Unforgotten: Britain’s missing war heroes
After more than a century, the search goes on for soldiers who died in the First World War, writes Robert Sackville-west
Alongside the bodies were a shaving brush, a metal water canteen, still swilling half-full
Every year some 50 sets of human remains from the First World War are recovered
At the end of the First World War, with battle zones in chaos, the whereabouts of more than half of Britain’s million war dead were still unknown. Most were presumed killed, lost forever under the battlefields of northern France and Flanders. These fields continue to yield up their dead today, 100 years after the mass searching for human remains was called off. Only last week, it was confirmed that a body turned up by a farmer near Arras in 2013 was that of Lieutenant Osmond Bartle Wordsworth, a great-nephew of the poet, who had been killed in 1917.
People often described the landscapes of northern France and Flanders as post-apocalyptic, like the end of the world. Even four months after the last shots had been fired, the putrid smell of rotting flesh from humans and horses hung faintly in the air. The poet John Masefield, for instance, pictured the area around Serre in the Somme as “skinned, gouged, flayed and slaughtered, and the villages smashed to powder, so that no man could ever say there had been a village there within the memory of man”.
Creating order from this chaos was a massive undertaking. The bereaved were travelling on pilgrimages to the Western Front in growing numbers. They were hoping to find the graves of their loved ones identifiable and well tended, and not expecting to see desolate and makeshift cemeteries with rickety crosses or, even worse, corpses left out in the open. In the immediate aftermath of the war, more than 200,000 bodies, many of whom had previously lain unidentified in isolated graves, were exhumed, reinterred and, where possible, given a name in the hauntingly beautiful military cemeteries that now define our commemoration of the World Wars. One of these bodies – in whose case no attempt was made, intentionally, at identification – was that of the Unknown Warrior, who was exhumed and then buried in Westminster Abbey in November 1920.
An Australian soldier with the Graves Detachment described in a letter to his mother in April 1919 how an English lady came to Villersbretonneux looking for her son’s grave. A load of bodies had just come in, and the exhumers had not had time to bury them before they knocked off work for the day.
As a result, she found the body of her son lying in a bag on the ground, and “fainted when she saw him and is in hospital suffering from shock…”
The systematic searching of the battlefields began in the spring of 1919 and continued until the autumn of 1921, exactly one hundred years ago, when responsibility for clearance was transferred from the Army to the War Graves Commission. The battlefields were divided into squares, and assigned to exhumation squads, consisting of 32 men each, equipped with rubber gloves, shovels, stakes to mark the location of graves, canvas and rope to tie up the remains, stretchers, disinfectant and wire cutters. Clearance and burial were among the most unpleasant tasks of the time, attracting some of the roughest, battle-hardened volunteers, who came to be known as the Body Snatchers or Cold Meat Specialists.
The process of identification was difficult, since the ground had been fought over and bombarded by shells many times over, creating a complex layering of corpses and debris from successive military actions. Nevertheless, a skilled “spotter” or “sounder” could locate a body just by examining the colour of the vegetation and soil where it might be buried. Grass was often a vivid bluish-green with broader blades where bodies were buried, while earth and water turned a greenish black or grey. Some of the exhumers carried hollow sticks, one end of which they would sink into the ground, while sniffing at the other end for any whiff of human decomposition that might alert them to a body below.
There were some success stories as relatives searched desperately for the graves of their sons and spouses. Second Lieutenant Eric Hayter was serving with the Royal Field Artillery during the German Spring Offensive in March 1918 when he was shot through the head with a rifle bullet. His father, Colonel Frederick Hayter, was informed that his body might well be found during the final clearing up of the battlefields after the war, among the many graves that had so far not been reported and registered. Colonel Hayter was a man of means, and embarked on a personal search, trawling the battlefields for the grave of his only son; but to no avail. He was beginning to give up hope and, in June 1923, proposed to erect a memorial to Eric on the spot where he thought his son might have fallen.
Over the following months, negotiations for the plot of land, five yards square, broke down over the price demanded by the landowner; and Colonel Hayter decided to buy a plot just a few yards away. In September 1924, six and a half years after Eric’s death, as the contractor started digging for the foundation of the stone memorial, he came – amazingly – across a body three feet beneath the surface, probably buried in a hurry when the Germans overran Eric’s battery. The RFA regimental buttons and badges of rank and the five gold fillings established the identity of Second Lieutenant Eric Hayter; his father was present to confirm the identification.
Even after the mass searching had ceased a century ago, the search for the missing continued, often at the initiative of the relatives. Rudyard Kipling and his wife Carrie lost their son John, an officer in the Irish Guards, in 1915. In 1919, the weight of evidence convinced the Kiplings that John must be dead rather than simply missing. The search for a grave now became their obsession.
Rudyard had taken on two monumental tasks: a commission to write the official regimental History of the Irish Guards of the Great War; and his work as literary adviser to the War Graves Commission. Both of these gave him further opportunities to continue his search, interviewing soldiers and poring over battlefield accounts. The Kiplings toured the Western Front, even as the war was raging (and would continue to do so every year through the 1920s, long after it had ended), in a succession of Rolls-royce cars, each called “The Duchess”. On one of these annual pilgrimages, in 1924, the Kiplings visited St Mary’s ADS Cemetery, near Loos – not knowing that the “Unidentified British Soldier, Officer Lieut. Irish Guards”, buried at Plot 7, Row D, Grave 2, was in fact their son. The Kiplings never did locate John’s grave, and his name was commemorated instead, along with 20,000 other missing soldiers, on the Loos Memorial.
In 1992, however, new evidence encouraged the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) to change the inscription on the gravestone of this unidentified Irish Guards lieutenant, who had been found by a battlefield clearance team in 1919 and buried in St Mary’s military cemetery, to read Lieutenant John Kipling.
Discoveries like this continue to this day, and every year some 50 sets of human remains from the First World War are recovered in France and Belgium; every attempt is made to identify and honour them with the same commitment as a century ago. During the course of writing my book The Searchers: The Quest for the Lost of the First World War, I visited the mortuary near Arras where some of these bodies are taken, and saw four skeletons laid out on tables. The bones had been unearthed during excavation works for a new hospital nearby, and painstakingly pieced together by the exhumations team at the CWGC. Three of the skulls were fractured beyond reconstruction, but one was almost perfectly preserved, as it was on site, when a member of the team lifted a rusty steel helmet to reveal it nestling beneath.
No identity discs were found with the bodies, but a mass of artefacts was discovered nearby, and was now laid out alongside: a shaving brush, date-stamped boots, a pocket watch, an army service book, and a metal water canteen, swilling half full with the water its owner never had time to drink.
The most revealing items are the regimental shoulder-titles. Members of the CWGC’S recovery unit are hopeful that one of the soldiers, at least, will be identified by name, in which case the other three might follow. If so, these men who had been lost to their nearest and dearest would now have been found and restored to their descendants, the voids in their family history finally filled.
The Searchers: The Quest for the Lost of the First World War by Robert Sackville-west (Bloomsbury, £25) is out now