THE SEARCHERS
THE QUEST FOR THE LOST OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR ROBERT SACKVILLE-WEST
Bloomsbury, 336pp, £25
One hundred years ago the word ‘closure’ had yet to acquire a palliative connotation, but it sums up what hundreds of thousands of bereaved British and Commonwealth families sought after the Great War. Not only did every home have ‘an empty chair’. More than half a million of them also had what Simon Heffer in the
Telegraph calls ‘a void’. Their loved ones were ‘missing’ – presumed dead, but with no known grave. Luckily, help was at hand from one of the war’s ‘most compassionate, if forgotten, departments’, a Red Cross unit whom Robert Sackville-west calls ‘The Searchers’. These tenacious men and women dedicated themselves to identifying as many of the unknown bodies as possible, a macabre task that continues to this day.
In the Sunday Times John Carey described Sackville-west’s book as ‘compelling and often horrifying’. He reminded readers that, thanks to shell fire, ‘there were often no bodies to retrieve’. How fitting that Sir Edward Lutyens should style his shrine in Whitehall the Cenotaph, meaning, in Ancient Greek, ‘empty tomb’. Noting that ‘some families did not rely simply on detective work to trace the missing’, Simon Heffer said that ‘this was a golden age for spiritualists, all of them charlatans to some degree or other, but endorsed by no less popular and respected a figure than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’ – whose ‘journey from materialist to messiah’ Sackville-west describes.
Another famous writer, Rudyard Kipling, pulled strings to get his severely myopic son John a commission in the Irish Guards, only to lose him soon after at the Battle of Loos. John’s body was not identified until 1992, far too late to console his father, but a tribute to the War Graves Commission’s dedication.