Empires of the Dead by David Crane

Empires of the Dead by David Crane

Author:David Crane [David Crane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-07-04T16:00:00+00:00


EIGHT

The Task

In all the arguments over principles it is easy to lose sight of the sheer scale of the physical task that the Imperial War Graves Commission had set itself. In the months immediately after the war it was naturally impossible to put a precise figure on the Empire’s dead, but as prisoners returned and the exhumations and discoveries continued and the Gallipoli peninsula was opened, the numbers of dead and missing began to assume something like their familiar, neatly rounded totals.

There may possibly never be a final figure – bodies are still found, identifications made, the missing given a name and grave, a whole new cemetery constructed – but there would be over 580,000 separate burials before the Commission had completed its immediate task. By the time that another war had added its own grim toll, the Commission had more than 23,000 burial sites under its control, but for all the global scale of its later work nothing in its history can begin to compare with the physical, logistical and administrative feat of burying or commemorating those half a million and more dead of the First World War who have their individual Commission graves.

These figures need to be put in their wider context of course – France had lost 1,398,000 men, Russia 1,811,000, Germany 2,037,000, Austria-Hungary 1,100,000, Italy 578,000, the USA 114,000, Turkey and Bulgaria 892,000, a grand total of 9,450,000 even before civilian deaths are taken into account – but no country was planning to do quite what Britain was. It should be remembered too that France and Belgium had a devastated country to reconstruct but that also made the Commission’s task harder. They were starting from scratch in a shattered land; they were struggling against a chronic shortage of labour, gardening and clerical staff; they were working in the aftermath of the greatest cataclysm in Europe’s history; they were competing with the rival claims of agriculture and demobilisation, and while numbers conjure up something of the challenge – 580,000 gravestones to be quarried, shaped, incised and lettered, to take just the most obvious example – they cannot remotely suggest the difficulties against which it was met. ‘The Commission itself started its work on the Continent with a staff of only eight operating from headquarters buried in the forests near Hesdin,’ the Commission’s official historian wrote,

hard put to it to find even basic necessities. Enterprising officers went out on the scrounge returning with quantities of supplies that had been begged or borrowed from the withdrawing army units … Gradually they built up stores, commandeered camps, and built others, and soon they acquired a miscellaneous collection of vehicles.

It was much the same story in London, where temporary huts had to be erected on the bed of the drained lake in St James’s Park to accommodate a growing Commission staff. But it was the itinerant labour force levelling and preparing the hundreds of cemeteries that stretched like a chain down the line of the Western Front who had it hardest.



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