Page 14 - Armistice 100: A Yorkshire Post Picture Past Special

YORKSHIRE POST NOSTALGIA TUESDAY NOVEMBER 06 2018
Armistice 100
COMMEMORATING THE CENTENARY OF THE END OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR
‘UNKNOWN TO MAN, BUT KNOWN TO GOD’
WORDS BY DAVID BEHRENS
In the Nave of Westminster Abbey, the memorial to the nation’s most famous warrior lies side by side with the grave of its least known.
The green marble stone, just inside the west entrance, is dedicated to the life of Winston Churchill. The one to which it sits next dwarfs it not only in scale but in symbolism.
This is the tomb of the unknown soldier, a man unidentified by
name or rank, who was brought from France and laid to rest there on Armistice Day, 1920. King George V and the heads of his armed forces were there to reflect on the scale of the
sacrifice that had taken place.
They were not told who they were burying;
only that he had been chosen from the countless unnamed dead in France and Flanders.
The army chaplain whose choice it was, the Rev George Kendall, took the secret to his grave.
“He may have come from some little village or some city in this land, and he may be the son of a working man or of a rich man,” he said. “Unknown to man, but known to God.”
Kendall, himself a working man from Thorncliffe in what is now South Yorkshire, before he took up the cloth, knew that it was not the soldier’s name that mattered, but what he represented. His presence was a metaphor for the thousands upon thousands of his countrymen sent to their deaths by the military chiefs who now watched him buried.
Many had been laid in marked graves on what had been the killing fields of the Western Front. Many more had not, and for their families there was some little solace in the knowledge that the tomb in the Abbey might be their personal monument.
To Kendall had fallen the appalling task of exhuming all the bodies buried in the fields and ditches where they had fallen, and moving them to the new war grave cemeteries.
The stench was unspeakable and he took up pipe smoking to mask the worst of it.
“He had a job to do, and he would have regarded part of that job as never to speak of what he knew,” said his grandson, Tim, the head of a charity founded in his memory.
Poppies adorn the Grave of the Unknown Soldier at Westminster Abbey, London. PICTURE: REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
‘He would have regarded part of that job as never to speak of what he knew.’
It had been another chaplain, the Rev David Railton, who had conceived the idea for an anonymous memorial. The son of the first commissioner of the Salvation Army and later a provincial vicar in the West Riding of Yorkshire, he had written to the Dean of Westminster, who in turn gained the support of the Prime Minster, David Lloyd George – whose own memorial was later to be placed nearby.
Eventually, the King also consented.
On November 11, 1920, the coffin was drawn on a gun carriage through the crowded streets of London. Soldiers who had been honoured with the Victoria Cross formed a guard of honour.
Outside the Abbey, Sir Edwin Lutyens’ Cenotaph was unveiled. Inside, 100 widows who had lost not only their husbands but all their sons to the slaughter, watched as the coffin was placed beneath 100 sandbags of soil from the battlefields.
Mourners filed past in their thousands, and the inscription on the black Belgian marble stone – the only one in the Abbey on which it is forbidden to walk – reflects the outpouring of grief that the burial unleashed.
“Brought from France to lie among the most illustrious of the land,” it read. “They buried him among the kings because he had done good toward God and toward his house.”
At precisely the same time, the body of a French unknown soldier was interred at the Arc de Triomphe.
A century later, the faces of those at the Abbey that day have faded but their loss
is undiminished. The passing parade that followed included Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the future Queen Mother, on her wedding day in 1923. On her way into the Abbey, she laid her bouquet at the feet of the unknown warrior in memory of her brother, Fergus, who had died at the Battle of Loos in 1915.
Their generation has long passed. The grave today, garlanded by poppies, is surrounded instead by visitors whose imaginations can scarcely comprehend the aberration of world war, but whose lives have been made better by the sacrifices of the unknown warrior and those who followed.
Outside the west entrance, back in the light and the noise, the life of London goes on. That was what they had fought for.
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