A landscape of the dead, a landscape for the living, is one way of describing the First World War cemeteries clustered around the city of Ypres in Belgian Flanders. The cost of the Great War was in so many ways beyond measure, but an idea of the number of human lives expended along the Western Front is given by these military cemeteries. The silent witnesses to conflict, they prompt us to remember with gratitude those who died ‘for evermore’ – to use a phrase from the King James Bible that is frequently inscribed on the memorials they contain. For years after the war, it seemed as if the dead here haunted the living, but today the living also haunt the dead – with tourism, scientific investigations, looting, urban and industrial development, and motorway-building.
At first glance, it can appear that most of those who died were British or British Imperial troops, but this belies the role of politics. After the war – and after bodies had been located, registered, and reburied elsewhere through the Herculean efforts of the Graves Registration Units – the US authorities permitted repatriation of the bodies of its citizens (some 70% of America’s 100,000 dead were taken home), as did the Germans, Belgians, and French. Uniquely, the British refused to do so, leaving the country’s dead to lie with their comrades near the battle fronts on which they had served. The British dead were also buried in smaller cemeteries than the Germans and French: the largest German cemetery, for example, is Menen Wald, home to almost 48,000 soldiers, four times more than at Tyne Cot, the largest British cemetery.
Yet what British cemeteries often lacked in sheer size, they made up for in number, in architectural design, and, for visitors, in the peaceful and reflective repose in an immaculately manicured garden landscape that is characteristic of today’s examples. Major-General Fabian Ware (1869-1949) was the founding head of the Imperial War Graves Commission (now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, or CWGC) from its beginnings in May 1917, and worked closely with some of the most renowned architects of the day, including Edwin Lutyens and Reginald Blomfield. What these men created was a very different mortuary landscape to those of their wartime allies and the Germans. The small size of many CWGC cemeteries means they are spread across the landscape of the old battle-zone and possess a sad but also pastoral atmosphere on a very human scale. Other nations tended to gather up their Western Front dead from their original smaller resting places and consolidate them into far fewer but much larger cemeteries, where the serried rows of endless gravestones can for some be overwhelmingly depressing.
Margaret Alice Murray (1863-1963)