Empires of the Dead: How One Man’s Vision Led to the Creation of WWI’s War Graves. David Crane
Читать онлайн книгу.
metres high should be erected, and at the centre of the field a large pit dug in the shape of an inverted and truncated pyramid that could be layered for cremations – ‘in the simple manner of Indians’, the report adds with an engagingly Rousseau-ian note – with successive strata of wood and naked bodies. Fifty crematoria in all, petrol or tar to expedite the process, ready access to wood and transport, twenty-five gravediggers to each site, twenty woodsmen, twenty carriers, one doctor, one engineer officer, several NCOs, one priest and, ‘if possible’, one rabbi ‘to provide for the satisfaction of every religious sentiment’: death on an industrial scale met death as gloire in a final exhortation that blended French swank, Enlightenment rationalism and a proto-Nazi thoroughness in a way peculiarly designed to disquiet John Bull.
‘In all ages from the earliest times up to our own day cremation has been practised in time of war,’ the report had declared,
The hot weather is approaching. It is in the spring that epidemics develop with the greatest vigour … Myriads of worms swarm in the corpses … myriads of flies will alike sow those germs of death sprung from the dead … Great evils need great remedies. We have only just time to act …
Soldiers sacrificed their lives without hesitation. They behaved like heroes. But with the sacrifice of their lives let them and their relatives sacrifice their bodies also. Let us honour them as the ancients honoured their heroes by burning their bodies and thus rendering their cinders imperishable. The whole of the country will be their tomb. Let us free ourselves from the prejudice of the old customs which under existing conditions may be fatal … Let us not shrink from any sacrifice for those who fight.
It was a proposal that in the end died of its own technocratic afflatus, but Ware’s negotiations had crucially guaranteed that no similar threat hung over the future of Britain’s war cemeteries. The liberality of the French authorities had made some kind of settlement a formality from the start, but it was Ware who had created a treaty that would be a model for every subsequent agreement, Ware who had picked his way through the legal obstacles, Ware who had the tact and journalistic nous to mobilise establishment opinion, Ware who protected France from an uncontrolled rash of British monuments and – above all – Ware who had the foresight to recognise cultural differences in attitudes to the dead that all the Francophilia in the world was never going to bridge.
If the law of 29 December shows one side of Ware, however, the second seminal development that makes 1915 the crucial year in the history of Britain’s war graves shows the other, opportunistic side of his character. In the early months of the war a number of private exhumations had been carried out by families who wanted their son’s or husband’s bodies home, but at Ware’s prompting the Adjutant General, Macready, had written to Ian Malcolm at the end of February spelling out a new stance for the BEF. ‘As regards the question in general,’ Macready told him,
of exhuming bodies either for the purpose of identification or for removal to England, the Commander in Chief has issued instructions that this shall not be done, and it is never allowed in the British area … if it is carried out it must be distinctly understood that it is not done with the approval of Sir John French.
There was no abiding principle involved in this, no sense that the embargo would stretch beyond the duration of the war, and when two weeks later General Joffre issued a proclamation banning all exhumations on French soil, that too was done on health grounds. In late 1914, Malcolm had carried out the exhumation of a mass grave that revealed more than sixty identifications, but while Ware had never been happy about this, it was not until the death of one particular officer more than a month after Macready’s letter that unease hardened into a principle that would become one of the battle cries of the Imperial War Graves Commission.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.