Australian War Graves Workers and World War One

Devoted Labour for the Lost, the Unknown but not Forgotten Dead

Fred Cahir, Sara Weuffen, Matt Smith, Peter Bakker, Jo Caminiti

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9789811508493
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Historiographie

This book relays the largely untold story of the approximately 1, 100 Australian war graves workers whose job it was to locate, identify exhume and rebury the thousands of Australian soldiers who died in Europe during the First World War. It tells the story of the men of the Australian Graves Detachment and the Australian Graves Service who worked in the period 1919 to 1922 to ensure that grieving families in Australia had a physical grave which they could mourn the loss of their loved ones. By presenting biographical vignettes of eight men who undertook this work, the book examines the mechanics of the commemoration of the Great War and extends our understanding of the individual toll this onerous task took on the workers themselves.

© The Author(s) 2019

F. Cahir et al.Australian War Graves Workers and World War Onehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0849-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. “Their Last Resting Place”: Foundations of Graves Work

Sara Weuffen¹ and Fred Cahir¹

(1)

Federation University Australia, Ballarat, VIC, Australia

Sara Weuffen (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Fred Cahir (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

Beginning in May 1917, the Imperial War Graves Commission aimed to commemorate in perpetuity those who had died in service of the British Empire in World War I (WWI). This mammoth task, continued to this day, was solemnly shared by member countries of the Empire, including Australia. In this chapter, we explain how the unprecedented industrialised warfare of WWI resulted in an enormous loss-of-life (military and civilian) for all nations involved, in a relative short period of time, and in a manner that had never been experienced previously. The logistical, physical, and emotional problems that the huge number of dead created, however, gave rise to contemporary graves practices, and ultimately the Imperial War Graves Commission.

Keywords

WWI war gravesImperial War Graves CommissionCommemorationMemorialisationGraves practices

End Abstract

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 them—their remains stayed on the distant battlefields where they had fought.

Shortly after World War 1 ceased an anonymous writer noted how “the most terrible words in all writing used to be ‘There they crucified Him’, but there is a sadder sentence now, ‘I know not where they have laid Him’ … surely ‘missing’ is the cruellest word in the language”.ⁱ The writer’s 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 (1914–1918) 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 Australia’s 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 “public displays of commemoration to honour those who sacrificed their lives for the nation”.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 “memory boom” 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 (1870–1881), 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 community’s 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 “last resting place of the common soldier [being within] a mass grave” often labelled with the commanding officer’s 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 “by families for whom death in action was an occupational hazard”.^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 Soldiers’ 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 soldiers’ graves.^xvi

Fig. 1.1

Battlefield graves on the Silt Spur, Gallipoli, 1915

(AWM image https://​www.​awm.​gov.​au/​collection/​C1014301)

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...