Sombre and silent, Mrs May pays tribute to the fallen
DWARFED by the largest British war memorial ever built, Theresa May yesterday reached for the words of one who had died within its gaze.
‘There lie the flower of youth, the men who scorn’d to live (so died) when languished Liberty,’ the Prime Minister wrote on the poppy wreath she laid at the Thiepval Memorial, Sir Edwin Lutyens’s soaring monument to the missing of the Somme.
She had borrowed her message from a poem, The Soldier’s Cemetery, by Sergeant John William Streets. He wrote it not long before his death on July 1, 1916 – the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the worst day in British military history.
On a day like yesterday, the Prime Minister preferred to leave the talking to the dead and made no further public comment.
Alongside her, in crisp autumn sunshine, stood French president Emmanuel Macron.
They met close to where Mr Macron’s British great-grandfather, George Robertson, fought in the trenches.
Mr Robertson, a Bristol-born butcher, was just 19 during the Somme campaign and won medals for his service before staying in France after the war. He married Frenchwoman Suzanne Leblond in Abbeville in 1919, and the couple had three daughters, including Jacqueline, who married Andre Macron. Their son, Jean-Michel, is Mr Macron’s father.
The two leaders had come together to the Somme ahead of tomorrow’s centenary of the Armistice, an event which will bring much of the world to a halt at the 11th hour, exactly a hundred years after the guns fell silent. Come that moment, Mrs May and Mr Macron will be in their respective capitals.
In London, the Prince of Wales will lead the nation in honouring the country’s war dead during the national service of remembrance at the Cenotaph in Whitehall.
He will lay a wreath on behalf of the Queen as she watches from the balcony of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. For the first time, a German leader – President Frank-Walter Steinmeier – will lay a wreath at the Cenotaph.
After the service, 10,000 people, chosen by ballot, will pay their respects to the First World War dead in a ‘People’s Procession’ past the Cenotaph.
Yesterday, Mrs May and Mr Macron came to pay tribute on soil so violated that a large tract of land alongside the memorial is still out of bounds behind steel fencing, because of unexploded shells.
The Battle of the Somme was a tragedy for both nations, with 420,000 British and 204,000 French casualties. Engraved on the walls of this sacred tower of brick and Portland stone are the names of the 73,357 British and Commonwealth troops whose bodies were never found – men of every rank and background, among them a few famous sportsmen and writers of their day but mostly, in the words of one historian, ‘unknown humble men, who never had a chance of becoming famous’.
The memorial sits among dozens of cemeteries. The one immediately alongside it very deliberately contains equal numbers of French and British fallen, 300 of each laid out either side of the Cross of Sacrifice. Escorted by two young guides from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, Mrs May and Mr Macron inspected the grave of Rifleman Philip Stubbs, a man who had served in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps with Mrs May’s maternal grandfather, Regimental Sergeant Major Thomas Brasier (he himself died at Salonika).
Rising up behind them, that pitiful stone roll call of those with no known grave was glowing in the setting sun. Looking up at a corner at random, I spotted a ‘Major CC Dickens’ of the Kensington London Regiment. Cedric Dickens was the grandson of the writer, Charles. He was last seen leading his men in to action in nearby Bouleaux Wood in the latter stages of the battle.
This vast construction, which required one million bricks, might have been larger still. Out of deference to the French, Lutyens actually reduced it by a few feet to ensure that it did not exceed the height of the hallowed Arc de Triomphe in Paris – though the flagpoles which he then planted on top actually make it fractionally taller. Yesterday, both flags flew side by side, visible for miles around across fields which, a century before, had been a hellish wastescape.
The short ceremony and inspection of the cemetery followed a bilateral meeting and working lunch in the town hall at Albert. Here was a reminder that some things really are bigger than parochial contemporary problems such as Brexit or the upcoming European elections, even if the French president frequently seems to forget this. Mr Macron’s behaviour during this centenary is questionable. He has spent the past week on a ‘memorial tour’ up and down the Western Front, mixing battlefield tours with brazen political grandstanding. It has not been entirely successful. His popularity ratings are tumbling and the far-Right are on the rise ahead of next year’s European elections, particularly in the industrial north – places much like Albert, in fact.
YESTERDAY, the president was so busy gladhanding locals in nearby Lens that he turned up in Albert 40 minutes late. Mrs May had flown in on time, and was left working on her boxes at the local airport until receiving the green light to head in to town. By then, Mr Macron was standing alone in front of the television cameras at the steps of Albert’s town, craftily making it look as if it was the Brit- ish who were being unpunctual. It is unsurprising that Mrs May has decided not to attend today’s instalment of the Macron show when the president holds a ceremony in Compiegne, where the Allies and the Germans signed the Armistice. Angela Merkel will be there. Britain is sending Cabinet Office minister David Lidington.
Mr Macron has also used the centenary to invite all the world’s leaders to Paris tomorrow, presenting the First World War as primarily a French victory. Presidents Trump and Putin will be among those present. This will be followed by a special ‘peace summit’ which Mr Macron’s aides are hailing as ‘a Davos of governance’. It will start with a major address on the state of the planet by Mr Macron himself, in contrast to the British tradition of politicians saying little or nothing of significance on Remembrance Sunday.
Little wonder, then, that there is exasperation at both Downing Street and Buckingham Palace.
Mrs May was pointedly avoiding any charges of grandstanding yesterday. She started the day at Mons, in Belgium, the very fulcrum of the First World War. It was here that Corporal E Thomas of the 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards fired the first
British shot of the war on August 20, 1914, as the British Expeditionary Force valiantly tried to hold off the German advance through Belgium. It was the first British shot fired in anger on European soil since the Battle of Waterloo.
It was also here that the first Victoria Crosses of the war were awarded – to Private Frank Godley, of the 4th Royal Fusiliers, who survived the war, and his commanding officer, Lieutenant Maurice Dease, who did not. He lies in perpetuity at the beautifully maintained St Symphorien Cemetery just outside Mons, a few yards from the first German to win the Iron Cross. Here, too, lies Private John Parr, the first British soldier of the Great War to be killed.
By astonishing coincidence, his grave lies opposite that of the last British soldier to die in the Great War – Private George Ellison of the 5th Royal Irish Lancers. A few yards away lies the very last man to die for King and country – Private George Price of the 6th Canadian Infantry Brigade. He was shot by a German sniper at 10.58am on November 11 as he received flowers from a grateful Belgian civilian.
Here, in one small, stunning cemetery – originally built by the Germans, 284 of whom lie here – we find the entire ghastly narrative of the Great War framed in a few tragic yards of well-tended grass. As Commonwealth War Graves Commission historian Max Dutton admitted: ‘It is extraordinary that fate should bring these men, ordinary serving soldiers, together like this. It makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck.’
It was entirely right that the Prime Minister should come here to pay her respects. She came bearing less well-known lines from some of our most famous war poetry. Accompanied by Belgian prime minister Charles Michel, she laid a wreath first at the grave of John Parr. On it, she had written a line from Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier: ‘There is in that rich earth a richer dust concealed.’
For George Ellison, she had taken a line from Laurence Binyon’s For The Fallen (‘They shall grow not old’). She wrote: ‘They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted. We will remember them.’ Standing alongside the graves were small detachments from the regimental heirs of these two soldiers, the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment in the case of Parr and the Royal Lancers, in honour of Ellison.
Here, too, were serving men from the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, proudly commemorating Lt Dease VC. Just the other day, workers mending a water pipe found three bodies – a Lancashire Fusilier and two Australians. The Lancashire lad was buried with full honours this week. The Australians will be interred together on Monday.
A century on and this rich earth continues to make one thing very clear: remembrance is not going to stop once this weekend is over.