Unknown by nameor rank

BEFORE the U. S. declared war on Germany in 1917, the German High Command released a propaganda document. It suggested that Americans who contemplated joining the fighting should first dig a shoulder-high trench in their garden, ‘fill it half-full of water and get into it. Remain there for two or three days on an empty stomach.

‘Furthermore, hire a lunatic to shoot at you with revolvers and machine-guns at close range.’

It could have added plagues of lice which drove soldiers demented and huge rats which attacked sleeping men and became so sated with eating corpses that they began to exclusively eat the eyeballs and livers of the dead.

It could also have warned of the constant stink of rotting bodies, and poison gas so strong and thick that it turned soldiers’ buttons green and stopped their wristwatches.

Neil Hanson’s book is about the three million men in World War I who were lost without trace, their bodies or their makeshift graves obliterated by shells which could tear tree trunks to matchwood, fling stone walls in the air or slice through a cranium like a cabbage stalk.

In the process, he has written one of the best books I’ve read on the insanity of life in the trenches, not only for the Allies but for German troops.

He takes a British private and a young German officer (an American airman is a more peripheral figure) and follows their progress through their letters .

Alec Reader was not yet 18 when he enlisted in the Civil Service Rifles, and his early letters are about pocket money and socks. As the months pass under constant bombardment, his letters begin to convey the fatalism and cynicism universal in trench warfare.

‘Dear Dad,’ he writes, ‘we have been told for the last month or so that we are going into the “real thing” at last, and other news calculated to produce “wind up” ’.

The ‘real thing’ was the maelstrom of shot and shell known as High Wood, ‘ ghastly by day, ghostly by night, the rottenest place on the Somme’.

In September 1916, Alec’s company, stupefied with fear, clambered out of their trenches at dawn into such a barrage of German machine-gun fire Ultimate sacrifice: How many of these men ( left) died in battle? Their sacrifice is symbolised by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier ( below) that many men died before taking a step. Four- fifths of the Civil Service Rifles were annihilated within minutes. Alec was one of them.

It was a crime to stop and attend the wounded during an advance. Unless the combatants agreed a truce to bury the dead, days or weeks might pass before it was safe to shovel up the maggoty, decomposing bodies or drag them out of water-logged shell-holes.

In some places, bodies were piled so high that it was possible to take cover from shellfire behind them. Trenches occasionally had to be cut through corpses, their boots and bones protruding out of dug-out walls.

Alec’s body was found and buried under a gravemarker — perhaps a rough wooden cross. The following spring, the Germans pushed back through High Wood and Alec’s gravemarker disappeared.

Paul Hub shared the same fears and longings as Alec, the same resolve to shield his family from the true horrors of the Western Front. He fought at Ypres, Verdun, the Somme and Passchendaele; he took leave to marry his fiancee Maria in June 1918, and within ten weeks he was dead.

ALTHOUGH Alec’s grave would have been obliterated by high explosive, his name is inscribed on one of the hundreds of Allied war memorials dotting northern France. Paul Hub’s body was found, but he lies unnumbered in a mass grave near the Somme.

His name appears on no list of the dead. Penury and the humiliation of defeat meant the Germans had no interest in commemorating individual soldiers, especially after the Treaty of Versailles required all crosses on German war graves to be painted black, to remind them they started the war.

In 1915, an order went out forbidding the return home of the bodies of fallen British soldiers (it remained in force until the Sixties). It underlines Neil Hanson’s proposition that the Tomb Of The Unknown Soldier, suggested by an Army chaplain in 1920, was instrumental in keeping the peace in a nation shattered and embittered by the war.

Its installation prompted the building of the Cenotaph and the two-minute silence which for the first time allowed the nation to grieve as one.

It also allowed every bereaved family the consolation of thinking it might be their son or husband who lay there in Westminster Abbey.

However, since the Unknown Soldier was not to be cremated, the Abbey insisted on a body from 1914 to avoid any taint of still decomposing flesh.