Remembering a Nameless Warrior – Reema Jadeja-Reed

The sheer horror and bleakness of trench warfare is unrivalled. The humanitarian toll of the First World War, which began in August 111 years ago, is staggering, with 10 million military deaths, close to 7 million civilian deaths, and 21 million military personnel wounded. On July 1, 1916, the Battle of the Somme saw the deadliest day in British military history to date, with 57,000 casualties, including 19,240 dead. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission files reveal that 526,816 British and Commonwealth soldiers of WWI have no known resting place. Tragically, 338,955 have never been buried, and 187,861 have unidentified graves. It is hard to fathom the scale of devastation and brutality that could render half a million families bereaved without even a tangible location in which to mourn their dearly departed. How did half a million men die in service of their country, with no known final resting place? What spurred the idea of a single tomb to commemorate these men? 

These are the questions John Nichol endeavors to answer in his new book The Unknown Warrior: A Personal Journey of Discovery and Remembrance. The bestselling author weaves archival research, diaries, and interviews with descendants and military experts to present a moving historical account that both haunts and edifies. A veteran who served in the Royal Air Force for fifteen years, Nichol is all too familiar with the complexities and camaraderie of war. He was taken prisoner in the Gulf War, and his highly publicized captivity became one of the most enduring images of the conflict. In this new book, Nichol quantum leaps between the past and the present to commemorate the fallen. 

At High Wood

If one single moment was emblematic of the loss of the Great War, it was surely there on the first day at the Somme, “when thousands of young men leapt gamely from their trenches, only to discover that woolen uniforms offer precious little protection against machine-gun bullets.” It was a cruel day in which one man was killed every 4.4 seconds. Two weeks later, a combined British-Indian force armed with lances charged into the jaws of a heavily armed, fortified German position equipped with machine guns. The writer explains that early in the Somme, the Allies had developed a strategy referred to as “creeping barrage.” A wall of exploding shells which moved slowly over enemy positions as infantry followed closely behind, with the hope being that any remaining enemy combatants would be forced to stay under cover as Allied soldiers advanced upon them. 

Nichol offers glimpses of the lives of some of the fallen. Bert Bradley with his pipe, young Alec Reader awaiting his release papers, and Sidney Wheater, the hockey player from Scarborough, all died at High Wood. A few hours later, Raymond Asquith, son of the Prime Minister, was shot while leading his men in an attack. In Ginchy, Harry Farlam from Derbyshire, who was so proud to be a Corporal, was killed the next day. Nichol cites the Duke of Wellington’s 1815 remark after Waterloo, “Believe me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.” At High Wood today, it is estimated that 8,000 nameless soldiers from both sides still lie under the soil. “Many of the dead, never recovered and offered a permanent place to rest, still lie in the earth beneath my feet. So many Unknown Warriors. So many ghosts.”

Chaplain David Railton carried his personal Union Jack on the battlefield in France, taking great care of it. “The flag was a stirring symbol of home, of ‘Dear Old England’, as he put it. It brought a flash of colour to the muted greys and khakis of their dun-coloured surroundings. And it was a Christian symbol, too: a blood-red cross which offered, perhaps, the possibility of resurrection for those upon whom it was softly laid.” When a fresh corpse was deposited, the Padre would cover it with his flag and say a few prayers. He would do his best to identify the body and make a note of the burial location. By November 1916, the combined casualties of the British Empire, the French, and the Germans were in excess of one million, and many families had no closure. 

Fabian Ware, a newspaper editor and educator, thought deeply about the fate of the unidentified dead and their resting places in France. With colleagues, he started an operation comprising sixteen ambulances, a field hospital, touring cars, well-crafted crosses with inscriptions, and tarred bases to prevent rotting. Called the “Graves Registration Commission” (GRC), they were officially recognized by the War Office. Ware worked to establish general principles for burying and memorializing the dead after the war, and what followed was the establishment of the Imperial War Graves Commission, with the Prince of Wales as its president. Writer Rudyard Kipling, who had lost his eighteen-year-old son John in the Battle of Loos in 1915, was appointed literary advisor. It was Kipling who coined the majority of the phrases carved in cemeteries and gardens, and the phrase that is on the white headstones of all the Unknown Warriors: “A Soldier of the Great War. Known unto God.” Famed architect Sir Edwin Lutyens would design a majority of war memorials, including the Cenotaph. 

The Chosen One 

Railton understood the nation needed closure, healing, and a symbol to represent the devastating loss. Only 32 out of 16,000 British villages had all their men return alive from the war. He proposed that an unknown warrior be interred at Westminster Abbey, and wrote to its dean, the Right Reverend Bishop Ryle. The dean had the ear of both the King and the Prime Minister, and if anyone could get this sanctioned, it was he. Ryle replied three days later: “The suggestion of commemorating the Unknown Dead has indeed been made in different quarters. But your suggestion strikes me as the best I have received. If I could obtain the War Office permission, I think I could carry out the rest of the proposal—the interment, etc. And the idea occurs to me that it would be appropriate as a wonderful way of commemorating the Armistice.” 

Grieving mothers needed to believe the Unknown Warrior could be their precious son; widows had to hope he could be their beloved husband; and children had to be given faith that he could be their dear father. Thus, it was essential that the identity of the chosen Warrior remain unknown. All involved were sworn to secrecy and given specific instructions for the selection process. Four bodies were to be chosen. The whereabouts of the three “unused” bodies were to be sacrosanct. The body had to be a British soldier chosen from each of the big battle areas: Aisne, Somme, Arras, and Ypres. The bodies were to be brought to the headquarters at St Pol and placed in the Chapel on November 8, 1920. The parties bringing the bodies were to swiftly return to their areas. The final chosen Warrior would lie in a sixteenth-century-inspired English oak casket.

The Warrior would not be weaponless in the afterlife and was interred with an iron shield and Charles ffoulkes’ crusader’s sword.

The final chosen Warrior was transported by ambulance to Boulogne on the coast under military escort, along with six barrels of French soil. Soldiers, both British and French, and a plethora of photographers lined the roads approaching the port, eager to see the Unknown Warrior’s cortège. Nichol explains, “A bearer party of British and dominion soldiers was waiting to carry the Union Jack-wrapped coffin up to the Château’s library. The men had been carefully selected to represent all branches of the army: the Royal Army Service Corps, the Royal Engineers, the Royal Garrison Artillery, the Australian Light Horse, the Canadian Infantry, the 21st London Regiment, the Machine Gun Corps and the Royal Army Medical Corps.”

That night would be the only time in which the Warrior was not under the protection of British troops. The “poilus” from the French 8th Regiment were chosen to guard him, in recognition of their valor in battle and as recent recipients of the Légion d’Honneur en masse. “At 10:30AM, all the bells of Boulogne began to toll, and after a blazing salute from the trumpets of the French cavalry, the great bass drums of the massed band began to thump out the sombre rhythm of Chopin’s marche funèbre (funeral march).” France had lost 1.3 million men in the war, and Maréchal Ferdinand Foch, the Supreme Allied Commander, well understood the intense human suffering. He unexpectedly travelled to the procession on his own volition and marched alongside General Macdonogh behind the Unknown Warrior. The Warrior set sail on the HMS Verdun, finally on his way home. He arrived on British soil to the chords of “Land of Hope and Glory,” then travelled by train to London Victoria’s station and onwards to his final resting place at Westminster. The French Unknown Warrior would begin his journey to Paris, where he was honored the following day as his brother-in-arms was being interred. 

A Place of Remembrance 

The Unknown Warrior’s parade began at Victoria Station, passed Constitution Hill and The Mall, stopped at the unveiling of the Cenotaph, and moved onwards to the abbey, where 20,000 applications had been received for around 1,600 places. Newspapers had come across the plea of a young boy who ended his letter with, “The man in the coffin might be my daddy.” A sentiment shared by many. Thanks to Queen Mary, wife of King George V, some places had been reserved for widows who joined dignitaries from across the Empire, including many Victoria Cross recipients, bestowing a very different honor as the Warrior’s peers. The Warrior would not be weaponless in the afterlife and was interred with an iron shield and Charles ffoulkes’ crusader’s sword. A writer for the Yorkshire Post captured the nation’s mood, “But never have I known any feeling comparable to that of today as I gazed on the flag-covered coffin that enshrined the sublime anonymity of a fallen soldier, from that to the simple but all-moving symbolism of the Cenotaph, and from both to the living, palpitating, pathetic multitude of mothers and wives stricken by the fell blow of war in these recent years. ” 

In the present, Nichol admires the ornate Unknown Warrior’s American Congressional Medal of Honor, affixed to a pillar near the Warrior’s tomb. It is embossed with the single word “VALOR.” More than 60 countries now have their own tomb for their own valiant unknown. Nichol shares that he and fellow Gulf War POWs gather every year on the anniversary of their release. They observe a moment’s silence before dinner and toast to absent friends who did not come home. 

Nichol speaks of the similarities between Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s final journey and that of the Unknown Warrior. The nation mourned for both, with a deep and profound sorrow permeating all quarters. Pride was also thematic in both, “Pride in Her Majesty’s life and her legacy; pride in our Armed Forces and the role they played; pride, above all, in the feeling of what it is to be British.” After laying flowers at Buckingham Palace, I too was a proud Brit who undertook the arduous lying-in-state pilgrimage to pay respects to our Late Queen. It was the mother of all British queues, thirteen hours of walking through the bitter London cold beside the River Thames. We diligently journeyed past iconic landmarks, eventually reaching the Palace of Westminster at 2am. 

Yet as Nichol states, differences exist, too. “Instead of the crown, orb and sceptre lay the workaday steel helmet, webbing and bayonet of a soldier.” Her Majesty was by no means anonymous. With the Warrior, he was everyone, yet no one, yet someone. As written in a personal narrative after the Warrior’s funeral, “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 cruelest word in the language.” The Unknown Warrior was someone’s missing—and there were hundreds of thousands like him. 

I have worn a poppy to remember the fallen and their sacrifices every November since primary school. Blazer or Cashmere coat, made of paper or enamel, ‘tis there on my lapel. It is a reminder to myself and others of what John McCrae so poignantly wrote in the first stanza of his poem, which inspired the symbol: 

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below. 

There are rows upon rows of those who loved and were loved. Who, like us, indeed felt dawn and beheld a sunset glow. The century has turned, man’s propensity for conflict has not abated, and peace still comes at a cost. As the passage of time takes us further away from the Great War, Nichol reminds us of our duty to remember—lest we forget.