On 11 November 1920, two years after the armistice that ended the First World War, the Unknown Warrior was buried in London’s Westminster Abbey in a deeply sombre ceremony that caught the mood of a nation, still reeling in grief following four years of war.

In 1916, the vicar of Margate in Kent, the Reverend David Railton (a recipient of the Military Cross) was stationed as a padre on the Western Front near the French village of Armentières on the Belgian border when he noticed a temporary grave with the inscription, ‘An Unknown British Soldier’. Moved by this simple epitaph, he initially suggested the notion to the British wartime commander-in-chief, Sir Douglas Haig that one fallen man, unknown in name or rank, should represent all those who died during the war who had no known grave. In August 1920, having received no response from Haig, Railton muted the idea to Herbert Ryle, the Dean of Westminster, who, in turn, passed it onto Buckingham Palace.

Initially, the king, George V (pictured), was not enthusiastic about the proposal; not wanting to re-open the healing wound of national grief but was persuaded into the idea by the prime minister, David Lloyd-George.

On 7 November 1920, the remains of six (some sources state four) unidentified British soldiers were exhumed – one each from six different battlefields (Aisne, Arras, Cambrai, Marne, Somme and Ypres). The six corpses were transported to a chapel in the village of St Pol, near Ypres, where they were each laid out on a stretcher and covered by the Union flag. There, in the company of a padre (not Rev Railton), a blindfolded officer entered the chapel and touched one of the bodies.

The following morning, chaplains of the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church and Non-Conformist churches held a service for the chosen soldier. Placed in a plain coffin, the Unknown Warrior was taken back on a train to England via Boulogne. At Boulogne, the coffin was kept overnight in the town’s castle, a guard of honour keeping vigil.

A British Warrior

On the morning of the 9 November, the coffin was placed in a larger casket made from wood, three inches thick, taken from an oak tree in the gardens of London’s Hampton Court Palace. Mounted on the side of the coffin, a 16th-century sword from the collection at the Tower of London especially chosen by George V. Draped over the casket, the Union flag, which had been used by Rev Railton as an altar cloth during the war. (The flag, known as the Padre’s Flag, now hangs in St George’s Chapel within Westminster Abbey). The coffin plate bore the inscription: ‘A British Warrior who fell in the Great War 1914-1918 for King and Country’.

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Nicknamed the Tiger for his fiery temperament, Georges Clemenceau was not averse to settling personal feuds by duel. He was anti-monarchy, anti-socialist and anti-Catholic. His father, Benjamin, who himself had been imprisoned for his republican views, was a doctor and although Clemenceau completed his medical studies, he didn’t take up the profession, being drawn instead to politics.

A staunch republican and troublemaker, like his father, Georges Clemenceau was once imprisoned for 73 days (some sources state 77 days) by Napoleon III’s government for publishing a republican newspaper and trying to incite demonstrations against the monarchy. In 1865, fearing another arrest, and possible incarceration on Devil’s Island, Clemenceau fled to the US, arriving towards the end of the American Civil War. He lived first in New York, where he worked as a journalist, and then in Connecticut where he became a teacher in a private girls’ school. Clemenceau married one of his American students, Mary Plummer, and together they had three children before divorcing seven years later. (Of his son, Clemenceau, known for his wit, said, ‘If he had not become a Communist at 22, I would have disowned him. If he is still a Communist at 30, I will do it then.’)

Five days after his divorce, Clemenceau returned to France and briefly worked as a doctor before returning to politics. In 1871, he witnessed France’s defeat to Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War.

‘A soldier of democracy’

An intellectual, Georges Clemenceau was fascinated by Ancient Greek culture, supported the work of the French Impressionists, wrote a book on Jewish history, and translated into French the works of English philosopher, John Stuart Mill. Following France’s defeat during the Franco-Prussian War, Clemenceau opposed France’s colonial ambitions, arguing that the country needed to concentrate its efforts on extracting revenge on the Germans and recovering Alsace Lorraine, territory it had lost to the Germans as part of the French surrender.

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Field Marshal Lord Kitchener’s face and pointing finger proclaiming ‘Your country needs you’, often copied and mimicked, is one of the most recognizable posters of all time.

Born 24 June 1850 in County Kerry, Ireland, Horatio Kitchener first saw active service with the French army during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and, a decade later, with the British Army during the occupation of Egypt. He was part of the force that tried, unsuccessfully, to relieve General Charles Gordon, besieged in Khartoum in 1885. The death of Gordon, at the hands of Mahdist forces, caused great anguish in Britain. Thirteen years later, as commander-in-chief of the Egyptian army, Kitchener led the campaign of reprisal into Sudan, defeating the Mahdists at the Battle of Omdurman and reoccupying Khartoum in 1898. Kitchener had restored Britain’s pride.

Boer War

Kitchener’s reputation took a dent however during the Second Boer War in South Africa, 1899-1902. Succeeding Lord Roberts as c-in-c in November 1900 with the idea of mopping up outstanding pockets of resistance, Kitchener resorted to a scorched-earth policy in order to defeat the guerrilla tactics of the Boers. Controversially, he also set up a system of concentration camps and interned Boer women and children and black Africans. Overcrowded, lacking hygiene and malnourished, over 25,000 were to die, for which Kitchener was heavily criticised.

The criticism, however, did not damage Kitchener’s career, becoming first c-in-c of India, promoted to field marshal, and, in 1911, Consul-General of Egypt, responsible, in effect, for governing the whole country. Continue reading →

It is almost midnight. The only light emanates from a few candles placed around the room. In the middle of the drawing room is a round table adorned only with a pale linen cloth. Around it sits a couple and a companion. The man is in his fifties, barrel-chested with a long moustache. He holds his wife’s hands. The third person, a medium, rocks to and fro, her eyes tightly closed. She is mumbling in a high-pitched voice, groaning, breathing hard, but, frothing slightly from the mouth, her words are unintelligible. The couple watch her intently, waiting, hoping for a communication.

Suddenly it comes. Her tone changes.  ‘Jean, it is I,’ she says in the voice of a young man.
Instantly, the couple recognise the voice. The woman, Jean, gasps, ‘It is Kingsley.’
‘Is that you, boy?’ says the man, his hands tightening over his wife’s.
Lowering his voice to a whisper, Kingsley says, ‘Father, forgive me.’
The man’s heart lurches, ‘There was never anything to forgive. You were the best son a man ever had.’
He feels a hand on his head then a kiss just above his brow. It takes his breath away.
‘Are you happy?’ he cries.
There is a pause and then very gently, ‘Yes, I am so happy.’

‘Christianity is dead’

Contacting the dead was a popular pursuit post-First World War, when so many parents had lost loved ones in the killing fields of the Western Front, Gallipoli and further afield. The war was without precedent in terms of fatalities, and people, throughout Europe, haunted by a generation of slaughtered men, found themselves struggling for answers. The technology of warfare had defeated everything they previously held dear – and religion had failed to provide the answers. Instead, many turned to spiritualism as a means to contact their dead directly.

And the leading proponent of spiritualism was none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. His greatest invention, the straight-laced Sherlock Holmes, would have thoroughly disapproved of his creator’s conversion to séances, Ouija boards and mediums. But the great writer had lost his son, Kingsley, in October 1918, and like so many grief-struck parents, he was desperate to commune with his dead son from beyond the grave. ‘Christianity is dead,’ he once declared, ‘How else could ten million young men have marched out to slaughter? Did any moral force stop that war? No. Christianity is dead – dead!’

Kingsley Conan Doyle had been wounded in the neck on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916. 20,000 British soldiers were killed that day, plus another 40,000 wounded – the worst, single day in Britain’s military history. Two years later, however, Kingsley was recovering. But in the summer of 1918, the whole world was swept by Spanish Flu, the most devastating pandemic in modern times, which claimed at least 50 million lives. Among them, on 28 October, was 25-year-old Kingsley, his resistance compromised by his battlefield injury.

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John French spent much of his early military career, like many of his contemporaries, in Africa and India. He was part of the failed 1884/5 mission to relieve General Gordon in Sudan, and from 1891 served in India.

In India French first met his future rival, Douglas Haig, then a captain. Indeed, Haig later lent French a large sum of money to help the latter stave off bankruptcy. While in India, French had an affair with the wife of a fellow officer. The scandal almost ended his career.  He survived and went on to serve with distinction as a cavalry officer during the Boer War where, most notably, in 1900, under the stewardship of Frederick Roberts, he lead the force that relieved the British garrison besieged in the town of Kimberley.

French was appointed Britain’s army chief-of-staff in 1911 and given command of the British Expeditionary Force, the BEF. In 1913, French was promoted to the rank of field marshal.

1914

With the outbreak of war in 1914, the BEF crossed the Channel, landing on the continent on 7 August. (Consisting of little more than 90,000 men, only half of whom were regular soldiers; the other half being reservists, the BEF had famously, and allegedly, been dismissed by the Kaiser, Wilhelm II, who, on 19 August, ordered his army to ‘exterminate the treacherous English and walk over General French’s contemptible little army.’ Hence British soldiers took pride in calling themselves the ‘Old Contemptibles’.) French’s orders, from Horatio Kitchener, minister for war, were to work alongside the French but not to take orders from them. The BEF first saw action during the Battle of Mons, 23 August 1914, Britain’s first battle in Western Europe since Waterloo ninety-nine years before.

Following the Allies’ Retreat from Mons and with the Germans advancing on Paris, Joseph Joffre, the French commander-in-chief, decided to counterattack, aided by the British. But French, concerned for his exhausted men, even at the cost of French soldiers, instead contemplated a complete withdrawal. On 1 September French received a visit in person from Kitchener who ordered him to obey Joffre’s commands. Continue reading →