis- sion helped coordinate these efforts and ordered: “That there should be carved on the headstone the rank, name, regiment and date of death of the man buried beneath it, and that relatives should be al- lowed at their own cost to add a short inscription to the nature of a text or prayer, subject to the approval of the Commission.” 12 Fam- ily members in Britain and the other Commonwealth nations were strictly forbidden from making any effort to reclaim and repatriate the remains of their loved ones from the continent. This extremely controversial and unpopular policy was rationalized by the belief that the nation’s public morale could not withstand the psychologi- cal trauma and emotional impact that would ensue from years of individual memorial services and endless private burials.13 Despite the admirable goal of properly identifying all of the war dead, it proved impossible to accurately account for all of the soldiers. As military historian, Patrick O’Donnell, writes: “Artillery vaporized and shredded men on the battlefield, reducing many of their bodies to mere remains—‘unknown soldiers.’”14 The British classified over 517,000 of its soldiers as missing-in-action while more than one million French soldiers were still unaccounted for by the end of the war.15 The loss of identity in death was a fate greatly feared by all soldiers. Most wore or carried small metal al- 56 Tomb of the Unknown Soldier loy identification disks which listed their name, rank, and regiment but these tokens were easily lost or separated from a soldier during combat, making post-mortem identification difficult.16 Furthermore, the number of unidentified soldiers increased because, as historian Neil Hanson writes: “Many grave markers [were] destroyed in sub- sequent fighting, or removed by farmers squatting on their ruined land in primitive shelters and desperate to begin ploughing and re- planting. As a result, all trace of tens of thousands of graves had been obliterated.”17 For countless grieving families, this meant that there would never be a known grave where they could focus their sorrow. In her seminal book, Bodies of War, author and historian Lisa Budreau writes: “loss of a loved one in battle [was] magnified by the uncertainty of burial place and the inability to connect a name with a grave or body...[there would be] no funeral service, no head- stone in a local cemetery, nothing left to venerate, and no closure so necessary in the grieving process.”18 Almost immediately after the cessation of the fighting, small towns, hamlets, villages, and cities throughout Europe began to erect war memorials. These early efforts at commemoration of the local dead attempted to honor hometown soldiers by permanently inscrib- ing in stone the names of their dead and thereby restoring a bit of their lost identity. 19 On a larger scale, the most imposing and somber war memorial to be erected after the armistice was the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing in Ypres, Belgium. On the monument’s massive walls were inscribed the individual names of 54,896 miss- ing British and Commonwealth soldiers who had disappeared during the fighting in Flanders. In the nearby city of Zonnebeck, the Tyne Cot Memorial similarly listed the names of another 35,000 missing soldiers.20 At Whitehall in England, the renowned architect, Sr. Ed- win Lutyens, erected a large, wood and plaster cenotaph collectively honoring “the Glorious Dead.” This temporary pylon became such a popular place of pilgrimage with the grief-stricken public that it was replaced by a permanent stone monument in 1920.21 In stark contrast to London’s bodiless memorial, the French constructed a massive ossuary at Verdun. There, the bones of 130,000 unidentified The Unknown from the Great War 57 (Philip Bigler) A typical war memorial in the town square of Wellen, Belgium. Hundreds of such monuments were erected after the war to honor the hometown dead. 58 Tomb of the Unknown Soldier French and German soldiers were entombed, forever uniting the for- mer enemies in death.22 DURING THE GREAT War, the Reverend David Railton served as a military chaplain with British troops.23 In 1916, during the terrible fighting at the Battle of theSomme, Railton stumbled upon the lone grave of a British soldier who had been killed during the combat. Written on a crude wooden cross was a modest but poignant inscrip- tion: “Unknown British Soldier of the Black Watch.”24 The mem- ory of that unidentified soldier haunted Railton for years. He was consumed by the knowledge that literally hundreds of thousands of grieving families would never know the ultimate fate of their loved ones, aware only that they had perished on a distant battlefield fight- ing for King, Country, and Commonwealth. In truth, many bodies had been obliterated by modern weaponry but there were still thou- sands of other soldiers who had been anonymously entombed in graves dispersed throughout cemeteries in France and Belgium. After the armistice, Reverend Railton returned to England and was appointed the vicar of St. John the Baptist’s, Margate in Kent.