Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Death, Grieving, and Community:

British Commemoration after the War

It was very difficult for him to sleep. To sleep is to turn one’s mind from the world; Funes, lying on his back on his cot in the shadows, could imagine every crevice and every moulding in the sharply defined houses surrounding him. (I repeat that the least important of his memories was more minute and more vivid than our perception of physical pleasure or physical torment.) Towards the east, along a stretch not yet divided into blocks, there were new houses, unknown to Funes. He imagined them to be black, compact, made of homogeneous darkness; in that direction he would turn his face in order to sleep. He would also imagine himself at the bottom of the river, rocked and annihilated by the current.[1]

Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes the Memorious”

After the greatest tragedy of their age, many Britons had difficulty sleeping. Soldiers awoke screaming as they relived the deaths of their friends and comrades; after the War, said Robert Graves, “shells used to come bursting on my bed at midnight, even though [my wife] Nancy shared it with me.”[2] Wives and parents lay awake remembering the sons and husbands they were never to see again. Like Borges’ Funes the Memorious, who remembered everything, Britain could not forget; it was in danger of drowning in its own memories. Between 1918 and 1939, says David Cannadine, “the pall of death hung sorrowful, stagnant and static over Britain.”[3]

The scale of the Great War, and the scale of death in the War, was unique, and led to unprecedented problems. After the War, the British were involved in a collective search for solace in the midst of great sadness. War memorials were at the center of this process. They grounded the experience of loss, expressing it in a public place through a vocabulary of patriotism. As such, they served as traditional sites of mourning, placing the losses they commemorated within a greater, long-standing context of death and grieving. At the same time, though, the losses of the Great War were not like those of wars before and were not seen in the same way as earlier losses. The nature of death in the War, the nature of those who had died, and above all the scale of the destruction, meant that war memory could not be contained entirely within traditional modes. One of the most notable changes was the rise of a nearly obsessive interest in locating and identifying corpses and putting names on memorials.

These memorials appeared almost everywhere: villages, towns, and even universities erected monuments listing the names of those who had fallen in the War. Memorials were also built at the Front; the most notable of these was the Menin Gate, in Ypres, Belgium.[4] The history of the Menin Gate began in 1919 and reflected the broader processes of British commemoration until and beyond its completion in 1927. The Menin Gate combined the need to commemorate the British victory, specifically the defense of the Ypres salient, with the need to locate the memory of all the dead soldiers, even those without known graves. It assumed a central place in the British memory of the War; other memorials may have been more tasteful or more impressive, said Philip Longworth, but “the Menin Gate came to symbolise the British way of commemorating [the War].”[5]

Discourses of the Dead

The heightened concern with the war dead was new to Britain. The dead soldiers of past wars quickly departed from public memory. The Duke of Marlborough lost twenty thousand men at the Battle of Malplaquet in 1709; not a single one of them is commemorated there. Of the fifteen thousand men lost at Waterloo on June 18, 1815, twelve are commemorated. “In sharp contrast” to the Great War, says Thomas Laqueur, “the image one is left with at Waterloo is one not only of anonymity but of complete individual dissolution.”[6] The dead of Waterloo were not merely ignored; they were erased from public consciousness. The pattern continued; dead soldiers of the Crimean War were, wrote Thackeray, “shoveled into the ground and so forgotten.”[7] In the Great War, though, Britons held the names and locations of the dead to be important. This change arose in part from the altered composition of the military. Past wars had been fought largely by professionals or mercenaries; death was accepted as a possible consequence of the profession. In the Great War, however, the troops were made up not by professional soldiers but by volunteers and conscripts. Memorials are usually built to honor those who die unexpectedly, and many of the deaths of the War were indeed unexpected. Before the War, death in battle had been seen as “something noble, heroic, splendid, romantic – and unlikely.”[8] In the years before 1914, death was becoming less familiar. The death rate was falling in Britain; death was increasingly associated with old age rather than youth. The death rate in the 1870s was twenty-two per thousand; by 1910, it had fallen to thirteen per thousand. A man of the mid-nineteenth century had a life expectancy of forty years; by 1910 it had risen to fifty-two.[9] Parents expected their children to outlive them, and often looked for fulfillment of their ambitions in the lives of their children. All these trends were disrupted during the war years; the War was, as one observer has put it, a “carnival of death.”[10] War deaths also penetrated the spectrum of social classes in a new way: the upper classes experienced losses probably as great as, if not greater than, the rest of the nation. The losses in the upper classes were to become the root of the myth of the “lost generation.” F. A. Simpson, speaking at Cambridge in 1932, claimed that

Our true leaders, as well in literature and the arts as in public life – but most of all, I think in public life – our true leaders were taken from our head ... when a generation was not decimated but decapitated; not mauled at mere haphazard, but shorn precisely of its grace and glory, of its most ardent, its most generous, its most brave.[11]

The explosion of commemoration, especially memorials, was thus partially a response to the trauma induced by unexpected death on a massive scale. Winston Churchill, reflecting on the War, believed that death had again become a part of everyday life: “Death stands at attention, obedient, expectant, ready to serve, ready to sheer away the people en masse; ready if called upon, to pulverize, without hope of repair, what is left of civilisation.”[12] In addition, the change in commemorative practices after the War arose from the changed nature and experience of death during the War. According to Adrian Gregory, the war led to “a changed set of parameters in the psychologically possible, a new emotional reaction to death.”[13] Not only were reactions to death different, but the deaths themselves occurred differently, in new circumstances often produced by the increased technological ability to kill and maim. The growing concern with honoring the dead ironically occurred in a war in which it was difficult to do so, for the dead of the Great War were not merely dead; often they were dismembered, missing, or unidentifiable, factors that made traditional burials impossible. The War did not move on after a day or two at each battlefield as past wars had; finding and burying the dead took place in the middle of the battle, not independently of it. Partly because of the logistical difficulties, many of the dead were never found; they went “missing,” their bodies often covered by the mud of Flanders. At the same time, many of the dead were not missing but rather all too present: their corpses lay rotting near the trenches, their “bodies and body parts beaten, not once but repeatedly, into the ground, which soon became a Bosch-like landscape of the Last Days.”[14]

The demand for the service of locating and identifying bodies was so large in part because of its difficulty. In previous wars there had been less interest in identifying bodies, but in previous wars there was less unease about the violence being done not merely to bodies, but also to the integrity of bodies. There was, Laqueur claims, an “anxiety of erasure” induced by the very real possibility of physical dissolution. War cemeteries were obvious attempts to deal with this anxiety; headstones, after all, testify to the stable presence of a corpse. This certainty was sometimes an illusion: the poet John Masefield, examining a war-time cemetery filled with graves, noted the inscriptions: “Foutiane, Marcel, 27 ans ... sometimes simply ‘un Allemand’ for in the heavy fighting often the bodies were not found, but heads and parts of bodies, sometimes only rags of flesh.”[15] At the same time, memorials to the missing, listing the names of those without graves, served much the same purpose, giving the names (if not the bodies) a final resting place.

Death in this technological war did not possess a reassuring sense of finality. As I will argue later, one of the dominating motifs of the interwar period, and especially the late 1920s and early 1930s, was of the dead returning to the land of the living. Death during the War was equally confused. Family and friends in England were often unsure about the health of the soldiers on the Continent; even worse, they were often misinformed. Robert Graves was wounded on the Somme on July 20, 1916; his family received official notice of his death soon afterwards. They also were receiving letters from him at the same time, but the official, and explicit, details of his death soon convinced them that the letters had been written before he died. It was not until early August that the confusion was cleared up; he had not been killed. The Times inserted an announcement reading: “Captain Robert Graves, Royal Welch Fusiliers, officially reported died of wounds, wishes to inform his friends that he is recovering from his wounds at Queen Alexandra’s Hospital, Highgate, N.”[16] Graves’ most lasting problem was that his bank stopped honoring his cheques. He wrote playfully to his friend Siegfried Sassoon, asking about an important question of identity: if he had died (and reports indicated that he had), then who was he?[17] Many other families were to wait for years on end for acknowledgment of the status, or resting place, of a soldier.

The question of identity, which Graves broached not entirely seriously, was important to many soldiers and families. In a number of ways the War severed or altered the traditional signals of identity: name and body. “The most important point to be made about the male body during the Great War,” says Joanna Bourke, “is that it was intended to be mutilated.”[18] Soldiers experienced not only their own mutilation and death, but also that of their comrades. Antoine Prost, appraising the lasting effects of the war experience, claims that “what leaves a deep impression is the sight of death at close quarters. It is the overwhelming and inescapable presence of one’s own imminent death. Front-line soldiers spent whole days, often whole weeks, in close familiarity or intimacy with death.”[19] S. Cloete claimed, “I was not afraid of death, only pain. I had seen too many people die. They died calling on God, asking for their mothers, cursing God, or grimly silent.”[20] Death was rendered problematic as the lines between it and life were blurred. Mary MacLeod Moore wrote in 1917 that

“Killed” is final; “Wounded” means hope and possibilities; “Prisoner of war” implies a reunion in the glad time when peace comes again to a stricken world; but “Missing” is terrible. In that one word the soldier’s friends see him swallowed up behind a cloud through which pierces no ray of light.[21]

The desire to pierce the cloud of darkness that separated the living from the dead fueled a different phenomenon, spiritualism. Like those who looked to the memorials for solace, spiritualists drew upon an anxiety about the ambiguity of death and an uneasy acceptance of the explanations of death in the War; in the words of David Cannadine, spiritualism was a “private denial of death.”[22] Spiritualism was based on an explicit belief in the return of the dead, an idea which was, as I will argue later, almost ubiquitous as a metaphor in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The spiritualists offered a message of comfort to those struggling with loss: “We say, your departed certainly return, they often stand at your side as in former days, though not being clairvoyant you fail to see them. They speak to you, but not being clairvoyant you do not hear them.”[23] Spiritualism before the War was varied and diverse. The popular interest of the 1850s had been followed by a decrease in appeal; its audience was stable in the years before the War, neither growing nor fading. The War, however, gave it new life as many of the bereaved hoped for the possibility of communicating with those who had fallen. One observer who analyzed spiritualism explained: “The whole question of Survival became invested with a new meaning. Were all the brave lads dead, who had gone forth buoyantly to fight for their country? ... It was really the bereaved mothers of Britain that lifted Spiritualism out of the dust.”[24]

The pre-eminent spokesmen of interwar Spiritualism were the scientist Sir Oliver Lodge and the author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Lodge had been a spiritualist since the 1880s, but his War experience was not very different from that of many other new converts. He lost his youngest son Raymond at Ypres in 1915; in 1916, though, Raymond contacted him through a medium. Their conversations were recorded in a book, Raymond, published in 1916. Lodge explained his book by reference to the War, saying that he was willing to write about personal, family experiences only because “the amount of premature and unnatural bereavement at the present time is so appalling.” He hoped that other mourners could “derive comfort by learning that communication across the gulf is possible.”[25] The most famous exponent of spiritualism, though, was Conan Doyle, the creator of the super-rationalist detective, Sherlock Holmes. While Holmes once said that “This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply,”[26] Conan Doyle disagreed with his creation. In the post-war years, Conan Doyle was heavily involved in the spiritualism crusade. Although there is evidence that he was interested by psychic phenomena well before the war, it is likely that he, like many others, was finally converted to spiritualism because of the trauma of the war. He lost a son and brother during the War years, and by 1919 he had already contacted both of them. He became a tireless missionary for spiritualism. In 1919 he went on lecture tours in the United States and Australia and in 1923 he helped found a spiritualist church in London.[27] He and his wife used automatic writing or the services of an Arabian spirit guide named Pheneas, the subject of his 1927 book Pheneas Speaks.[28] He explained his activities (in the third person), saying: “Evidence of the presence of the dead appeared in his own household, and the relief afforded by posthumous messages taught him how great a solace it would be to a tortured world if it could share in the knowledge which had become clear to himself.[29]

A community arose of those who communicated with the dead; in 1918, Conan Doyle told an audience in Southsea that he had received letters from thirteen mothers about their contact with their dead sons.[30] The members of this community, sharing common goals and beliefs, found comfort not merely in the communication with the dead but also in the community itself. Their grief was no longer private; they comforted each other. Spiritualism, in this light, was a complex strategy for dealing with the losses of the War. It denied death even as it accepted those mourning death into a community. Many of the same characteristics, from the confused nature of death to the need for community, will be seen in the memorial processes centered on the Menin Gate. At the same time, though, these processes were very different from those of spiritualism because they were guided and shaped by the government and governmental organizations. The history of commemoration must concern itself not merely with grief and mourning but also with committees and commissions.

The Imperial War Graves Commission

In September 1914, a forty-five year old teacher and administrator named Fabian Ware arrived in France and was placed in charge of a Red Cross ambulance unit. Soon, the unit expanded its work; in addition to transporting wounding soldiers between various sections and hospitals, it began to make notes about where soldiers were buried.[31] This activity arose initially merely in order to provide information for the lists of lost and missing. However, as Ware realized that no one was responsible for the improvement and maintenance of the graves, the Mobile Unit began to assume these responsibilities. One member described the effort:

It frequently requires considerable patience and some skill as an amateur detective to find the grave of some poor fellow who has been shot in some out of the way turnip field and hurriedly buried, but I feel my modest efforts amply rewarded when I return a day or two later with a wooden cross with a neat inscription and plant it at the head of his grave, for I have the proud satisfaction of knowing that I have done some slight honour to one brave man who has died for his country.[32]

By early 1915 the Mobile Unit (now known as the Graves Registration Commission) had been officially designated by the Army as “the only organisation authorised to deal with the question of the locality, marking and registration of the graves of the British officers and men.”[33] This task absorbing most of its time, the Unit soon gave up its ambulances. Faced with a lack of personnel, Ware agreed to switch his group from the supervision of the Red Cross to that of the British military. In September 1915 the War Office acknowledged that the Graves Registration Committee was to “be placed on a proper footing as a part of His Majesty's forces.”[34] At the loss of a degree of freedom, this change provided a great increase in manpower for the former Red Cross unit; the army would now assign men to serve with the Committee, allowing it to keep up with the accumulating dead.

A significant decision was made in 1915 to forbid the repatriation of corpses to England. It was largely a pragmatic solution; the conditions of the War did not allow for bodies to be easily collected and transported. In addition, though, Ware realized that allowing some bodies to be shipped home would go against the communal spirit of the front, for it would be difficult to “treat impartially the claims advanced by persons of different social standing.”[35] One official later emphasized this point, saying that “one could never explain to a person why Lord or Lady this was able to have a body [brought] home while plain Mrs. Smith, a labourer’s wife or widow, could not.”[36] Another significant agreement was the Anglo-Franco-Belgian Agreement of August 9, 1917, in which the Belgian government in exile granted land in perpetuity for British cemeteries.[37] In April 1917, over the objections of the Office of Works, which felt that control of the cemeteries and monuments should fall in its jurisdiction, a new body was formed with authority over all imperial cemeteries and memorials: the Imperial War Graves Commission. Its president was the Prince of Wales; the Secretary of State for War was its Chairman; and Fabian Ware was the Vice-Chairman.

In the years after the War, the Commission made a number of important decisions. First, the ban on repatriation was continued: all British soldiers who fell on the Continent would remain there. This decision, not unnaturally, was very controversial. Many saw it as the extension of the government’s power over its citizens, as seen in mass conscription, to their bodies after death. The considerations of equality, though, led the Commission to continue the wartime ban. Second, the headstones in the cemeteries were uniform; there was to be, wrote Ware, “no distinction ... between officers and men lying in the same cemeteries in the form or nature of the memorials.”[38] The only variation in form was a simple inscription at the base of the headstone selected by the next of kin (subject to censoring). This decision was even more unpopular. One parliamentarian railed against it, saying,

Relatives should long treat their own loved ones in their own distinctive way, and I hope the House of Commons will hesitate long before it allows the right to be taken away or any interference with it. The dead are certainly not the property of the State or of any particular regiment; the dead belong to their own relatives.[39]

A sizable contingent in Parliament argued for more personal gravestones, chosen by relatives. Again, the Commission supported its decision on the basis of equality: “I attach much importance to uniformity,” said Sir Frederick Kenyon, Director of the British Museum and member of the Commission, “as expressing the idea of uniformity of service, equality of sacrifice, and the comradeship of all ranks and classes. It is the principle of corporate memorial as against the congeries of individual memorials.”[40] With the support of the trade unionists and soldiers’ organizations, the Commission won the protracted, even bitter, Parliamentary conflict.[41] Third, each cemetery was to include two specific monuments: a large block of stone and a cross. Edwin Lutyens designed what he described as a “a great fair stone of fine proportions, 12 feet in length, lying raised upon three steps.”[42] This “Stone of Remembrance” (as it became known) was adorned with a passage selected by Rudyard Kipling from the apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus: “Their name liveth for evermore.”[43] Its mass and solidity suggested that the lost would not be easily pushed aside in the public’s memory. Each cemetery also included a “Cross of Sacrifice,” designed by Reginald Blomfield. The cross, atop an octagonal base, was constructed in stone; a bronze sword was attached to it, combining military imagery with religious. Blomfield explained his motivations:

What I wanted to do in designing this Cross was to make it as abstract and impersonal as I could, to free it from any association with any particular style, and, above all, to keep clear of any of the sentimentalities of Gothic. This was a man's war far too terrible for any fripperies, and I hoped to get within range of the infinite in this symbol of the ideals of those who had gone out to die.[44]

Having dealt with the problem of graves and cemeteries, the War Graves Commission faced the different, and complex, problem of commemorating the missing with no known grave. The simplest solution, placing headstones for the missing in existing cemeteries, was rejected as misleading; these “false graves” would indicate the presence of a body where none existed.[45] The plans called for record houses to be built in every cemetery to serve as a chapel and to hold the records of those buried in the cemetery. The Commission decided to inscribe the names of the missing inside these record houses. By using them, the Commission would avoid the extra expense and delays in construction that would occur if they were to design a new structure for each cemetery. This idea was soon revised to include only eighty-five representative cemeteries on the western front, instead of more than three hundred; it proved to be too difficult to determine exactly where individuals had fallen, so they were merely grouped into broader geographical regions.[46]

Roughly £100,000 was allocated for commemorating the missing of the Ypres salient. In these deliberations, the dual principles of equality and efficiency were at work. The Commission wished formally to acknowledge each of the missing soldiers, to give the grieving families a stable location for the memory of the lost. The lists of names would serve the same function as the graves of those whose bodies had been found; the memorials would be the final resting place for names, if not bodies. Further, since the concern over the commemoration of the missing came after the cemeteries had begun to be designed and built (it was, after all, a much more complex process to compile the names and locations of those missing than of those known to be dead), it made sense for the Commission to incorporate these names into the cemeteries themselves instead of building free-standing memorials. These plans, though, were never fully implemented as the War Graves Commission became involved with the building of national monuments to the “victory over the enemy.”[47]

The Memorial at Ypres: The Menin Gate

After the War, Winston Churchill suggested that the entire town of Ypres become a British memorial. “I should like us,” he said, “to acquire the whole of the ruins of Ypres.... A more sacred place for the British race does not exist in the world.”[48] This proposal did not appeal to the citizens of Ypres, who had already begun rebuilding their town. In 1919, Blomfield was sent to Ypres to examine possible sites for a national memorial. He chose the Menin Gate (the site where the road to Menin left the town of Ypres, earlier a fortified gateway) over the other proposed sites in the area, the Lille Gate and an island in the moat between the Lille Gate and the Menin Gate. In 1920, the Cabinet granted £150,000 for the erection of an “Imperial Memorial in the form of a gateway at the Menin Gate,” as well as £100,000 for other memorials in France, the Mediterranean, and to the Royal Navy.[49] The monument at the Menin Gate was to be built under the supervision of the Office of Works. Ware, resisting the intrusions of the Office of Works, soon reported to the Cabinet. He suggested that the Cabinet consider allowing the War Graves Commission to incorporate the national memorials into its plans for memorials to the missing.[50] This suggestion was soon acted upon, and the War Graves Commission was given responsibility for the national war memorials. The eighty-five memorials earlier planned were reduced to twelve, each holding from 5,000 to 50,000 names, depending on the number of missing in that geographical sector.[51] In this way, the commemoration of the missing was connected to the commemoration of victory. It resulted primarily from Ware’s desire to keep the Office of Works from interfering with his work; he wrote in 1921 that “the Office of Works are rather butting in and may spoil our demands.”[52] His suggestion was accepted, though, out of a desire for efficiency and cost-saving: it was considered wasteful to construct two large memorials at the same place when they could possibly be combined into one.

The centerpieces of this commemorative effort were the three memorials designed by the primary architects of the War Graves Commission: the Indian memorial at Neuve-Chapelle designed by Herbert Baker, the memorial at Thiepval designed by Edwin Lutyens, and Reginald Blomfield’s Menin Gate. Blomfield’s report to the War Office on his 1919 visit to Ypres had read in part: “Of all the sites suggested [for a memorial], I recommend that at the Menin Gate as by far the most suitable, inasmuch as it was through this opening on the ramparts that our men went out to attack the German lines. In the second place, the ramparts, the moat and the causeway provide a splendid opportunity for a great Memorial.”[53] When, in 1922, the Commission was given charge of constructing the memorials, Blomfield was selected to proceed with the design of the Menin Gate.

He faced a number of problems. The ground was filled with sand, poorly suited for a foundation; thirty-six foot long concrete piles were driven into the ground to provide an adequate base.[54] The second, and most significant, problem was the ever-rising number of names of the missing which needed to be incorporated into the memorial. It was first estimated at 40,000, rising to 54,896 names that were actually placed on the memorial (and 34,888 left for the nearby cemetery at Tyne Cot).[55]

The center of Blomfield’s design was the Hall of Memory, a vault 115 feet long by 66 feet wide, constructed in reinforced concrete. This vault was patterned on the seventeenth-century fortifications of Nancy. It spanned the road running out of Ypres, was lit by openings in the crown of the vault, and was lined with 1200 stone panels listing the names of the missing (Fig. 3). Staircases on the sides ran up to the ramparts. From the outside, the Menin Gate appears as a monumental arch, flanked by twin Doric columns with the inscriptions “Pro Patria” and “Pro Rege.”[56] Constructed from brick and Euville stone, the structure was topped by two sculptures and inscriptions. The east side of the Gate featured a lion designed by Reid Dick; it was, wrote Blomfield, “a massive lion, not fierce and truculent, but patient and enduring, looking outward as a symbol of the latent strength and heroism of our race.”[57] The west side had a sarcophagus with a Union Jack thrown over it and a wreath atop it.[58] The inscription, written by Kipling, read

To the Armies

of the British Empire

who stood here

from 1914 to 1918

and to those of their dead

who have no known grave.

Inside the vault, there are panels which read: “Ad majorem Dei gloriam, Here are recorded names of officers and men who fell on Ypres Salient, but to whom the fortune of war denied the known and honoured burial given to their comrades in Death.”

The Menin Gate was completed in 1927, almost two years behind schedule.[59] Opening ceremonies were to be held on July 24. Admission to these ceremonies was by ticket; 6000 such tickets were allocated. These tickets were made available to close relatives of those men commemorated on the Gate and then to soldiers who had fought in the Ypres area.[60] In mid-June, an announcement was made that funds would be provided to 200 widows otherwise unable to attend the ceremony; the generous response to this announcement allowed for provisions for more women to travel to Belgium. This emphasis on women was not unusual. By the late 1920s, the bereaved, as Adrian Gregory has noted, had come to be primarily associated with women. In its Armistice Day edition in 1927, the Daily Herald summed up the dichotomy: “The men who won, and the women who lost.”[61] Further, the memorials were considered first as a consolation for the bereaved and only second as solace for those who had fought and survived. The intended audience for the ceremonies surrounding the opening of the Menin Gate was that of widows and parents, not veterans.

Sunday, July 24, 1927, was a bright, sunny day in Ypres.[62] The area around the Gate was filled with visitors, as was the town itself. The official party was led by the Belgian King Albert and Lord Plumer, the British Field Marshal in charge of the Second Army and the defense of Ypres from 1915-17. Just before the ceremony began, Blomfield was presented to the King, as were two war widows, Mrs. Emily Shurbsole of Clapham and Mrs. Merriman of Croydon. Just as the Unknown Warrior represented all men who died in the War, these two women seemed to stand for all the bereaved. The ceremony opened with a prayer written by the Archbishop of Canterbury, praising the “host of brave men who gave their lives for our country’s safety and for the cause of right ... ‘missing’, but not outside the Father’s knowledge and the Father’s love.” The prayer concluded with a plea for the living, “to grant that as we raise their memorial, so we may walk worthy of their fellowship.”[63] Lord Plumer spoke at some length, giving an account of the Menin Gate,

a memorial worthy of them which should give expression to the nation's gratitude for their sacrifice and their sympathy with those who mourned them. A memorial has been erected which, in its simple grandeur, fulfills this object, and now it can be said of each one in whose honour we are assembled here today – “He is not missing; he is here.”[64]

King Albert gave a short tribute, saying

there is no ground in the world more sacred than that of the Ypres Salient, for it was to uphold the sanctity of treaties that England came into the war. In truth, for 50 months Ypres marked the threshold of the Empire, and throughout centuries to come its name [will] stand as the symbol of British courage and endurance.[65]

In closing, there were a number of hymns, preceded by a minute of silence, which The Times described as “a terrible minute of silence - a silence so absolute that it seemed as if the whole Salient must be standing hushed in prayer.”[66] The interior of the Gate was soon filled with wreaths, laid first by King Albert and then by unofficial participants.

The ceremony was broadcast by the BBC. There was a break in service during the speech of King Albert, but otherwise the transmission was “quite successful,” producing the feeling that “the listeners were actually at the Menin Gate.”[67] Many of those who listened to the broadcast did so at their local churches. At St. Mary’s Church, Aylesbury, the church had installed a temporary radio with a loudspeaker, and “after Matins the church was filled by a large number of relatives of the fallen and others, including the Mayor and representatives of the British Legion, all of whom joined in singing the hymns and following the service which was actually taking place some hundred or so miles away.”[68] Correspondence in The Times indicates that such an experience was common. In at least one church, in Evesham, the congregation joined in the ceremony: “all present joined in the singing of the three hymns and then stood also during the Dedication, the Last Post, Lament, Silence and Reveille. For the prayers they knelt, and sat for the speeches.”[69] The group experience, not merely of those at the Menin Gate but also of those scattered across the country listening to the broadcast, was seen as producing a community. The Rev. H. J. Bell of Carlisle said this quite clearly, noting that “such use of the wireless should tend to foster the spirit of patriotism and banish the feeling of isolation and unimportance so often prevalent in the minds of remote villagers.”[70] “The technical possibilities inherent in radio,” says Gregory, “helped foster the sense of openness which [Victor] Turner describes as the ‘anti-structure’ inherent in Communitas.”[71] In short, the vast community formed around the Menin Gate ceremony crossed the boundary lines of class and experience which had been reiterated so clearly in the General Strike of 1926. The ceremony brought together those who had lost loved ones, often elevating the traumas of women over that of men. The veterans were incorporated less completely into the commemorative ceremonies, for their experiences did not translate easily into a postwar community.

These two moves, one of inclusion and one of exclusion, were consequences of the way the government had claimed and affected memory of the War. Commemorating the dead and missing proved to be much easier than honoring the living veterans. Further, the connection between commemorating the lost and commemorating victory seen in the dual function of the Menin Gate was, and was recognized to be, somewhat artificial. It was determined more by political and financial efficiency than by any thematic unity. The War Graves Commission was given control over the memorial to the victorious defense of the Ypres Salient not because it was initially intended to fulfill that function, but rather because it would save money and effort to allow the Commission to broaden its scope to include more than cemeteries. This awkward marriage of victory and loss, though, quickly became one of the predominant ways of remembering the War. Victory was always thought of in terms of loss; loss was always thought of in terms of victory. Of course, these connections were in part inevitable, but the institutionalization of the connection was a product of political happenstance. The governmental interference in the memory of the War served to channel that memory in a certain way, a way that was pleasing to some, disturbing to others, and, as will be discussed in Chapter 3, not without practical consequences.

[1] Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes the Memorious,” in Labyrinths (New York: Penguin, 1970), 94. This story is alluded to in a related fashion in John R. Gillis, ed., Commemoration: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 15.

[2] Robert Graves, Good-bye to All That (Garden City: Doubleday, 1957), 287.

[3] David Cannadine, “War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain,” in Joachim Whaley, ed., Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 233.

[4] I have referred to this town throughout as “Ypres,” which is the conventional historical designation for what is known as Ypern to the Germans, Ieper to the Flemish, and even “Wipers” to the British soldiers.

[5] Philip Longworth, The Unending Vigil: A History of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission 1917-1967 (London: Constable, 1967), 103.

[6] Thomas W. Laqueur, “Memory and Naming in the Great War,” in Gillis, ed., 151.

[13] Adrian Gregory, The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day 1919-1946 (Providence, RI: Berg, 1994), 21.

[14] Thomas W. Laqueur, “Names, Bodies, and the Anxiety of Erasure,” in Theodore R. Schatzki and Wolfgang Natter, eds., The Social and Political Body (New York: The Guilford Press, 1996), 134.

[17] Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (New York: Atheneum, 1991), 429.

[18] Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 31.

[19] Antoine Prost, In the Wake of War: ‘Les Anciens Combattants’ and French Society 1914-1939 (Providence, RI: Berg, 1992), 3.

[26] Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire,” in The Original Illustrated ‘Strand’ Sherlock Holmes (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1996), 1016.

[27] Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 58.

[28] Julian Symons, Conan Doyle: Portrait of an Artist (New York: Mysterious Press, 1987), 117.

[37] Fabian Ware, The Immortal Heritage: An Account of the Work and Policy of the Imperial War Graves Commission During Twenty Years 1917-1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937), 40.

[43] Ibid., 37. Kipling’s son John had gone missing at the Battle of Loos in October 1915. For two years Kipling and his wife remained hopeful; at the end of 1917, though, they had to acknowledge that John was dead. His body was never found. Cannadine, 219.

[44] Sir Reginald Blomfield, Memoirs of an Architect (London: Macmillan and Co., 1932), 179.

[55] Longworth, 186; Ware, 32; Alan Borg, War Memorials: From Antiquity to the Present (London: Leo Cooper, 1991), 129.

[56] Blomfield, 187; Richard A. Fellows, Sir Reginald Blomfield: An Edwardian Architect (London: A. Zwemmer, 1985), 112.

[62] Details on the ceremony from The Times, July 25, 1927, 14, 16.