Remembering the fallen

This year as usual, on either Remembrance Sunday or Armistice Day, many people in the UK will gather at a local war memorial to remember the country’s war dead, those of the two World Wars and other conflicts since 1945. Lines from Laurence Binyon’s famous 1914 poem “For the Fallen”, beginning ‘They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old’ will be read and its promise, ‘We will remember them’, will be intoned by the assembled as a civic duty. The whole commemoration has such an air of eternity about it that it is easy to forget that remembrance has a history and it was not ever thus.

Many of Remembrance’s rituals, including poppies and the Two Minutes’ Silence, go back to the Great War. The time and date chosen are a deliberate marker of the end of that war, the guns falling silent at 11am on 11 November 1918. And yet in 1945 there were national debates about whether to inaugurate a separate commemoration for the fallen of the Second World War, with a host of competing proposals, including Victory in Europe Day (8 May) and Battle of Britain Day (15 August). Ultimately, Armistice Day or its nearest Sunday triumphed out of a desire to link together the sacrifice of the dead in both wars as undertaken for the same principles against the same enemy.

The erection of local war memorials, now a seemingly fixed feature of almost every community in the UK, had a more contentious history, for they were substitute grave sites given the government’s policy of refusing to repatriate the war dead—in previous wars the wealthy had been able to return the bodies of their beloved for burial in Britain. A long and sometimes acrimonious campaign was waged by those who wished to bring back the nation’s sons. The Countess of Selbourne branded the ‘conscription of bodies’ as a ‘tyrannical decree’ and the ‘contempt of liberty’, but the government was unmoved. Noting that only the wealthy few could pay to bring home their dead, it clung to a principle of equal treatment to represent a common sacrifice. The official ban on repatriation remained until the Falklands War in 1982.

By contrast, the most striking feature of modern war memorials, the naming of the dead, met with popular support. It was a vast exercise in bureaucracy. Overseas, principally in Flanders, the names of 1,075,293 British and Imperial soldiers were carved in stone in the cemeteries and memorials of the War Graves Commission (another invention of the war, founded in 1917). This exercise in (to adapt the phrase of the historian Thomas Laqueur) hyper-necronominalism, naming the dead, was paralleled at home by local communities erecting their own war memorials. Committees were established, names collected, and decisions made not just about the form of the memorial but who to include (a particular issue was those who died of their wounds after November 1918) and in which order, alphabetical or by rank.

The scale of the memorialization effort is notable—Rudyard Kipling compared it to the erection of the pyramids by the Egyptian pharaohs—but that has often obscured its roots. Naming all the dead, rank-and-file alongside officers, was not new in 1914. Significant efforts had been made in the Boer (or South African War) of 1899–1902 to erect graves and memorials naming all the dead, and that was merely a development of earlier practices, including the Crimean War, 1853–6: by the end of that conflict, British forces had created 120 war cemeteries of varying sizes along the western shores of the Black Sea, most of them identifying the buried by name or initials. Naming the dead was a developing tradition across the nineteenth century, not, as is often believed, a new form of memory for new forms of industrial slaughter in the twentieth century. A contrast is sometimes drawn between the anonymity of the rank-and-file dead of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and the preservation of the names of the dead from the Western Front a century later. But perhaps the first British war memorial to name all of the dead, officers and ordinary soldiers, comes from Waterloo: that of the fallen of the 12^th Light Dragoons naming 2 sergeant-majors, 4 sergeants, 3 corporals, and 38 privates, which by 1823 had joined a host of memorials in Waterloo church. The roots of Remembrance Day stretch back through the trenches of the First World War to another conflict in the soil of Flanders a century earlier.

An appreciation of the slowly evolving history of war commemoration and remembrance may better equip societies to face the challenges of future conflicts, notably the extensive use of drones and the vastly increased scale of civilian casualties since 1918. For questions of how best to remember are a key part of how to comprehend and perhaps even how to prevent war. Remembering, as they say, is always about the future.

_{Featured image by Raelle Gann-Owens via Unsplash.}