This superb book is about Great Britain's transformation from a nation with little enthusiasm or interest in its foreign wars and it's victims to a country that reveres the memory of those lost and takes devoted care of over a million overseas graves. This is the history of Britain's war cemeteries and the man responsible for them. "The man who made it possible for a country to come to terms with the slaughter and unbearable debt it owed its dead, is scarcely better known than the unidentified thousands whose graves bear the inscription 'Known unto God'. His name was Fabian Ware." He had served in the Boer War, had established a reputation for administrative efficiency and was appointed as the Major-in-charge of the Graves Registration Commission (GRC), a hybrid Red Cross/Army entity, early in the War. By 1915, he had convinced the French government to grant land in perpetuity to Great Britain, which would assume responsibility to forever maintain the cemeteries. Reconstituted as the Imperial War Graves Commission, Ware and his colleagues were entrusted with endless decisions: how to layout the cemetery, what kind of foliage and shrubbery (maples for the Canadians), which direction would the graves face (east to face the enemy), crosses or stones (stones), whether to allow repatriation of remains(no), whether to make the usual class distinctions between the officers and the ranks (no), how to segregate and respect the Muslims and Hindus from the colonies, how to denote regimental affiliations, and on and on.
After the war, the battle became one of personalization and the ability of wealthy families to memorialize individually. In the Commons, the matter reached an end when an MP suggested that men who had died together should not be separated by their fathers. In the end, the IWGC prevailed in its theme of uniformity for the graves. Another vexing problem was how to memorialize the 'unknown' graves and how to honor by name those who were never found. Rudyard Kipling, member of the commission and poet of the Empire, lost his beloved son Jack and never knew where he lay. He came up with the phrase 'A Soldier of the Great War known unto God' which can be found on 180,000 headstones. The Army identified eighty-five distinct battles and for each one a memorial was constructed and the names of those believed lost were listed. The most famous is the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. "On it are inscribed the names of 72,085 soldiers who were killed on the Somme and Ancre and have no known graves." Beyond the western front, the commission memorialized and buried the dead around the world and, most importantly for New Zealand and Australia, at Gallipoli in Turkey.
For a hundred years, as Americans, our primary insights into the horror of the Great War have been the histories, poems and fiction written by the British. This is not a great book and certainly will not achieve any kind of immortality. But, it is very, very good at conveying the unfathomable hell of mud and death that was WW1.
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