My goodness yes! Yes, yes, very much! If it's alright, I am going to post again a comment that I made a few months ago. I am going to edit it slightly, because I was drunk. It is also a WALL of text, so forgive me for that as well!
The first thing to understand is that dead people have such amazing charge. People care about them. That seems obvious, but... but why is it obvious? The person is dead - their body has technically become an object. What's the difference between a dead body and any other object? It seems weird that we would throw a broken plate into the rubbish bin while treating something equally not alive as the focal point for myth and memory.
Right now the reader is saying "Crossy, you moron, they were a person! They have meaning and emotion attached to them. People loved them. People don't care about a broken plate." Yep; when something is a 'person' it is suddenly the focus for many, many identities - those identities get mapped by other people onto its (probably human) body. Like masculinity is mapped onto the penis, for instance, or femininity onto the womb.
So when people die their bodies stay, and those identities linger; the body can therefore be used by other people as a kind of metaphor. A signifier, if you will, for what the dead person was. That's why the outrage is intense if that dead body is messed with; that's why its pretty vital even today to the grieving process for families have a body. An empty grave is just not satisfying to visit - it is empty - even though the person is dead inside the grave or out of it.
And because a grave a site of dense richness, oh does modern war bugger grieving patterns. Those Great War cemeteries with their ranks of war dead interred near or in the battlefield where they died? Profoundly unnatural. All politics. The bodies were co-opted in death as they had been conscripted in life. Stolen for their "charge" and richness of meaning.
I use the word 'stolen' in a very real sense, because in the normal course of death, bodies are returned to their families. Naturally some of the men like the Kiwis, Canadians, and Aussies were simply too far away to be returned; those countries accepted their burden, but still had hundreds and hundreds of letters and personal appeals for photos, information, witnesses.
As for Britian; the Imperial War Graves Commission stole those bodies. A bloke named Ware decided that the mass of dead was a glorious opportunity. He argued up, down, and sideways until it was a matter of policy that no bodies would be returned from the Great War to any Commonwealth country - not even at private expense. The bodies in his vision were ordered, their emotional connection and understandings layered into cemetery-memorials to Empire. A place of pilgrimage for the entire Commonwealth that would strengthen all the bounds between the countries by reminding them of their common sacrifice. I wish I was making this up, because it depresses me, but I am not.
It depresses me because this usurpation of bodies caused profound unhappiness - in Britishers especially, because the bodies were right there. Some of the rich folks nipped across and grabbed their sons without telling anyone, but even that was stopped pretty soon, and the poor never even got the opportunity too. I read a really heartbreaking letter from a mother which read "you took my son away from me in life and now you take him away from me in death".
And the result of all of this? Grief. Unending grief. Mourning for the Great War keeps going - people couldn't tend their family member's grave, or visit it, or even know if there was one. Men were blown to pieces, or were buried in mud - completely missing. Had people ever had that before, on such a massive scale? Not just the disruption to mourning practices to not have a body or a grave, but not having a grave at all? And the grief was so total - back before the war folks in England would hang out black drapes, all their neighbors came around with food, and family would appear. During the Great War visible grief was frowned upon - after all, the casualties were so heavy, what made your boy so special? If you can't mourn like you need to, and your support network is broken, and you don't have a body, then your grief goes on and on.
Those cemeteries which we all take for granted now, and which steal your breath - they are an abomination. They are the government saying "these men were more important in their identity as soldiers of empire than they were in any identity they ever had as father or husband or son or nephew." Ware and his Imperial War Graves Commission imposed what HE believed those soldiers were onto their bodies. Not the identity that the soldier had believed. Not what the family believed. Only Ware could decide.
Isn't that a bit sad?
The best book on all of this is by a man named Bart Ziino, and it's called "A Distant Grief". It's a really readable book, except for the subject matter.
Now, the Imperial War Graves Commission policy was a Big Change from before. Prior, bodies were often buried where foreign battles - but they could have been brought home had the family the inclination. Plus, the British troopers were regulars, who often had their wives and children with them on campaign. Grief practices could be done "on site", as it were. No way was the government going to get in the way of that, because the government didn't claim to own the bodies.
In the First World War though, there was no way to get the bodies back. The War Graves Commission had plans for those bodies which didn't involve the families. It involved Empire building, places of pilgrimage, and general veneration of "British values."
Grief in New Zealand and Australia in the First World War had much more acceptance of the lack of bodies - distance modifies the rules of mourning. Pretty much the deaths in the First World War were treated (at the time! Later on it changed!) like the deaths New Zealanders and Aussies had prior, like in the Boer war. Except bigger. Much bigger.
The scale of death was definitely a factor in why the Imperial War Graves Commission decision was so bad - it was a decision made in a new context where properly demonstrative grief wasn't being socially allowed in the various Commonwealth countries. The support system had been strained past the point where it could cope with all the loss. Does that make sense? And the lack of bodies - bodies which were essentially just a hop, skip, and a jump away - only made these things worse because traditional middle-class things like tending the graves etc simply couldn't be done. It was just appalling. We're still dealing with the grief from it, and its nearly a century later.
The French, now they tried to do the same thing - they made large military cemeteries as well. But Frenchmen weren't putting up with that bullshit when they lived nearby the cemeteries, and simply paid people to pinch the bodies of their sons in order to bring them home again. After awhile, the "theft" problem became so endemic that the French government allowed bodies to be returned to their families if those families desired: about a third took the government up on this offer.
TL:DR Yes! Lots of people were upset! It caused a LOT of social problems.
I realise that it is not WW1, but I recently found out that there were 14 graves of Russian soldiers from WW2 in a small graveyard on RAF Gütersloh in Germany during the cold war. The soviets refused the offer of return of the bodies, as it meant they got a yearly visit to the base, which they attempted to use as an opportunity to spy on the harrier force. So not returning bodies can have other political reasons too. Does anyone know of other occurrences of this?
I just want to say thank you for this perspective. As a US Marine Ive seen large war memorials and taken them for granted not thinking of how those families may have felt and never making the connection to present day procedures. For us, it was always a foregone conclusion that if we fell in combat our remains would make it home escorted by fellow marines the entire way. I recall being shot at as we gathered what few remains we could after one of my friends stepped on an IED. We gathered all we could. A friend of mine received a combat award recovering his COs body from a rooftop in Iraq under heavy fire. The thought that some bureaucrats could have implemented a policy of burial in some desert is unsettling. Obviously there are situations were a full recovery may be untenable due to operational difficulties but every effort is made to bury something at home, even if it's just dog tags to provide closure for the families.
While your post is a good one, I feel it leaves some very important points out.
For one, you completely failed to mention the enormous cost and logistical difficulties that would be caused by repatriating almost a million bodies back to Britain. The Imperial (now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission was a government body, so the cost would have come from public funds. This in a country that has been forced to borrow millions already to fight the war.
Another factor you did not mention was the feeling among Ware and others that separating the soldiers in death would be counter to the feeling of brotherhood they had developed. It was felt that they should be buried as they had lived: as comrades.
Allowing people to privately repatriate bodies would also have conflicted with the other policies of the IWGC. Officers and Soldiers were given the same style of headstone and the same plots (Officers are mixed in randomly with the men). This was to avoid class distinction and represent the equality of their sacrifice. Allowing the rich to pay for the bodies of their loved ones to be returned, while the poor could not afford to do so, would not have been in keeping with this ideal.
I feel like you have neglected the full range of motivations that the people in charge of the IWGC had in not repatriating the bodies. You've ascribed a purely political agenda to Ware and his colleges and I feel this paints them in an unfair light.
EDIT:
Just to clear things up. I'm not saying there was no political motivation involved, I just felt that CrossyNZ has painted a simplistic picture of what happened that distorts the truth.
Wow, that's amazing; I hadn't ever considered unresolved grief as a/the key reason that people regard WWI so differently from other wars: Remembrance Day (in Canada) is still very much focussed on WWI, with the old vets, recitals of In Flanders Fields, poppies, images of the graveyards, and truly mournful bugle calls (Last Post) and bagpipes (Amazing Grace). Thinking about WWI always made me cry... even decades before I suddenly discovered that one of my own ancestors was killed in it.
Your comments are something I'll keep in mind this November.
You forgot the part where they refused to bring them home and then charged the families for every letter on the gravestones.
Collective grieving was the most significant result of the sheer number of dead after the Great War. There's a reason why in Britain we hold our remembrance day ceremony at Edward Lutyens Cenotaph. It is an empty tomb. No single person is remembered; instead we remember all that fell together. Our entire memorial culture has been transformed and shaped by the First World War.
You state that it caused social problems, but I'm not convinced that people really were obsessed with returning the dead to Great Britain. You're right - Traditional mourning practices were disrupted, but what WW1 did was create a new form of grief that was expressed at a national level. Somebody else mentioned the importance of equality within death. This is an extremely important part of the story.
After the War around 38,000 memorials were built, the majority of them not depicting men, but simple obelisks designed to represent a shared sacrifice. Yes they were cheaper - but ultimately the IWGC created a new vision of death, of patriotism, and what it meant to be British.
Unending grief is certainly a difficult issue to measure -I don't disagree with the idea that people found it incredibly difficult to come to terms with their loss, an issue which has plagued the existing historiography of the topic. But we should also be wary of attaching our own impression of the war onto contemporaries. There's a lot of evidence to suggest that people believed in the aims of the war, claimed it was just, and even necessary. To this day many call it a 'noble yet futile sacrifice.' Futility however was added later.
One of the best authors to read on the subject is Jay Winter. His book Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the process of grief that emerged after the First World War.
You can interpret mass graves through the lens of the 21st Century. That they distanced people from the sacrifice of the individual, an issue that has plagued or own memory of WW1. Yet I think people saw nobility in the idea of a lost generation, a classless mass of men who gave their lives for a whole number of motivations, but many of whom genuinely felt they were protecting their nation.
On an entirely separate note I think you also need to acknowledge the problem of identifying the dead, piecing them back together, or in fact even finding them.
I've refrained from adding anything to this discussion until now because there really hasn't been much I've felt it necessary to add. I agree with your perspective on this, in the main, though I'd like to say that I am uncomfortable with seeing Sir Fabian Ware and his motives dragged so liberally (and indeed rather casually) through the mud.
All I wish to note at this time is that there are modern consequences to the IWGC's scheme, and that they've been rather surprisingly encouraged by someone with unexpected credentials -- someone, I think, who should know better.
The late Sir John Keegan, who I may call without much exaggeration one of the most popular military historians in the western world, had this to say about the matter in his preface to Jay Winter's The Legacy of the Great War: 90 Years On (2009):
The decisions taken by the original members of the commission -- that each of the dead should have a separate grave and headstone, that the headstone should record age, date, and place of death, regiment, and rank, but that ranks should be intermingled in the burial place and that each headstone should allow space for an inscription by the bereaved -- ensure that the cemeteries are powerful expressions of both national and personal grief. Even had the official histories not been written the cemeteries would serve as a collective memorialization of the war, from which its chronology and topography could be pieced together. Indeed the cemeteries today are much more visited than the official histories are read.
This meshes well enough with what you've already said here yourself, but there are some things in it that I find troubling.
First, there's the important degree to which this public memorial has been shaped and engineered. Conscious decisions were made about what to emphasize and what to occlude; the locations of the cemeteries and of each body within them were carefully staked out; the headstones were designed in a fashion that inescapably emphasizes a sort of orderly anonymity (in stark defiance of the beautifully expressed "riotous individuality" that was mentioned elsewhere). In brief, there was nothing at all organic about this process -- or anything short, either; the last body was interred in 1938. The toll that must have taken upon those in mourning is difficult to express.
Second, though, and most worrying to me is Keegan's rather remarkable declaration that all of this is enough -- that these wholly artificial installations serve as an openly reliable guide to the war's "chronology and topography." They don't. In fact, I would argue, they are fatal to a proper understanding of those things. They are a fabrication; an act of leveling that would likely have seemed baffling to those so leveled while they had been alive, and which continued to cause frustration and confusion to their friends and kin after they were dead.
I really appreciate your post, CrossyNZ. It's the kind of one I had hoped to make myself, but I don't think I could have done it as well -- even if I do have some minor qualms with how some of it is expressed.
Wasn't part of the argument against repatriating war dead that there were so many bodies that were unknown/unidentified? It's been several years, but I remember reading Neil Hanson's Unknown Soldiers, where he makes the point that the large number of unidentified or simply missing bodies complicated the graves registration problem, and was a reason for the building of things such as the ossuary at Douaumont. (I do know that's a French memorial, not a British one ...) But in any case, I seem to remember that the graves commission's decision was complicated by identification problems.
It's been a few years since I read the book; apologies if I've misrepresented it.
Thanks for the response. It's clear you feel passionate about this, as well as having read thoroughly on the subject. This is the kind of answer that I subscribed here for.
I think the bodies were probably such a mess that they didn't want relatives to see at the time. I think this might have disrupted support and also deterred the propaganda being employed to send young men off to die. Plus, I'm not convinced they always knew who thy buried. But perhaps took more of a cue from the list of survivors. Dunno might be utterly wrong but they didn't care enough for the boys in the trenches so why care for their dead corpses.
This is fascinating. Thanks "Best of" for linking to it. My assumption would also have been - given seeing the ossuary at Douaumont - that bodies would not be in a condition to give back to relatives, or that there would be numerous "unknowns." Did that figure into the decision-making, or was that used as an excuse, or was it even a factor?
About Community
Readers
Readers Online
