The Unknown Warrior (36 page)

Large sculptures of animals were also placed on the battlefields to commemorate regiments or nations that had fought in an area. There is an elk at Vimy Ridge for the Canadian forces, and a dragon for the Royal Welch Regiment at Mametz Wood.

War cemeteries are present not just in the countries of the conflict. At Cannock Chase, in England, there is a very large German cemetery containing graves marked by crosses of Belgian granite. These represent the final resting place for 2,143 German prisoners of war who died in British camps from their wounds, disease and suicide. They were brought to Cannock Chase after having been exhumed from the churchyards where they had been buried during the war and they are now accompanied by many of their countrymen who fell in the Second World War.

The work at the site of the mass burial at Saint-Rémy-la-Calonne indicated that there might have been a hierarchy of burial. Excavators believed that the captain was laid in first, followed by the other officers and finally the private soldiers, with all bodies laid head to toe (Adam, 1999: 32). Such a formalised mode of burial may have been possible early in the war (this incident was in 1914), but the sheer numbers of troops killed on the Western Front meant that such formalities were often impossible. Even when they were observed, artillery barrages frequently reopened the graves of those killed earlier in the war. The effects of artillery also ensured that some of those killed could not be buried as there was next to nothing left of them; at times only small portions of a man were laid to rest: ‘The following day when I was given the job of going round with sandbags, collecting the pieces, we had to rescue some bits from telegraph wires where they'd been blown at great velocity, and we buried them in the common grave' (Private R. Richards, Royal Engineers, on the effects of a shell; Arthur, 2002: 106).

An example of the palimpsest of burial on this front is to be found at Monchy-le-Preux, Pas de Calais, as a result of rescue archaeology work. Here, the body of a British soldier (a subaltern of the Royal Scots Regiment) was found in a shell hole with his arms and legs spread wide apart indicating a lack of ceremony. Below his legs was the body of a German infantryman who had probably been killed some time before (Desfossés
et al.
, 2000: 34). A similar situation was revealed in an evaluation excavation on the route of the A29 in France, at Monigny-les-Bains. The body of an unknown Australian soldier was intertwined with that of an Algerian (Olivier, 2000: 24). As we have noted (see Accommodation, page 191), a number of Germans were also buried in a shell hole at Gavrelle, and it seems to have been expedient to use these large holes for quick burial of the dead (
ibid.
: 35) and that mass burials were commonplace.

Some burials were placed next to the fallen of previous wars; according to Jünger (2003: 190), several German soldiers were interred ‘in the military cemetery at Thiaucourt. In among the fallen of this war, there were also fighters from 1870 [the Franco-Prussian War]. One of those old graves was marked by a mossy stone with the inscription: “Distant to the eye, but to the heart forever nigh”.'

As a postscript to this section, it could also be pertinent to mention the burial and memorial of soldiers who died and were buried in cemeteries together, yet who never came under fire. Cemeteries at places such as Durrington, Codford and Sutton Veny in Wiltshire reveal the fact that many men died as a result of disease in areas of training, many of them far from home – New Zealanders, Canadians and Australians.

THE FALLEN

The excavation of human remains from First World War battle sites is a sensitive issue. In many cases the deceased have surviving relatives and, at time of writing, there are even some surviving veterans. It is a conflict from which there are numerous photographs, film images and recorded testimonies of combatants and civilians. The recovery of human remains is imbued with a pathos unequalled on archaeological excavations. The vast number of men listed simply as ‘missing' on the battlefields of Ypres, Verdun and the Somme ensures that recovery of human remains continues, whether by farmers, by those undertaking excavations in advance of development work, or even by walkers. Some of these remains, if excavated using archaeological techniques, can provide information on how the individual died, facets of his life in the trenches, and, on occasions, his name.

One such excavation, on the Heidenkopf at Serre on the Somme by No Man's Land Archaeological Team, is a case in point. In addition to the German soldier with the flint (see Practice, page 183), the team found another German soldier who, through careful analysis of a partial identity disc, and the pattern of his cuff buttons, they were able to identify as Jakob Hones. He was a farm labourer from Stuttgart who served in the 121 Reserve Infantry Regiment and had been killed in June 1915. A third body was that of a British man, found lying on top of chalk fill on the front edge of the Heidenkopf. The many small shell fragments among his bones and the fracture of his right femur illustrated the savage realities of death through shell burst (Brown, 2005: 30).

UNKNOWN WARRIOR 13

When part of the site of Boezinge, to the north of Ypres and east of the Ypres–Yser canal, was threatened by the development of an industrial estate, the Belgian government sanctioned the exploration of the area – the site of the first German gas attack in 1915 – by The Diggers, a group of amateur archaeologists. The group has been criticised for its use of metal detectors (Saunders, 2002: 103), but its efforts have yielded important information, which has been archived by the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres. Had it not been for The Diggers' work, much information might have been lost to developers (for The Diggers' reports, see The Diggers, 2005). The work confirmed that this area had covered British and German trench systems at a point where no man's land was far from wide. Excavations recovered both spent and live rifle rounds (British and German), a British rifle with fixed bayonet, barbed wire and wooden duckboards from the trenches, and a large amount of material relating to the lives and deaths of soldiers.

On 2 August 2001, the remains of two British soldiers were excavated at Boezinge. With one of the men, Burial 124, a number of items were found: a broken pipe, a shaving brush, a fragment of a toothbrush, a spoon, an iodine ampoule, remnants of a gas mask (by the individual's face), a pocket knife, a small mirror (perhaps a trench mirror for observation), several buckles, an entrenching tool, a blue water bottle, some broken pencils and two badges of the Royal Welch Fusiliers.

Close by was another man. He was found with a Mills bomb (hand grenade), the two eyeglasses of a gas mask, a brush, buckles, buttons, spoon, pipe, knife, cartridges, a tin box with tobacco snuff and (importantly for dating) a small leather purse with coins, some of which had a 1917 date. From his insignia he too was a Royal Welch Fusilier (Aurel Sercu, pers. comm.).

Some 2ft below the men were the remnants of a trench proper, including wooden duckboards. Given the fact that these two men were both Royal Welch Fusiliers and that coins of 1917 were found, it is possible to date their deaths to between January and July 1917 when the 38th (Welsh) Division with the Royal Welch Fusiliers was stationed at Boezinge. Both men were not interred as part of an established burial ritual; they were both battlefield casualties, buried by the same action that killed them.

UNKNOWN WARRIOR 14

The Unknown Warrior, Westminster Abbey

The final unknown soldier in this volume is the source of its inspiration. Dedications have been made by other countries around the world in a similar fashion. This is the British Unknown Warrior (see Plate 29).

On 7 November 1920, one burial from Ypres, one from the Somme, one from Arras, and one from the Aisne were exhumed; they were the bodies of unknown British servicemen of unknown rank and unknown armed service. One of these bodies was chosen at random and was brought back to Britain on HMS
Verdun
in a coffin of English oak. (The other three bodies were buried in a military cemetery at St Pol.) On 11 November, the coffin was drawn past the cenotaph in London on a gun carriage and taken to Westminster Abbey where it passed through a guard of honour of 100 Victoria Cross holders (the highest honour bestowed on a British soldier; Gavaghan, 1995: 65). There, in the west nave, the warrior was laid to rest, buried in the abbey that holds the graves of kings and poets, scientists and musicians. On a slab of black Belgian marble, laid over the grave in 1921, the inscription on the tomb reads:

BENEATH THIS STONE RESTS THE BODY

OF A BRITISH WARRIOR

UNKNOWN BY NAME OR RANK

BROUGHT FROM FRANCE TO LIE AMONG

THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS OF THE LAND

AND BURIED HERE ON ARMISTICE DAY

11
NOV
: 1920,
IN THE PRESENCE OF

HIS MAJESTY KING GEORGE V

HIS MINISTERS OF STATE

THE CHIEFS OF HIS FORCES

AND A VAST CONCOURSE OF THE NATION

THUS ARE COMMEMORATED THE MANY

MULTITUDES WHO DURING THE GREAT

WAR OF
1914–1918
GAVE THE MOST THAT

MAN CAN GIVE LIFE ITSELF

FOR GOD

FOR KING AND COUNTRY

FOR LOVED ONES HOME AND EMPIRE

FOR THE SACRED CAUSE OF JUSTICE AND

THE FREEDOM OF THE WORLD

THEY BURIED HIM AMONG THE KINGS BECAUSE HE

HAD DONE GOOD TOWARD GOD AND TOWARD

HIS HOUSE

In 1921 the Unknown Warrior was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honour of the United States of America (Gavaghan, 1995: 73).

John Laffin (2003: 222), in his book
Tommy Atkins: the Story of the English Soldier
, rather mournfully concluded:

Colonel John McCrae, a distinguished Canadian doctor, who died of pneumonia at Wimereux, France, in January 1918, movingly crystallized in his poem, ‘In Flanders Fields', the loss of so many British and Commonwealth soldiers. One stanza reads:

We are the dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset flow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

I would make an addition to the last line:

In Flanders fields forgotten.

Despite, or perhaps as a result of, the scale of loss of life, this war more than any before it attempted to commemorate the common soldier – the private in the ‘Poor Bloody Infantry'. As far as the living were concerned, campaign medals were issued to all soldiers, independent of rank. Fallen soldiers were buried, where possible, in cemeteries with individual headstones – cemeteries that are attended to this day. Where the body was not recovered, a name was entered on monuments such as the Menin Gate, the walls of Tyne Cot cemetery or the Thiepval monument (73,367 names of the missing on the Somme are carved on the latter – Laffin, 2003: 211). Cities, towns and villages produced their own memorials on which the names of the dead were carved.

Contrast the commemoration of the common soldier in the First World War with those of the Battle of Waterloo or flight from Moscow some 100 years earlier. Today, when remains of the dead and of the trenches in which they fought are uncovered through the progress of modern infrastructure, they are given due deference even when their names have long since been lost. Historians and archaeologists are constantly striving to understand more about the First World War and to uncover details of the lives of those who fought and died in it. Those who died on the Western Front are being remembered.

Conclusion

Pay heed to nourishing the troops; do not unnecessarily fatigue them. Unite them in spirit; conserve their strength. Make unfathomable plans for the movement of the army.

(Sun Tzu,
The Art of War
)

I have examined the presence of infantry from the Bronze Age to the First World War, yet archaeological sites have revealed details of the lives of humans from early in the prehistoric period. One of the elements that appears to be traceable throughout most periods is the violent act. This is not a comment on the predisposition of our species to fight, simply that such acts occur.