Context 161 - September 2019

52 C O N T E X T 1 6 1 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 9 The Vietnam War Memorial is deliberately low key in its design. importance of commemorating the fallen. He managed to enlarge the mission of his unit to not only caring for the wounded but recording and registering where the dead lay.The Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC) was thus formed. Like all good leaders he surrounded himself by a team of experts. Sir Frederick Kenyon, direc- tor of the British Museum, was responsible not just for the layout of the cemeteries but for the founding principles of the IWGC. It was agreed that each of the dead should be commemorated individually by name, either on the headstone on the grave or by an inscription on a memo- rial; that the headstones and memorials should be permanent; that the headstones should be uniform; and that no distinction should be made on account of military or civil rank, race or creed. Everyone who died in service was to be commemorated either by a name on a headstone or a name on a memorial. The repatriation of the body of Lt William Gladstone, whose grandfather was the Liberal prime minister, from a cemetery near the Battle of Loos in 1915 to his family burial plot in Wales caused considerable anguish in the IWGC. FabianWare asked why one family with the means to do so should be able to repatriate the body of a relative while others less fortunate could not. In the interests of uniformity another principle was subsequently added to the others: the fallen should be laid to rest near where they died. These principles caused enormous anger among the public, who questioned why a war was fought when the basic rights of a family to choose how to lay to rest their loved ones were being denied. A petition of 8,000 signatories drawn up by Lady Cecil, the Bishop of Exeter’s wife, who lost three sons in the first world war, was sent to the Prince of Wales. The principles were debated in the House of Commons and, although the decision was split, it was agreed to let the cemeteries be built as outlined by the IWGC. There are over 587,989 named headstones on the western front. Those bodies that were not identified (and there are some 187,000 of these) were given a headstone with the wording provided by Rudyard Kipling: ‘A Soldier of the Great War – Known unto God’. How to com- memorate the missing (numbering 338,955) created considerable debate in the IWGC. It was suggested that dummy graves be created with the headstone recording the name of the miss- ing. This idea was rejected by FabianWare, who felt that it would give false hope to the relatives. Instead the names of the missing are found on walls in selected cemeteries, with the Thiepval Memorial, the largest memorial, created by Edwin Lutyens, commemorating over 72,000 missing from the Somme. The IWGC, which changed its name to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) in 1960, commemorates the 1.7 mil- lion fallen in two world wars across 153 countries in 26,000 sites.There are 305,806 memorials for the first and second world wars in this country alone. Those killed in recent conflicts are com- memorated with similar headstones which are now maintained by the Ministry of Defence. It was very much up to communities to choose their own way of commemorating the fallen. Many chose war memorials that were in the main paid for by public donations. Not all memorials were well received, with the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington a case in point. After its unveiling in 1982 many veterans were horrified that the sacrifice of over 58,000 in that war could be commemorated by a black wall partly hidden from view in the ground: one described it as ‘a monument to defeat, one that spoke to a nation’s guilt rather than to the honour of the war dead and the veterans, a black gash of After the Battle at Spion Kop in 1900, bodies were buried in mass graves but attempts were made to commemorate some of the names on war memorials.