Introduction
The unprecedented industrialised warfare of World War One (WWI) created widespread trauma and devastation for countries across the world; over 38 million deaths and/or causalities internationally have been estimated. Almost half a million (416,809) Australians volunteered to fight with the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) during WWI. It is estimated that approximately 60,000 Australians died on active service; for most of themâtheir remains stayed on the distant battlefields where they had fought.
Shortly after World War 1 ceased an anonymous writer noted how âthe most terrible words in all writing used to be âThere they crucified Himâ, but there is a sadder sentence now, âI know not where they have laid Himâ ⊠surely âmissingâ is the cruellest word in the languageâ.i The writerâs lament, echoed by hundreds of thousands of families across the world, their communities, and governments, prompted dramatic reconsideration for ways in which the war dead were to be commemorated and memorialised.
Since the centenary commemorative period for active service during the First World War (1914â1918) has drawn to a close, memorial services have turned to honouring post-conflict events. Of primary focus during these services are the experiences of returned soldiers, celebrations of instrumental leaders, and remembering those in auxiliary forces such as the Red Cross. Attention has also shifted to understanding better the inception of bereavement rituals that remember dead soldiers on the battlefields in Europe. Due to the military policy of non-repatriation of war dead which was strictly enforced from the spring of 1915 onward, those who died at the front were buried on foreign soil in which they fell.
Pat Jalland argues that the logistical impossibility of repatriating Australiaâs entire military dead became the catalyst for alternative death and bereavement practices.ii The absence of a physical grave at which individual families could mourn the loss of their loved ones, combined with a growing national identity forged by the conflict at Gallipoli in particular, gave rise to âpublic displays of commemoration to honour those who sacrificed their lives for the nationâ.iii These public displays became the manner by which a nation came to make sense of such conflicts.iv Australian and New Zealand public events, such as Anzac Day and Remembrance Day, are the pivotal points of a âmemory boomâ at which individual sacrifices during conflict are honoured, and national narratives and identities are reinforced.v
Evolution of Modern War Graves Practices
In order to understand the philosophical and physical significance of graves work conducted during and after the Great War, it is necessary to review recruitment and burial practices for the British and Colonial armies before this period. Prior to the Boer War, recruitment practices within a military force occurred en masse. Common soldiers in the British Army were randomly assigned to a single company operating within a larger battalion; no relational ties were considered. The Regulation of the Forces Act 1871, as part of the Cardwell Reforms (1870â1881), implemented the Localisation Act which reoriented recruitment and mobilisation of soldiers according to geographical location. The premise being that when fighting with friends and officers who had established a connection within a communityâs recruitment district, a greater fervour could be drawn upon to increase camaraderie and overcome obstacles that would have previously resulted in a rout.vi While successful in achieving this goal, the Act had other unforeseen consequences where death-by-combat was concerned. Lack of common soldier identification during this period, coupled with Localisation Act practices, resulted most often in the âlast resting place of the common soldier [being within] a mass graveâ often labelled with the commanding officerâs details and men of the regiment.vii The impossibility of identifying individual common soldiers within mass graves, therefore, restricted geographically-situated bereavement rituals. In their place, families commemorated genealogical sacrifices through inscribed physical mementos, such as plaques, boards, or tablets.viii These items became tremendously important symbolic focal points for grief and mourning, particularly for those whose bodies were never recovered.ix Officers, on the other hand, were more readily identifiable due to uniform moderations, rank insignias, or additional weaponry, such as the sidearm or sword.x Individual commemoration of the military elite was a normalised practice, albeit âby families for whom death in action was an occupational hazardâ.xi
Only nine months after the commencement of WWI, municipal graveyards in towns along the Western Front were overflowing with the increasingly catastrophic amount of military personnel and civilians dying on a daily basis. Jay Winter highlights that due to the social structure of the early nineteenth Century, Officers heralding from the middle or upper classes were killed at a rate of five percent to their working-class soldiers.xii Whether due to lack of preparedness, or the unforeseen realities of modern warfare, the British army and its allies were ill-equipped to deal with the overwhelming number of war dead at this early stage of the conflict.xiii The age range of solider casualties has been recorded between 12 and 68 years.xiv Soldiersâ killed in action or dying quickly from wounds before extraction were either buried on the battlefield where they fell, or in plots close to the front line (Fig. 1.1).xv This task often fell to fellow unit soldiers or commanding officers (CO) with attempts made at identification based on personal effects. Little time or focus was available to mark out the precise geographical location of the burial during a conflict. Where soldiers died of wounds at a casualty clearing station, or at a base hospital, in addition to burial service tasks, unit chaplains were consigned with formal responsibilities of identification, marking, recording, and registering individual soldiersâ graves.xvi
In October 1914, in response to inconsistent burial processes of British military personnel occurring across the front, a mobile Ambulance unit headed by Sir Fabian Ware, began gathering voluntarily soldier identification and location details of individual graves in situ. The unanticipated personal devastation of WWI over the next five months urgently increased demand for additional first response medical units across battlefields which left little time for voluntary graves registration work to be conducted by such units. To remedy this, the British Army created a formal entity in March 1915, aptly named the Graves Registration Commission (GRC), in recognition of the work undertaken by Fabian Ware as CO of the Red Cross Flying Unit (explained below). The commission was responsible for negotiating the purchase of foreign lands, in perpetuity, for British war dead, and formalising the process of recording, registering, and planning Imperial war graves.
Among the first procedural changes implemented by the GRC was the mandatory use of the dual-identity discs to systematical...