Empires of the Dead: How One Man’s Vision Led to the Creation of WWI’s War Graves

It was a powerful and energising legacy, and if the passion for battle, the conviction of righteousness, the love of autocracy also left their mark, these were only the reverse of that spirit of independence that is the great birthright of all Protestant dissent. In the most obvious sense, Ware’s whole life became a violent rejection of a sect that had turned its back against the world, but even when his work took him to the heart of the British establishment, he never sold out, never lost that critical power of detachment or sense of distance that, in the struggles ahead, would prove the most creative and important inheritance of his Brethren upbringing.

Even if Ware had wanted to ‘belong’ to that establishment world, his formative years and education inevitably reinforced a sense of apartness. In the late nineteenth century, the public schools and universities offered a well-trodden path to public service, but while his contemporaries were filling the reformed civil service and dying on Majuba Hill, soldiering with Stalky on the North West Frontier, or running the Empire, Ware was trudging down an obscure road that took him from a private tutor at home in Clifton to a struggling career as an indigent and ill-qualified schoolteacher. ‘My academic qualifications (#litres_trial_promo) are not worth counting,’ he confessed in 1911, forced by the abortive hope of a post at Sheffield University to rehearse the long and dusty route that had brought him, at the age of forty-three, to the life of an unemployed ex-newspaperman working in Paris on a book no one was ever likely to read:

First class tutors up to eighteen (my people were Plymouth Brethren & took me away from a Preparatory School when I was twelve because I had been made captain of a cricket XI. I was never allowed to go back to school); then my father died & I had to earn my own living by teaching in private schools – I could only afford to work for a London degree – after having passed two of the three examinations I chucked it as I was getting no teaching, & saved up to come to Paris & took my Baccalaureate in science … Returning from Paris I was for several years assistant master in the Bradford Grammar School, then I reported to Sadler on foreign educational systems (Germany), was British Educational Representative at the Paris exhibition in 1900 and, when I came out … in 1901, was inspecting secondary schools for the Board of Education and was to be made a permanent inspector as soon as the inspectorate was established … All this counts for nothing among English academic people who smile at it all as they would smile at my Paris pinkish-mauve hood & cap of the same colour which is a cross between a coster’s headdress & a biretta!!

For an ambitious, sensitive and highly gifted idealist, there must have been endless frustrations, although in the long run this education opened up a richer and more varied experience than a conventional and insular English public school could ever have done. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the life of a secondary schoolmaster was as miserable as it has ever been, but it crucially gave Ware the experience and right – a right he would claim in the pages of the Morning Post and again in France – to speak for that other Britain which, in the years ahead, would make up the Pals’ battalions and fight and die in their anonymous thousands in the mud of Flanders and the Somme.

If it was the years of educational drudgery and poverty that made an egalitarian and social reformer of Ware, it was the next phase of his career that hardened ‘pity and indignation (#litres_trial_promo)’ into the kind of vision and ideal that was so crucial to a lapsed child of the Brethren. In 1900 he had published the first of two books on educational reform, and on the back of a growing reputation he went out to South Africa the following year to oversee the post-war reconstruction of education in the Transvaal alongside that famous ‘Kindergarten’ of talented and devoted young imperialists that the High Commissioner, Lord Milner, had gathered around him.

The figure of Viscount Milner has receded so far into the background of history that it is hard now to remember how large he once loomed over the Edwardian political landscape. Alfred Milner was born in Giessen, Hesse in 1854 of Anglo-German stock and received his early education at a Gymnasium in Tübingen. On the death of his mother in 1869, the fifteen-year-old Milner returned to England, and in 1872 won a scholarship to Benjamin Jowett’s Balliol, where a brilliant undergraduate career and a fistful of university prizes was rounded off with a First in Classics and a fellowship to New College.

This was the Oxford of Ruskinian high-mindedness and social intervention, of Arnold Toynbee and H. H. Asquith, of the Canadian imperialist George Parkin, and Cecil Rhodes – and it was the dominant influence on Milner’s life. ‘As an undergraduate (#litres_trial_promo) at Oxford,’ he later wrote,

I was first stirred by a new vision of the British Empire. In that vision it appeared no longer as a number of infant or dependent communities revolving around this ancient kingdom but as a world encircling group of related nations, some of them destined to outgrow the mother country, united in a bond of equality and partnership, and united … by moral and spiritual bonds.

At the heart of Milner’s ‘New Imperialism’ was a quasi-religious belief in the innate superiority of the English ‘race’ and an unshakeable conviction of its civilising destiny, and one of the great tragedies of British history is that he found himself in a position to implement it. On leaving Oxford he had gained a formidable reputation as an administrator and public servant, and after a formative colonial apprenticeship in Egypt under Lord Cromer, he went with the blessings of all parties to ‘Southern Africa’ as High Commissioner and Governor of the Cape Colony at a time when the Jameson Raid and President Kruger’s treatment of British Uitlanders in the Transvaal had forced South Africa to the front of the political agenda.

It was a disastrous appointment – a crisis that called for cool pragmatism and the government had sent an imperial visionary, negotiations that demanded compromise and tact and they had sent the one man in England as obdurate as Kruger – and Britain reaped what it had sown. It is very possible that nobody could have dealt with Kruger and his dismal combination of ‘hatred’ and ‘invincible ignorance’, but Milner had never any intention of trying to find a peaceful answer to the problems of the Transvaal. When negotiations finally broke down in the summer of 1899 he had the war with the Afrikaner republics that he had wanted.

The Second Boer War was known as ‘Milner’s War’ for good reason. Milner was not a man to shy away from the personal or public opprobrium brought about by a brutal and ugly conflict. In the spring of 1901 he had returned to England to face down a storm of Liberal criticism from his old allies, but within the year he was back again with a peerage and the support of a Conservative government to tighten the final terms of the Boer surrender and begin the vast post-war task of reconstructing a united, reformed and anglicised South Africa along the imperial lines he had always dreamt of.

It was as part of this work of political, legal, economic and educational reconstruction that Fabian Ware went out to join the Kindergarten of zealous young administrators: men like Geoffrey Dawson, the future editor of The Times; Philip Kerr, Britain’s Ambassador to the United States at the outbreak of the Second World War; the novelist and future Governor General of Canada, John Buchan; the future Governor General of South Africa, Patrick Gordon; Lionel Curtis, the driving force of the ‘Round Table’, who shared Milner’s vision and would carry the Milner torch deep into the twentieth century.

For the first time in his adult career, Ware had the man and the faith he needed, and the substitution of the religio Milneriana for his father’s Millenarianism marks the great ‘conversion experience’ of his life. Under the influence of Milner’s ‘race patriotism’ he learned his sense of Britain’s global destiny, under Milner he honed his doctrine in the subordination of the individual to the collective, under Milner he gave political shape to his social conscience, and under Milner – cold, austere and ‘Germanic’ in public, generous and warm in private – he learned the virtue of public service that would be his own lodestar. ‘For you your job (#litres_trial_promo) was your mistress, and was no step-mother to those who worked under you,’ Ware addressed him on the eve of the First World War in an open letter that is as close to a personal manifesto as he ever came,

You taught them to regard their own success as dependent on and inseparably associated with the success of their job. They rose, as it were, on the work which they built up, you, the supreme architect, from your lofty outlook warning off those evil fellows … who would have taken advantage of their absorption in their daily task to climb up, unnoticed on the growing structures and supplant them.

It was under Milner too that Ware got his first chance to show his own remarkable abilities as an administrator. The early months in South Africa produced a series of frictions that provide an interesting ‘taster’ of the battles ahead, but from the day he established his independence he was in his element, doubling within four years the number of children in education in the Transvaal, addressing the technical mining and agricultural needs of the newly annexed state, breathing in the heady fumes of imperialism, and battling – and no one loved a battle like Ware – with a Boer clergy so bigoted and intransigently hostile to reform or reason that even the Brethren could have learned a lesson from them.

‘I was working late (#litres_trial_promo) last night,’ he would write to his old ‘chief’ from Paris in 1911, the memories of the Transvaal and their imperial venture as fresh and intoxicating after six years as if it had all been only yesterday,

& watched the sunrise – behind the Pantheon & the Bibliothèque Ste Genevieve – and whenever I see it, it reminds me of S. Africa & takes one by the throat as the French say … What a time it was & how we worked – & always when we were conscious of having done rather more than our hardest hoping that it would please you: I suppose I was a fool not to stay on doing your work. But as you say, it is no good regretting.

Ware might have been a fool not to have stayed, but as an ambitious man in his mid-thirties he would have been a bigger fool not to have left when, in 1905, he was offered the editorship of the Morning Post. The offer must have come as much of a surprise to him as it did to everyone else in journalism, but as the newspaper world soon found out, he was a born editor, the ideal man to take a hopelessly moribund Tory newspaper like the Morning Post and kick and bully and charm it into becoming the most influential and combative paper of its day.

The paper had no library or reference support for its journalists, no salaried leader-writers, no proper offices at this time, even, nothing but temporary wooden sheds near the Aldwych, and ‘a regular mythology of minor deities created by the old traditions’. ‘It is magnificent (#litres_trial_promo) but it is not business,’ Ware wrote to the paper’s owner, Lord Glenesk, as he began the Augean task of modernisation,

I will take an example. The Art Critic is, I believe, actually bedridden. At any rate I have never seen him. He draws his salary and farms out the work. He does this with discrimination … But he breaks the first condition which should attach to such service and that is regular attendance at the office.

There was something else that he had learned under Milner that stood him in good stead in these early days at the Morning Post, and that was how to make use of that informal network of connections that held the British establishment together. The group of young zealots who had made up Milner’s Kindergarten had nearly all been Oxford men, and one of Ware’s first acts as editor was to write off to the Master of Balliol – Milner’s old college – to scout for talent. When the answer came back in the shape of ‘an ugly mannered but honest, self devoted young reformer of the practical kind called William Beveridge’, Ware took it and him in his stride. He asked me ‘to come on the staff completely to undertake all the articles and leaders on social questions!’ an astonished Beveridge – the future architect of the modern Welfare State – later wrote of their interview,

I told him of course (#litres_trial_promo) that in party politics I was certainly not a Conservative and that in speculative politics I was a bit of a Socialist. He rather liked that than the reverse. I told him I wasn’t a journalist; he said there was no such thing as a journalist, that it was all practice. It was a flattering approach. I went about feeling like a beggar-boy who had just been proposed to by a Queen.

The change of regime was seldom as smooth or happy a transformation as this suggests, however. Although Lord Glenesk knew what he wanted when he appointed Ware, it is less certain that he knew what he had got. He had brought in an outsider to put an ailing business back on its feet, and over the next five ‘erratic but brilliant (#litres_trial_promo)’ years he found that he had not so much bought himself a ‘new broom’ as a high-jacker, an unruly Milnerian cuckoo in the comfortable old Tory nest, an imperial zealot, Tariff Reformer, and universal conscript-monger, hell-bent on readying Britain and the Empire for a war with Germany that he half feared and half wanted. ‘At the time of (#litres_trial_promo) the Delcassé incident’ – the first ‘Moroccan Crisis’ of 1905 – he later told Spenser Wilkinson, his influential military correspondent,

we threw the whole weight of the Morning Post against war with Germany. I am ashamed that I did not understand what we were doing at the time. I now believe that England ought to have fought them then – at any rate she is every month becoming less prepared relatively to Germany to fight her than she was then … It [the Morning Post] should boldly point to the German danger and use the lesson of present events to rub in the immediate necessity of universal military service and the reorganizing of naval matters.

Ware was perfectly genuine in his campaigning hatred of social injustice and sweated labour – it was all part of the Milnerian imperial package to improve the ‘race’ – but as international crisis followed crisis it was the German threat and thought of an opportunity lost for ‘urging compulsory service’ that left him awake and ‘miserable’ (#litres_trial_promo) at night. Wilkinson ‘has been wanting (#litres_trial_promo) to write saying that there are no causes for misunderstanding between England and Germany at the present’, he complained to Lady Bathurst, Glenesk’s daughter and successor as proprietor, as the gap between Ware and his military correspondent widened to open warfare, ‘but I won’t let him: to allay fears of Germany is to throw away our only chance of getting the people to bestir themselves’.

There were genuine strategic differences at stake: Wilkinson thought Ware’s obsessions with imperial defence and conscription woefully inadequate to the real nature of Britain’s military and naval deficiencies, but it was essentially a battle of wills between two men equally determined to get their way. Ware had already shown what a generous and imaginative boss he could be with a young man like Beveridge, but line him up against a leader-writer who had been publishing on defence issues while Ware was still a Bradford schoolteacher and the iron entered his soul. He could not bear to share authority. The Morning Post must speak with one voice and that voice was his. He had fought with Glenesk, he had battled his manager, and he was not going to give in to Wilkinson. What he wanted, when it came to issues of Empire and defence, was not an independent thinker of stature but a ‘party hack (#litres_trial_promo)’.

‘I am to take the views (#litres_trial_promo) that he thinks right,’ Wilkinson complained to Lady Bathurst, ‘and he even explained to me what my views, which he thinks he knows better than I do, really are.’ It was a dangerous omniscience to insist on. This time he won his battle (Wilkinson could not even bring himself to mention Ware’s name when he wrote his memoirs) but Ware’s own days at the Morning Post were numbered. In the bitter infighting within the Conservative Party over Tariff Reform he had alienated some powerful interests, and when in 1910 a fundraising appeal, sponsored by the Morning Post, to buy the nation an airship to counter the ‘Zeppelin menace’ ended in chaos, farce and serious financial embarrassment for Lady Bathurst, Ware was forced to go.

It was a grubby end to a brilliant, maverick, error-strewn age for the Morning Post and left Ware in a limbo that was both new and familiar to him. The terms of his severance gave him a measure of financial independence for the immediate future, but for a man who had been at the heart of the country’s political life for a decade – a man, moreover, with not just a wife, Anna, now but two small children and no more obvious prospects than he had when living in student poverty almost twenty years before – dismissal was a psychological blow from which it would take a war to help him recover.

In his open ‘letter’ to Milner, written in France as a preface in 1912 to his last book, The Worker and His Country, Ware bravely trumpeted the blessing of his new-found ‘freedom’, but it was the Cassandra cry of a prophet without honour in his own country. ‘The existence of (#litres_trial_promo) the United Kingdom to-day as a first-class Power is indissolubly bound up in the integrity of the British Empire,’ Ware warned from his ‘old student quarters’ in Paris, as he contemplated a France on the brink of civil war, a Britain torn apart by strikes, political atrophy and civil unrest, Ireland on the edge of disintegration and international relations stumbling from crisis to crisis,

The gravity of the responsibilities thus incurred needs no emphasising; they will be accepted calmly by a race which has brought so large a portion of the earth within its rule … So long as (#litres_trial_promo) patriotism is the controlling force, dominating all classes, the supreme instinct in the hour of crisis, no renunciation and no sacrifice will be too great in the cause of unity.

It was only too horribly prophetic. For Ware, though, even if he could never have admitted it, the imminent prospect of war carried its own dark consolations. Spenser Wilkinson had once accused him of being a warmonger and he was only half wrong. If it seemed to Ware, in his gloomier moments, a mere toss-up whether civil strife or a European conflagration would come first, at least part of him saw the latter as the solution to the former. If the country could not heal its divisions in peace, perhaps it could in war. If ‘Milnerism’, the dream of a united, federated, white empire spanning the globe, was already unravelling in Ireland and South Africa then perhaps war – the great purging, unifying engine of change – might redeem it.

He had dreamed and preached of the individual absorbed in the family, the family in the nation and the nation in that ‘highest attainment (#litres_trial_promo) of human collectivity that the world has yet seen, the British Empire’, and just when it seemed that history had left that dream behind, war had come to give sacrificial patriotism a last, bloody chance. In the final summer of peace, the headmaster of Uppingham School had told his departing sixth form that unless they could serve their country they would be better dead, and for a heady moment in that autumn of 1914 it was as if the whole country had been listening – not just that headmaster’s ‘country’, not the country of Wykehamists and Etonians desperate to get to France before it was all over, but the 300,000 men who volunteered in August, the 450,000 in September, the 137,000 in October, forerunners of the five million who, in one way or another, would find themselves in uniform before the war’s end to bear out Kipling’s prophecy that it would be the ‘third-class carriages (#litres_trial_promo)’ that would save the country.

It was the same too on the broader scale, where all those dreams of imperial preference and closer union had seemed the vision of a departing age. The First World War would only hasten the centrifugal forces at work within the Empire, but before it did that it would prove a macabre theatre for the realisation of Ware’s dream. The parliaments of the Empire had no more say in the declaration of war than did the Imperial Parliament at Westminster, but as the Viceroy in India and each governor general issued the King’s proclamation, the same enthusiasm that had fired Britain brought the Dominion troops in their tens of thousands to sacrifice their lives – 65,000 Canadians, 60,000 Australians, 18,000 New Zealanders, more than 9,000 South Africans – in a war that only sentiment, historical ties and a shared linguistic and cultural heritage, can remotely have suggested was theirs.

As Fabian Ware made his way across to France to take up his new post as commander of the Mobile Ambulance Unit, he at least knew what he wanted out of this war. Milner had found him a consultancy with Rio Tinto, but that was now forgotten. In October 1914 he had no idea, of course, where his Red Cross work would ultimately take him, but no one could have been better equipped to recognise and fill the need when it came. He had arrived with all the qualifications for the task – ambition, connections, intelligence, energy, diplomatic skills, charm, iron will, fluent French – but at the core of everything he would do was a belief in the rightness of the cause: belief in the Empire, belief in France, and a belief in a patriotic sacrifice. Fifteen years earlier he had written that the purpose of education was to produce the citizen ‘ready to perform (#litres_trial_promo), to the utmost of his ability, those duties which his country demands of him’, and war had only changed the nature of that call. ‘So long as … patriotism is the controlling force … no sacrifice will be thought too great in the cause of unity,’ he had concluded his political credo, and he was not going to shy away from the consequences now. Only at the moment of birth and death, he had written just two years earlier, can men be truly equal. Desperate and shameful poverty in England might have given the lie to the first part of that proposition, but, from now on, his life’s work would be to make sure that the second half of it, at least, would come true.

TWO (#ulink_77ca06d1-8fb4-5add-9541-3050e1dfe5c4)

The Mobile Unit (#ulink_77ca06d1-8fb4-5add-9541-3050e1dfe5c4)

At the distance of a hundred years, the First World War and the attritional fighting of the Somme or Passchendaele have become so synonymous in the public mind that it is hard to remember that it was not always so. For any soldier going to France between the spring of 1915 and the end of 1917 this might well have been the one experience of war he would ever know, but for the men of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in August 1914, or their conscript heirs of 1918 who arrived in time to face the last German offensives and the final Advance to Victory, the Great War was a war not of entrenchment but of mobility, retreat and advance.

It was this initial, highly fluid phase – defined for the British by their first, brilliant action at Mons on 23 August and by the death knell of the Old Army at the first battle of Ypres in early November – that had brought Ware and his Mobile Ambulance Unit into the conflict. In these early weeks of the war, before security fears dictated a stricter regime, it was easy enough for civilians to get over to France, and few things so beautifully capture the bizarre mix of amateurishness and high professionalism with which Britain went into battle in 1914 as the advertisement that Ware had seen in The Times on the day after the declaration of war: ‘The Royal Automobile Club (#litres_trial_promo),’ it announced over the name of the Hon. A. Stanley, the philanthropic chairman of the RAC who had just been brought in to try to make the Red Cross and St John Ambulance work together after more than thirty years of institutional bickering, ‘will be glad to receive the names of members and associates who will offer the services of their cars or their services with their cars either for home or foreign service, in case of need.’

There was a certain scepticism from the Army over civilian involvement, but in the days when the nation still believed in Kitchener, Kitchener’s pronouncement in September that he could see ‘no objection (#litres_trial_promo) to parties with Motor Ambulances searching villages that are not in occupation by the Germans for wounded and to obtain particulars of the missing and to convey them to hospital’, was all that was needed. On the Sunday morning following it, the first vehicles and owners embarked at Folkestone for France, and by the end of the month twenty-five vehicles had made the crossing, the vanguard of over two hundred cars that were collected by road and rail from across the country by engineers before being converted into ambulances and shipped out under the aegis of the Red Cross to Le Havre.

Among the first of these arrivals was the collection of owners and cars – a Hudson, Vauxhall, Morris Oxford, Sunbeam, Daimler – that made up the unit that Fabian Ware had come out to command. The Mobile Unit was not the only Red Cross team operating in northern France during these opening weeks, but from the first, Ware’s was unusual in being a quasi-autonomous command, enjoying a jealously guarded independence owing something to its original remit, but still more to Ware’s iron determination to run his own show in France as he had done in South Africa or at the Morning Post.

He was lucky in his bosses – lucky they were for the most part on the other side of the Channel, lucky they were the kind of men they were – and Arthur Stanley, in particular, had never been a man to see a committee as anything but a rubber stamp. Over the next months there would be various challenges to the unit’s independence, but the Joint Finance Committee of the Red Cross and St John Ambulance was always ready to back him, sanctioning his local initiatives and giving him his own budget – £2,000 for these first three months, £3,000 for the second – perfectly happy to believe what he told them and bask in the reflected glory of the work that the unit carried out.

It was a necessary latitude because for all that it was a hand-to-mouth existence in these early weeks – petrol to be begged, hotel rooms and office space to be found, cars to be mended, jurisdictional niceties to be negotiated, rivals to be seen off, Uhlans to be avoided – Ware had arrived at a moment when events were rapidly outstripping the unit’s original modest remit. ‘The Mobile Unit was organised (#litres_trial_promo) under the command of Mr Fabian Ware, shortly after the Battle of the Marne,’ Ware himself – always perfectly at ease talking of himself in the third person – reported back to the Red Cross in London on the first steps in its evolution into something a world away from anything Kitchener had had in mind when he first sanctioned their searches,

and the original object of the Unit was to search for British wounded and missing in the district which had been overrun by the Germans during the retreat from Mons, and to convey them back to the British lines or to a British base. Fighting was still proceeding in some of these districts, and the French authorities invited the help of ambulance care for the conveyance of the wounded.

That ‘invitation’ had come at Amiens in early October at a time when the town of Albert was under heavy bombardment and for the next six months the Mobile Unit worked increasingly with the wounded and dying of the French army. By the middle of the month Ware had added a mobile light hospital and medical staff to his growing fleet of ambulances, and before the unit was finally disbanded it had dealt with more than twelve thousand casualties, ferrying and treating the wounded from Amiens to Ypres as the rival armies began their crab-like ‘race for the sea’ and stalemate.

After the years of frustration and disappointment, Ware was in his element, crisscrossing north-western France, liaising one day in Paris and the next in London, putting down his marker here, warning off a potential rival there, his energy and optimism seemingly inexhaustible. ‘October 29

(#litres_trial_promo)’, his diary reads – a typical, and gloriously White Rabbit-ish entry, sent off to London to explain why he had no time to send the Joint War Committee the full report he owed them,

Left Doullens 6.10 a.m., where I had arrived the night before (in order to confer with Colonel Barry and to define sphere). Breakfasted at St Pol 6.50. Met and despatched from here one of our sections at 7 a.m. (This had come to me by appointment at Headin.) Arrived Houdain Station at 7.30 a.m. Met a party in charge of Dr Kelly which I had sent out the night before in order to determine the site of our light hospital. Arrived at Bethune 8.55 a.m. Consulted with the director of the RAMC there. Left Bethune at 9.45 a.m. … Arrived Noeux les Nines at 10.5 a.m. … Arrived Merville 11.45 a.m. Arranged with the General commanding the 1

Corps of French Cavalry to place our light hospital at Merville for the use of both French and British. Left Merville 2 p.m.

There was, too, in these early fluid days, real danger, and the unit’s work could often bring them under direct enemy fire. ‘To be fair to them (#litres_trial_promo), and heap coals of fire on their heads,’ Ware wrote to Sir Arthur Lawley, another Milner appointee in the Transvaal and a staunch support at the Red Cross, after a second abortive attempt to rescue a wounded girl from among the ruins of Albert had brought the German artillery down on their defenceless convoy,

I think it possible that they may not have distinguished the Red Cross at that distance … I have never been in such a scene of desolation – it was like nothing on earth but the pictures one saw in one’s childhood of the Last Day. The place was so ruined that they couldn’t recognise the streets and there was a minute when I thought that we should go round and round and never find our way. All the time we were going towards the guns! … We stopped at the remains of a corner to ask a man the way, but he wouldn’t stay long enough to do more than point down a street and then run off … We found the house, and a woman with two dear little children came up from the cellar, and crying her heart out told us the girl was dead.