Heroic padre whose crusade means Britain’s lost Tommies will NEVER be forgotten
Tomorrow, the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior will be at the heart of our national remembrance. A new book reveals it wouldn’t exist but for the . . .
FROM THE rain-soaked Somme, an exhausted British Army padre wrote home to his wife to tell of his grim experiences after a recent action in September 1916. There had been 900 casualties in his brigade alone, and it fell to him to oversee the gangs of ashen-faced young soldiers recovering the corpses of their comrades and burying them.
The work took four gut-wrenching days as they moved in a line across the eerily quiet battlefield, finding bodies, collecting men’s identity tags and carrying their remains to a collection point.
‘No words can tell you of the sights, the smell, the horrors,’ the Rev David Railton confessed to his wife Ruby.
He had stumbled on the remains of his commanding officer — ‘our dear colonel’ — in a shallow crater. ‘It is dreadful standing over the body of a man whom you know and lifting him on to a stretcher.’ And this was a battle they had supposedly won.
Railton, whose story is told for the first time in a newly published biography, was an exceptional army padre. Some of his fellow churchmen stayed away from the front line if possible during World War I and served for as little time as they could, says author Andrew Richards.
But this officer in his khaki uniform and dog collar went everywhere the fighting men went — into the trenches, into battle, into the hospitals and the graveyards.
He ran the gauntlet of artillery shells and sniper fire just as they did. He went into no man’s land with the stretcher-bearers to pick up casualties, crawled back on his knees and carried at least one wounded man to safety.
His easy manner made him a popular figure, too, as did his willingness to listen to troubled, frightened men pouring out their hearts and souls.
He was also the one tasked with writing to grieving relatives to say how a son or father had died and offer what consolation he could.
HIS
bravery at the front won him the high distinction of a Military Cross, but at the cost of mustard-gas damage to his eyes and the mental torture of shell shock — what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — once the war was over.
But his greatest achievement was one with particular poignancy at this time of the year, when red poppies appear in lapels for Remembrance Day today and Remembrance Sunday tomorrow.
For Railton was the driving force behind the idea of honouring those ‘ ghost battalions’ of British soldiers whose bodies were never identified.
He devised the notion of the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior and pressed for it to become a permanent monument in Westminster Abbey.
Railton could never get out of his mind the futility of war, the sheer waste.
‘Yesterday morning I chatted in the front line with one of the jolliest young officers we have,’ he said in a letter home. ‘At night he went out and was hit. He has since died. It is all too miserable.
‘I am tired of the war, of seeing wounds and death and mud and filth.’
At the vast medical stations behind the lines where the wounded were taken and bodies laid out, he couldn’t help noticing the growing number of unidentified corpses laid in rows awaiting burial. Names and numbers were missing either because their identity tags had gone astray or they were so shot up, shelled and shattered that nothing much remained.
Dozens of such men would be buried in the same grave, often just a shell-hole with earth shovelled in on top.
One day, when the padre was sitting in a cottage garden in a devastated French village, his eye fell on a mound of earth and a rough cross of white wood and he wondered who was buried there.
This ‘ unknown British soldier’ needed recognition too, he mused, just like those whose deaths were recorded and whose remains filled the military cemeteries. The idea took root. There should be somewhere back in England where they could be remembered. At least it might give some comfort to bereaved families whose loved ones had no known grave.
He mulled over the idea as he continued his clerical business on the Western Front — setting up his battlefield altar in darkened dugouts to give Communion before the men went over the top; reciting the Lord’s Prayer as bullets whistled overhead; and leading the troops in a defiant and moving Abide With Me at improvised church parades.
The padre inspired his congregations. One Tommy recorded how ‘my tin hat felt like a halo’ after he had belted out Onward Christian Soldiers at a Railton service.
Yet Railton, a modest man, was beset with doubts about the notion he had conceived, as his private (and previously unseen) writings reveal. ‘War is war,’ he wrote, ‘and there is no time for the luxury of idealism. Life is as cheap as a blade of grass and no army, navy or government could carry out such an idea.’
He felt that perhaps he was being stupid: ‘Most people would simply laugh at the notion of taking the mortal remains of an unknown soldier or sailor back to Blighty to be enshrined in the heart of London.’
Railton came home at the end of the war, like many, a broken man.
‘The shedding of blood ceased,’ he wrote as he tried to come to terms with his experiences, ‘but there was no real peace in the souls of men or nations.’
He became Vicar of Margate but would walk the streets at night, unable to sleep. He felt for the thousands of ex-servicemen who couldn’t find work or had been left with mental health problems. And he couldn’t get the ‘ unknown comrades’ of the war out of his mind. In August 1920, he wrote a letter — one he had long been composing in his head — to the Dean of Westminster, suggesting burial of the body of an unknown soldier in the Abbey.
The response was positive: the Dean was keen, if he could get permission from the War Office.
RAILTON’S
suggestion came at the perfect time. Nearly two years had passed since the end of the war and the country was in a mood to remember and honour the sacrifices of its 750,000 dead.
On the first anniversary, in 1919, a temporary Cenotaph had been erected in Whitehall as the centrepiece of a remembrance parade, and the architect, Edwin Lutyens, was in the process of transforming his wood-and-plaster memorial into a
permanent one in Portland stone in time for the 1920 ceremony.
There would be a royal parade, a marchpast and a ‘great silence’ (originally to be an achingly long five minutes until the king, George V, insisted on brevity).
The ‘unknown soldier’ idea was swept along in this tide of sentiment.
The Dean floated it in high places. To Buckingham Palace he wrote: ‘There are thousands of graves of English “Tommies” who fell at the front, names not known. My idea is that one such body should be exhumed and interred in Westminster Abbey.’
The King was at first uncertain but the reforming Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, grabbed at the ‘ impressive suggestion’. It was given the go-ahead to be unveiled on the same day as the newly finished permanent Cenotaph.
Railton’s idea was not only being taken up but all the stops would be pulled out to make it happen in just a few weeks’ time, on November 11. He was ‘overwhelmed with joy’. One of his suggestions was firmly rejected. He had wanted it to be a memorial to the ‘Unknown Comrade’ because that wording seemed allencompassing and democratic, a tribute to the common man, to those who had borne the brunt in the conflict.
But the idea was vetoed instantly from on high as too redolent of the recent Bolshevik revolution in Russia and its slaughter of the Tsar.
Another of Railton’s suggestions was taken up, though. Throughout his war service he had carried in his pack a Union Jack, folded tightly alongside a small wooden cross and two candlesticks.
The flag was 8ft wide and he had used it as an altar cloth but also to cover hundreds of corpses and coffins before they were lowered into the ground.
He regarded the blood- tinged flag almost as a sacred symbol and his plan had always been to offer it to a cathedral in London when the war was over, to be flown in memory of those who died.
Now it was agreed that ‘the Padre’s Flag’ would be in Westminster Abbey, as part of what was to be known as the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior.
Over in France, four, possibly six and even as many as eight — accounts differ — ‘unknown’ bodies were disinterred at the Somme, Ypres and other battlefields and taken to a chapel. There a British general (possibly blindfolded) picked one at random.
The body that had been selected was put in a plain pine shell and taken by ambulance to Boulogne castle to lie in state. There, undertakers placed it in a coffin of oak from Hampton Court, with a crusader’s sword on top and an iron shield inscribed with the words ‘A British warrior who fell in the Great War 1914-18 for King and Country’.
With great ceremony — and a moving speech from the French Marshal Foch, thanking Britain for her bravery and sacrifice — the ‘Tommy Anonyme’, as the French called him, was put on a British destroyer bound for Dover and from there taken by rail to London.
As the train steamed through the Kent countryside, silent crowds paid their respects from station platforms, bridges, fields and embankments.
In the capital, the body in its coffin was placed on a gun carriage, draped with Railton’s flag and escorted through the streets by admirals and field marshals, the highest-ranking officers in the land.
Millions lined the route as many as 20 deep in what one historian describes as an unparalleled outpouring of public emotion. Soldiers stood with heads bowed and arms reversed. There was an awed, reverential silence.
The vast procession halted in Whitehall, where the massed bands played O God, Our Help In Ages Past and the King solemnly unveiled the newly completed stone Cenotaph. There was a two-minute silence before the gun carriage moved on to the Abbey. The King marched behind with his sons. Bringing up the rear was a phalanx of ex-servicemen, some limping and leaning on sticks.
At the Abbey, a grave had been dug at the west end of the nave, to be filled in using soil brought in 100 sandbags from France. Coldstream Guardsmen lowered in the coffin.
Railton, in his army uniform, watched from a specially reserved seat as his Union Jack was draped over the grave.
He never wrote or spoke about the occasion — he was not a man to boast or indulge himself. Others put themselves forward to claim authorship of the Unknown Warrior idea, including two MPs and a journalist.
Railton kept his own counsel, stating only that ‘it doesn’t matter a brass pin who first had the idea; any ideas that are good come from God who inspires men’.
His padre’s flag stayed in place for a year, until the grave was covered with a black marble stone inscribed: ‘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’. The flag was hung from a pillar near by.
AS
FOR Railton himself, he became a fervent campaigner on behalf of ex- servicemen from the Great War, many of whom suffered badly in the economic downturns of the Twenties and Thirties. He was a popular preacher who never feared to speak his mind about social ills, to the extent that one parishioner pleaded not to have ‘any more of those sermons from Russia’.
He worked in the north of England as Vicar of Bolton and Rector of Liverpool and was active in the Church of England’s Industrial Christian Fellowship, which proselytised among factory workers.
When war was declared in 1939, despite all he had endured in the previous conflict (or perhaps because of it), he offered himself as a front-line army padre again. But, at 55, he was considered too old.
He continued his ministry in heavily bombed Liverpool, retiring in 1945.
His death ten years later was a bizarre accident: at the age of 70, he fell from a train in Scotland when a door burst open as it neared a station.
One obituarist hailed him as ‘a kind man with a common touch’. And his padre’s flag? That stayed aloft on its perch in Westminster Abbey until the Queen’s coronation in 1953, when BBC bosses took it upon themselves to move it because it obstructed television camera shots down the nave.
It was later re-hung in St George’s Chapel, just inside the Abbey’s Great West Door — where, more than 100 years old, slightly faded now and its fabric a little flimsier, it remains.
It is a tribute not just to those who died in battle but to the determination of one man who did his best to bring humanity (and divinity) to the battlefield.