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b i o g r a p h y Prizes The McKitterick for first novels (published or unpublished) by the over 40s The Betty Trask for first novels (published or unpublished) by the under 35s The Tom Gallon for short stories (published or unpublished) by writers who have had at least one short story accepted for publication Join the Society of Authors An annual subscription costs just £95 (£68 if 35 or under) and includes confidential clause-by-clause contract vetting and advice on all aspects of the writing profession. You are eligible to join as soon as you have received a contract. For more details and to download an application form: www.societyofauthors.org j a n e r i dl e y At Their Last Post Empires of the Dead: How One Man’s Vision Led to the Creation of WWI’s War Graves By David Crane (William Collins 289pp £16.99) In April 1915 a 29-year-old lieutenant named William Gladstone was killed in France after only a few days in the trenches. The exhumation of soldiers’ bodies was forbidden, but this particular lieutenant was the grandson of the statesman Gladstone and his devastated parents pressured Prime Minister Asquith to wangle permission for his body to be exhumed and shipped home. He was buried next to his father at Hawarden.To us this might seem only fitting, but at the time it provoked howls of criticism. Some claimed it was outrageous that string-pulling, wealthy toffs should be allowed the privilege of home burials while the bodies of the poor lay rotting in France. On the other hand, it could be argued that the nation had no right to own the bodies of the men who had given their lives in its service. This tension lies at the heart of David Crane’s vivid and thought-provoking book. The hero of the story is a forgotten maverick named Fabian Ware. He was born into a family of Plymouth Brethren and, like the naturalist Philip Gosse, his father believed in an imminent Second Coming. Ware rejected the sect and, after some years of drudgery as a schoolteacher, joined Milner’s Kindergarten of bright young men in South Africa. Back home, he became editor of the Tory Morning Post. His politics were a sort of Edwardian version of UKIP: he was an imperialist and an anti-German warmonger. When war broke out in August 1914, Ware, aged 45, was too old to fight. Determined not to miss out, he crossed to France with the motor ambulances of the Red Cross. While picking up the wounded, Ware’s mobile unit took to labelling the simple wooden crosses that marked the graves of the war dead. He soon spotted a glaring gap in the system. The army authorities had failed to make any provision for dealing with casualties. Bodies were carelessly dumped into mass graves with no identification. Ware persuaded the army authorities to form a Graves Registration Commission (GRC) with him at its head. He also succeeded in persuading the French to allow land to be appropriated for the burial of Allied dead. The GRC did painstaking work, creating a register of burial grounds and names, counting graves, photographing them and marking them with labels written with hard black lead. As the casualties mounted, the work expanded massively. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme some 20,000 British men were killed, making a mockery of Ware’s careful methods. Employing a combination of bloody-mindedness and charm, Ware expanded his organisation. The Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC) was founded in 1917. Ware appointed three architects – Edwin Lutyens, Herbert Baker and Reginald Blomfield. Lutyens and Baker had quarrelled in India over the gradient that Baker created in New Delhi, concealing the dome of Lutyens’s Viceroy’s House from the ceremonial route (Baker won; Lutyens called it his Bakerloo). In France they quarrelled again over the architecture of the war cemeteries. Lutyens designed a nondenominational Great War Stone, while Baker argued for an English churchyard and a Christian cross. In the end a compromise was reached and both the cross and the great stone were used. In spite of the bickering, they produced masterpieces: Lutyens’s Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval, Baker’s cemetery at Tyne Cot and Blomfield’s memorial at Menin Gate. The story of these has been told before. What fascinated me about Empires of the Dead was the story of the bodies. The blueprint for the war cemeteries was drawn up Sir Frederic Kenyon, the director of the British Museum. He seems to have been a pathologically tidy-minded man. In accordance with his recommendations, the dead were given identical headstones measuring 2’6” by 1’3”, arranged in rows like a battalion on parade, facing east towards Literary Review | n o v e m b e r 2 0 1 3 12
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b i o g r a p h y the enemy – or towards God, whichever you prefer. The cratered, stinking mud and mangled corpses of the Western Front were reimagined as an army of the dead. As Crane suggests, the impersonal neatness of the war cemeteries helped to conceal the bloody, unspeakable reality of war from those at home who came to visit, as they still do today. The construction of these cemeteries involved a staggering enterprise of exhuming bodies from mass graves or random burials, identifying corpses and reinterring them. The governing principle in all of this was equality of sacrifice. No one was allowed special treatment, no individual memorials were permitted. There were complaints from the public and pathetic pleas from grieving families, but Ware ignored them. Ware was a contradictory, conflicted character. Part individualist, part collectivist, at times he seems an attractive John Buchan hero, but he could also be a harsh authoritarian. One of the few who dared to speak out against the IWGC was a little-known Tory MP, Viscount Wolmer. ‘By all means have memorials,’ he said, ‘but you have no right to employ, in making these memorials, the bodies of other people’s relatives.’ To us, accustomed to the sight of the coffins of soldiers killed in Afghanistan being brought home to Wootton Bassett, the IWGC’s appropriation and nationalisation of half a million war dead seem unthinkable. But, as Wolmer pointed out, there were no women on the Commission. These were the graves of men built by men. Splendid though it was, the necropolis created by Ware and the IWGC denied the survivors – and especially the grieving women – the emotional closure that they so desperately needed. David Crane writes exuberant, joyful prose and it is hard not to admire Fabian Ware, whose sheer drive and determination ensured that the dead of the First World War received burials and epic memorials. But Crane is no triumphalist. He is acutely alive to the ambiguities and nuances surrounding the issues of war and death; and that makes this a fine and troubling book, as well as a riveting read. To order this book for £13.59, see the Literary Review Bookshop on page 10 a n dre w ly c e t t Burmese Days Uncle Bill: The Authorised Biography of Field Marshal Viscount Slim By Russell Miller (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 466pp £25) In March 1942 the fate of the Allies hung in the balance. Despite Pearl Harbor, the Americans had yet to intervene decisively in the Second World War and, while events in Europe showed signs of turning, the speed and precision of the Japanese advance through Southeast Asia and into Burma threatened to overwhelm British defences. India was at risk, and no one needed reminding that the loss of the jewel in the empire’s crown would be catastrophic, not just for British interests in the Subcontinent but also for the prosecution of the war effort elsewhere. With a touch of good fortune, the British chiefs of staff identified Lieutenant General Bill Slim as the right man to take command of the main Indian Army units keeping the Japanese at bay in Burma (they became known as Burcorps). After deciding his position was impossible to hold, Slim arranged for his army’s withdrawal back into India, a punishing 900mile trek – the longest retreat in British army history. Then, as commander of the new 14th Army, he masterminded the fight back against the seemingly invincible Japanese. Within three years – with help from the Chinese and Americans in the north and from the ‘Chindits’, the longrange penetration units commanded by Major General Orde Wingate – the 14th Army had crossed back over the Irrawaddy River and had the Japanese on the run. Slim’s special qualities were widely noted, not least by two writers who served under him. One was John Masters, a Gurkha officer and later author of Bhowani Junction, who remarked on the power of his slow, unaffected oratory. The other was George Macdonald Fraser, creator of Flashman, who stated: ‘He had the head of a general with the heart of a private soldier.’ Coming from a small-business background in Birmingham, Slim’s early army career ran on different lines to those of his fellow officers who had served on the Western Front. He had initially gone to Gallipoli, where he fought with Gurkha troops and was wounded. To consternation in Whitehall, he was still officially an invalid when he surfaced in the hard-fought campaign against the Turks in Mesopotamia. Somehow (in a manner that ought to have been explained in more detail by Russell Miller), he was again wounded but was treated on the battlefield by a Turkish orderly and made his way back to his own lines. The story of the Burma campaign has often been told and Miller offers few new insights. His forte is his ability to convey not only the excitement of Slim’s military operations but also the complex thinking that went into them. Everything is deftly set in context – so that, for example, Slim’s chastening experiences on the Sudan– Ethiopia border in late 1940, where he believed he had failed to be bold enough, play an integral role in his career and in the unfolding of his campaign in Burma. Three men could have upset Slim’s plans. One was the querulous General Joseph (‘Vinegar Joe’) Stilwell, who was in charge of America’s military operations alongside the Chinese Nationalists. He disliked British officers and was damned if he would play any role in shoring up the British Empire. Fortunately he made an exception for Slim and was prepared to work with him. The second was Wingate, the Chindits’ maverick commander, who, after being summoned to the Allies’ conference in Quebec in August 1943, thought he had Churchill’s ear. He made Slim’s life difficult by threatening to take operational disagreements to the prime minister. In relating the consequences these had for the Burma campaign, Miller is clearly partisan, supporting Slim on contentious issues, such as his dismissal n o v e m b e r 2 0 1 3 | Literary Review 13

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b i o g r a p h y

Prizes The McKitterick for first novels (published or unpublished) by the over 40s

The Betty Trask for first novels (published or unpublished) by the under 35s

The Tom Gallon for short stories (published or unpublished) by writers who have had at least one short story accepted for publication Join the Society of Authors An annual subscription costs just £95

(£68 if 35 or under) and includes confidential clause-by-clause contract vetting and advice on all aspects of the writing profession. You are eligible to join as soon as you have received a contract. For more details and to download an application form: www.societyofauthors.org j a n e r i dl e y

At Their Last Post Empires of the Dead: How One Man’s Vision Led to the

Creation of WWI’s War Graves

By David Crane (William Collins 289pp £16.99)

In April 1915 a 29-year-old lieutenant named William Gladstone was killed in France after only a few days in the trenches. The exhumation of soldiers’ bodies was forbidden, but this particular lieutenant was the grandson of the statesman Gladstone and his devastated parents pressured Prime Minister Asquith to wangle permission for his body to be exhumed and shipped home. He was buried next to his father at Hawarden.To us this might seem only fitting, but at the time it provoked howls of criticism. Some claimed it was outrageous that string-pulling, wealthy toffs should be allowed the privilege of home burials while the bodies of the poor lay rotting in France. On the other hand, it could be argued that the nation had no right to own the bodies of the men who had given their lives in its service.

This tension lies at the heart of David Crane’s vivid and thought-provoking book. The hero of the story is a forgotten maverick named Fabian Ware. He was born into a family of Plymouth Brethren and, like the naturalist Philip Gosse, his father believed in an imminent Second Coming. Ware rejected the sect and, after some years of drudgery as a schoolteacher, joined Milner’s Kindergarten of bright young men in South Africa. Back home, he became editor of the Tory Morning Post. His politics were a sort of Edwardian version of UKIP: he was an imperialist and an anti-German warmonger.

When war broke out in August 1914, Ware, aged 45, was too old to fight. Determined not to miss out, he crossed to France with the motor ambulances of the Red Cross. While picking up the wounded, Ware’s mobile unit took to labelling the simple wooden crosses that marked the graves of the war dead. He soon spotted a glaring gap in the system. The army authorities had failed to make any provision for dealing with casualties. Bodies were carelessly dumped into mass graves with no identification. Ware persuaded the army authorities to form a Graves Registration Commission

(GRC) with him at its head. He also succeeded in persuading the French to allow land to be appropriated for the burial of Allied dead. The GRC did painstaking work, creating a register of burial grounds and names, counting graves, photographing them and marking them with labels written with hard black lead.

As the casualties mounted, the work expanded massively. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme some 20,000 British men were killed, making a mockery of Ware’s careful methods. Employing a combination of bloody-mindedness and charm, Ware expanded his organisation. The Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC) was founded in 1917. Ware appointed three architects – Edwin Lutyens, Herbert Baker and Reginald Blomfield.

Lutyens and Baker had quarrelled in India over the gradient that Baker created in New Delhi, concealing the dome of Lutyens’s Viceroy’s House from the ceremonial route (Baker won; Lutyens called it his Bakerloo). In France they quarrelled again over the architecture of the war cemeteries. Lutyens designed a nondenominational Great War Stone, while Baker argued for an English churchyard and a Christian cross. In the end a compromise was reached and both the cross and the great stone were used. In spite of the bickering, they produced masterpieces: Lutyens’s Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval, Baker’s cemetery at Tyne Cot and Blomfield’s memorial at Menin Gate. The story of these has been told before. What fascinated me about Empires of the Dead was the story of the bodies.

The blueprint for the war cemeteries was drawn up Sir Frederic Kenyon, the director of the British Museum. He seems to have been a pathologically tidy-minded man. In accordance with his recommendations, the dead were given identical headstones measuring 2’6” by 1’3”, arranged in rows like a battalion on parade, facing east towards

Literary Review | n o v e m b e r 2 0 1 3 12

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