The Unknown Warrior: A Personal Journey of Discovery and Remembrance

400 pages

Tearless

“Rum’s just coming up, Sir” “Thank you, Corporal”

“Once more into the breach dear friends, once more;

Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood”.

The first chapter is a tough read but I’ll come back to that. I was taken to the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior by my father in April 1944, before D-Day and before London was assailed again by the doodlebugs. My father had fought throughout and had somehow survived the whole of WW1 as a naval aircrew officer. For his generation and especially for my grandparents’ generation this Tomb had a profound veneration.  This heritage has continued to be honoured by my generation; and by my children’s. Not yet sure about my grand-children’s or my great-grandson’s. Time will tell.

We all know the story. Four (or were there more?) unidentified bodies were exhumed from different battlefields in France. A general (?) then chose one at random and this body was returned to Britain and re-buried as the Unknown Warrior in a fine coffin at the west end of Westminster Abbey.

Yet there are two stories which run in parallel because the idea of finding and burying an Unknown Warrior at the Abbey came from Rev. David Railton, a dynamic Army Padre who had interred many in France beneath his tattered Union flag, now hanging in the Abbey.

So how can a whole book be written just about this? Well, the author, a former RAF Navigator who was shot down, captured and tortured during the Gulf War, has a mastery of words and has, like his other books, researched this whole dramatic saga.

We start in WW1 and switch back and forth through times, like some modern films, to the Falklands War, to the Afghanistan War, to the Funeral of HM Queen Elizabeth II, to Remembrance Sundays, and back to the Service at the then new Cenotaph and Interment in 1920. The whole panoply of history and its tangled emotions are laid bare.  We meet some of the people who took part, indeed some who played significant parts, in all these times, and their families, and see how these events affected and traumatised them.

Despite intense public pressure no bodies, except just a very few brought back unofficially at private expense by those who could afford this, were returned to Britain from abroad after WW1. None from WW2. None from Korea, Malaya, Suez, Borneo or other post-WW2 actions. None from the Falklands. All lie in CWG war grave cemeteries. Not sure about the two Gulf wars but certainly the war in Afghanistan brought repatriation and this has wrought its own dramatic and emotional changes: Think of Royal Wootton Bassett.

The author’s research makes much of this and the need for a ‘body’ as a focal point for grief; hence the intensely emotional effect of returning just one body from WW1 over which the whole Nation could grieve. “The man in the coffin could be my Daddy”.

I’m somewhat perplexed by this. The bodies of seagoers are buried at sea. No such focal point for their widows or children. Maybe at best a chart marked with the Lat. and Long. Just think of all the ships lost in WW2 with all hands or nearly so: Hood, Barham, Prince of Wales, Repulse. Their ships became their tombs and are official war graves, where we now leave RBL poppy wreaths upon the oceans.

No graves for the 300,000 whose bodies were never found. Simply their names carved into the stone at Lutyen’s great Memorial at Thiepval, or upon the Menin Gate at Ypres, overflowing to the nearby CWG cemetery at Tyne Cot; or into the stone walls of numerous other CWG cemeteries world-wide. And no graves for those cremated; just names in a Book of Remembrance.  But for the Tomb in the Abbey, these and names on local War Memorials throughout the land, offer the only focal points.

It is, however, crystal clear from the author’s research that the bereft need to ‘know’ that their husband, father or son is really dead and have a focal point at which to grieve. There will certainly be readers of this book who substantiate this.

So, could the Unknown Warrior have been an airman or a sailor? Very unlikely to have been an airman as airfields were behind the lines and almost equally so to have been a flyer, because a crash into the swamps and slime of constantly refought over No-Mans-Land surrounded by aircraft wreckage and differences of uniform would have discounted anonymity. How about a sailor or a Marine? Only if one of the bodies of potential Warriors had been exhumed from the area where the Royal Naval Division had been fighting, and generals rather despised the RND for its naval traditions so searches for a potential Warrior might have been directed elsewhere. But does this matter? Not a jot. He is Unknown.

The core of the book takes us all through this fascinating history and it is compelling and worthwhile and lump-in-the-throat reading. What then was the ‘tough read’ to which I referred at the start? It is the vivid scene-setting descriptions of harrowing mindless slaughter, death, pain, wounding, rats, horses, mud, corpses, stench and privations of trench warfare. I could only read just a few pages at a time of this first chapter. Probably because I sensed and feared a ‘flashback’. So, in recommending this book, I would caution anyone who has known the sudden violent death of friend or foe at close quarters to skim through the early pages.

“Rum’s just coming up, Sir” “Thank you, Corporal”

“To die, to sleep, perchance to dream”.

Lest we forget.