I wouldn't mind," I heard a woman's voice sobbing at my elbow, "I wouldn't mind if my son had been killed if he could have lain here." Tears streamed down her kindly face. She clutched my elbow. "I wouldn't mind." There was a scent of roses and mown grass, the reflection of sunlight from white Portland stone, a cool and gentle Mediterranean breeze, the promise of heat to come. "I wouldn't mind."
We were two English people in a primal English setting: greensward, shrubs, flowering perennials, paved walks with saxifrage rooted in the cracks, low walls, statuary and masonry-an English enclosure far from England. "Remember, green is a colour," advised Gertrude Jekyll, inventor of the modern English garden; and here below the hillsides, arid after a long summer drought, green was a brilliant, almost overpowering colour.
The landscape beyond the garden was ageless, with that Mediterranean quality which has captivated English travellers since they first began their journeys to rediscover, 300 years ago, the classical world their ancestors had done so much to overthrow. But the garden was timeless, belonging neither to the present nor the past, but to an arrested moment existing only in the English imagination. It is a moment suffused by classicism, inspired by the temperate wilderness, but transcending both; a moment when man's work comes into equilibrium with the beauty of nature and an ideal landscape is brought to perfection.
Where are these landscapes? Some are accidental tracts of the English countryside—an artificial creation 4,000 years old in parts—where contour and woodland combine with plough and pasture, hedge and wall, to form a vision the English call England. The English vision is particularly present in the Cotswolds west of Oxford, in the South Hams of Devonshire, in Thomas Hardy's Dorset, along the Welsh marches of Herefordshire and Shropshire, in Beatrix Potter country above the Cumbrian lakes, in the Kipling territory of remoter Kent and Sussex. Yet that vision is also present wherever population is sparse, rainfall heavy and agriculture intense, but with tracts of ancient forest land making a patchwork of settlement and emptiness, the familiar and the mysterious.
Many are not accidental at all, but the work of great landlords and the artists they employed to beautify what was already beautiful, in a manner quite alien to the environment. England is natural broadleaf forest land, with deep topsoil in which stone is hard to come by and the indigenous flowering plants are retiring and modest on colour. Without relentless human effort, cleared land reverts to scrub in a few seasons and to forest in a century. Despite the power of these natural forces, English landowners decided in the 17th century to create private landscapes which defy north European ecology and impose elements of Italian and French classicism. They began to build stone palaces in classical style, to lay out severely formal gardens on their doorsteps, and to reorder the more distant landscape into those idealised Italian ones painted by Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin with which they filled their picture galleries. Near my house in Wiltshire, there is one of the greatest English ideal landscapes, the artificial lakeland garden of Stourhead. I often wonder whether the Hoare family, which created it, was not inspired by the southerly vista into Dorset, which typifies the vision of an accidentally perfect England. There are other such ideal landscapes at Blenheim and at Ditchley north of Oxford, at Stowe in Buckinghamshire, at Castle Howard in Yorkshire and at Chatsworth in Derbyshire. Every county offers dozens of less spectacular versions, and the English visit them in their millions, to commune with a central belief of their identity: that England is a garden, and that to be English is to be a gardener; that in life they are best at home in a garden; and that, in death, a garden is where they belong.
Few English people, of course, can hope to live at Stourhead or Stowe. Perhaps they really do not wish to inhabit such idealisations of nature. The English are homebodies, happy if in a fraction of an acre they can recreate some of the elements of that high style. They are helped to do so by the BBC's Gardener's Question Time, whose panel of experts instruct millions of radio listeners each week in the secrets of gardening by answering queries put by members of a local horticultural society. The popularity of Gardener's Question Time, which has been on the air now for 50 years, is a touchstone of the difference between English and American culture. The extremes of climate in the US, its highs and lows of fertility and aridity, rule out the viability of a programme based on uniform temperature and cultivability. More than that, however, Gardener's Question Time presumes that its listeners will have a lifetime to tend the same garden. It is a programme for a people who do not move, or move at most a few miles down the road, and it would therefore be untransplantable into the restless mobility of the US, whose people not only change states but coasts, with a frequency that seems reckless to the BBC's cosy stay-at-homes.
There is, alongside the great garden, an alternative English gardening tradition: the cottage plot, parish church of plantsmen and plantswomen. The great garden is formal and contrived, however artfully integrated into its natural surroundings, and its colour tones are modulated and subdued. The cottage garden, by contrast, is spontaneous and informal, full of colour with plants allowed to have their heads. The centre point of the great garden is the paved or gravelled walk running between trimmed topiary. That of the cottage garden is the herbaceous border and rambling rose. Both are equally English, though they have different origins. Towards the end of the 19th century a new generation of English garden designers succeeded in combining these traditions into what is now accepted as the classic English garden. Its layout draws on the 17th century fashion for formality, on the 18th century idealisation of nature and classical civilisation, and on a more recent enthusiasm for the vernacular. Some great gardens were adapted to accommodate the herbaceousness previously excluded as vulgar and unaristocratic, as at Arley Hall in Cheshire, where the beds date to 1846. Many others, the work of the newly rich, were radical reorganisations around old houses which had fallen into decay or houses which had been originally designed in the new fashion. Such houses were not necessarily large, but given spaciousness by a deliberate policy of extending the architecture of the building out into the surrounding walls, terraces, summerhouses and topiary hedges. The most sought-after designer of these new houses was the young architect Edwin Lutyens; and the most inventive designer of their gardens was the self-taught horticulturist Gertrude Jekyll. They often co-operated. Lutyens helped Jekyll with what is still one of the most influential of all English gardening books, Gardens for Small Country Houses, and the results of their collaboration can be seen at such places as Orchards, Surrey; Marsh Court and Amport House, in Hampshire; and Folly Farm, Berkshire.
Lutyens favoured low stone walls, paved walks, pergolas and pavilions in the stripped-down classical style. Jekyll encouraged the planting of dwarf roses, creeping ground cover, grey and silver border plants, azaleas, and climbers such as hydrangea and wisteria. Their purpose was to soften masonry with vegetation which liked support, to sharpen natural forms with architectural straight lines, and to relieve the greys and browns of stone and brick with blues, yellows and purples.
It was in exactly such surroundings that the tear-stained woman burst out about not minding if her son had been killed. I was not the least surprised by her reaction. I had heard it, in different versions, many times before in many parts of the world. This time we were in the Suda Bay British War Cemetery in Crete, where 1,571 servicemen are buried, mainly British, but including New Zealanders and Australians. Most were killed resisting the German invasion of 20th May 1941, a disaster for the German parachutists involved—2,000 died on the first day—but a strategic victory for Hitler, who secured the island despite the losses.
But we might have been in any one of the larger Commonwealth War Graves Commission's cemeteries anywhere in the world. The dead of the British Empire and Commonwealth of the two world wars are buried in 134 countries, from Algeria to Zimbabwe. The smallest cemetery is on Ocracoke Island, off North Carolina, with four graves. The largest is the Thiepval memorial in the department of the Somme, in France, where the bodies of 70,000 soldiers are buried and the names of those missing in the great battle of the first world war are commemorated. These are cemeteries proper, of which the commission maintains about 2,000 throughout the world. Besides these, the commission also cares for 23,000 individual graves or plots in non-military cemeteries. One such grave is in Kilmington churchyard, under my bedroom window: Private S Prince, Somerset Light Infantry, who died aged 22 on 5th May 1916—home on leave, I presume, from France just before the opening of the Battle of the Somme. Every two years an official of the commission comes to scrub the headstone (one of over 1m identical headstones in the world), to cut the grass, tidy the surroundings, and ensure that Private Prince continues to repose in dignity.
There are, of course, many more dead than headstones. In every French cathedral a plaque, in French and English, reads: "To the glory of God and in memory of one million men of the British Empire who died in the great war and of whom the greater number rest in France." Of those killed in France, the bodies of nearly half could not be found or were unidentifiable, while most of the naval dead were lost at sea. There is a similar proportion of missing among the dead of the second world war. The commission commemorates the names of all of them—nearly 1.7m in number. Of these, 900,000 are identified servicemen and women lying in marked graves. There are over 700,000 monumental inscriptions to the missing, but 200,000 of those read "known unto God," because the remains recovered were unrecognisable. Some headstones record a casualty "known to be buried near this spot"; others bear two or more names of bodies too entangled to be buried separately.
How was this vast army of the dead to be decently interred? That was the question which confronted the British government soon after the first mass casualty lists were published in the national newspapers in 1915. The dead of Britain's earlier wars, frequent though those had been, were comparatively few in number. They had been buried near where they fell, marked by stones raised by their friends or regiments, if commemorated at all. It was a disposal accepted by the poor from which the bulk of the army's soldiers came. In civil life many of them might have gone to an unmarked pauper's grave in town or city. In the country a wooden cross, soon to decay, would have indicated their plot in the churchyard. In my village, a resident has calculated that 25,000 bodies have been buried in the churchyard since the Norman conquest, yet it contains only a few dozen stones—those of the wealthy, and none older than the 18th century.
By the beginning of the 20th century, however, the British people were better off. The funeral had become an important working-class ritual, and a marked headstone had become a symbol of respectability. For this reason it was unthinkable that the dead of a national army, dying in their tens of thousands for king, country and empire, should be left in hurried graves, marked by some makeshift cross nailed together by comrades. In the early months of the first world war soldiers dug graves in French or Belgian churchyards; but these rapidly filled up. The better off among the bereaved erected private memorials which most families could not afford; some repatriated the bodies. Both practices struck the wrong note in what the government represented-and the population endorsed-as a national war.
Very early on, therefore, Britain established what in retrospect are remarkable and nationally distinctive principles for the burial and commemoration of its war dead. First, there should be no private memorials, "on account of the difficulties of treating impartially the claims advanced by persons of different social standing." Second, there should be no repatriation of bodies, because of the common feeling that, as one officer put it, "in spite of all differences of rank, we were comrades, brothers dwelling together in unity." Third, officers and soldiers should be buried identically and together because, as Fabian Ware, founder of the War Graves Commission, wrote: "In 99 cases out of 100, officers will tell you that if they are killed they would wish to be among their men." The fourth, most important, principle was that each fallen soldier should be honoured individually; even in a war of mass slaughter, each should be represented as a hero in an epic of collective heroism.
These principles were to be greatly elaborated on and their implementation standardised in the years to come. That was the achievement of Fabian Ware, a modest man who deserves to be recognised as a major semiologist of British culture in the 20th century. Semiology was not, of course, his purpose; it was not a title he would have welcomed or even understood. But through him a particularly English (rather than British) language of symbols—some from nature, some from the mind or hand of man—has come to represent how the nation wished to be seen by itself and by other nations at the end of an ordeal that tested the roots of its culture and identity to destruction. Some manifestation of this language of symbols can be found at sites all around the world; I can testify to its continuing power to move the emotions of those who come upon them. Wherever they are found-in places as far apart as Alabama, Israel, Pakistan and South Africa-the British are moved to tears, tears shed also by people who are not British at all. Fabian Ware, by instinct rather than artifice, created a great cultural artefact at which generations to come will wonder-as we wonder at the relics of Roman legions-long after Britain's worldwide power is only a memory for historians.
Ware had much help. In 1915, soon after his appointment, the French government passed a law deeding land for the cemeteries of foreign soldiers as a s?pulture perpetuelle. It passed not without opposition, for it was against the French tradition of storing the bones of the dead in ossuaries, a cheap way of burying remains en masse and of reusing burial plots. As a result, however, British war graves became the resting places of individuals in legal perpetuity. Ware also had assistance from several leading British architects, including Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker, who designed the Empire's great public buildings.
Rudyard Kipling's role in the design of the imperial war graves was a poignant one. John, his only son, was too myopic to meet the army's medical standards, but Kipling used his influence to secure him a commission in the Irish Guards. John was among the regiment's missing after the second Battle of Loos, in 1915. For several years Kipling and his American wife Carrie toured military hospitals in France seeking news of their son, but to no avail. In his grief, he wrote a short poem always quoted in his selected works:
My son was killed while laughing at some jest, I would I knew
What it was, and it might serve me in a time when jests are few.
The truth, never revealed to the parents, but discovered by a comrade from survivors of John Kipling's company, was that he was last seen crying in pain from a wound in the mouth. His body, lost for decades, has recently been identified by officials of the commission, and his headstone has been appropriately re-engraved.
Kipling conceived the inscriptions carved on the headstones and monumental sculptures of the commission's cemeteries. These monuments take three forms. One is a high columnar cross bearing a bronze sword known as the Cross of Sacrifice. The second is a monolith, the Stone of Remembrance, on which are carved words from Ecclesiasticus, adapted by Kipling: "Their name liveth for evermore." (They were adapted to avoid offending Hindus, many of whom died in the service of India's king-emperor.) The third is the standard headstone, two feet eight inches high, one foot three inches broad. It is cut from white Portland stone, engraved with the deceased's regimental badge—Private Prince's, below my bedroom window, shows the mural crown, slung bugle and battle honour "Jelalabad" of the Somerset Light Infantry, and a religious symbol. Today 1.5m bear the Christian cross; 65,000 the Muslim crescent; 100,000 the appropriate Sikh or Hindu symbol; 10,000 the Star of David; and 10,000 Buddhist or Confucian symbols. Each stone is also inscribed with the dead serviceman or servicewoman's number, name, decorations, regimental title, age, date and place of death; or as many details as could be ascertained when a body was disinterred for reburial. At the bottom of the stone relatives may place a personal inscription of up to 60 characters. These inscriptions are the exception rather than the rule-an indication of how heartfelt is popular acceptance of the guiding principle of uniformity of remembrance. They are often quite conventional-"Peace perfect peace," or "He died that others might live." Eccentric or distasteful inscriptions are not allowed. Occasionally, however, an extra tug of the heartstrings is given by an apt line of poetry or some quite artless phrase of lament, the labour of a young widow or a family struggling to express its love for a son and brother who will not return.
Kipling also struggled to find words that would dignify without mawkishness the grave of a body which could not be identified. He hit upon the phrase, "a soldier of the great war known unto God." Thus, unidentified burials of the second world war are inscribed "A Soldier [Sailor/Airman] of the 1939-45 War Known Unto God." Altogether, 204,145 graves in the commission's care are now marked in this way.
None of this symbolism could be imposed until the missing dead were found and the makeshift cemeteries of the war reordered. Work began while the first world war was still in progress, but even at its end the condition of many burial places was deeply distressing to relatives who began to make their way to France and Belgium to find where lost ones lay. Too often the sites they discovered were patches of mud, bereft of vegetation or covered by weeds and grass. A scheme of order had to be devised. The task was entrusted to Frederic Kenyon, director of the British Museum. Within the principles of uniformity of commemoration and an individual grave for all recovered remains, he proposed that each cemetery should either "have the appearance of a small park or garden in no way recognisable as a cemetery," or that it "be marked by rows of headstones of a uniform height and width, the graves themselves being levelled to a flat surface and planted with turf and flowers." The rows of headstones would "carry on the military idea, giving the appearance as of a battalion on parade."
The second alternative was adopted; but the first idea was integrated with it. The commission cemeteries are unmistakably that; but they are also unmistakably parks or gardens in the classic English style. How did this come about? When the commission began to recruit maintenance staff, it decided for administrative reasons not to enlist locals but to commission British firms who would send their own staff abroad. The work was therefore begun not by French or Belgian labourers but by British gardeners, already experienced as horticulturists or later trained at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. The style they brought with them was the one which Lutyens and Jekyll—she drew up plans for several cemeteries-taught in their seminal gardening book. By March 1921, 1,362 gardeners were employed. Many settled in France or Belgium, married local women, founded little English communities and introduced their sons into the commission's employment. These communities still exist and now have equivalents in Africa, southeast Asia, India and Pakistan, all trained in and carrying on the tradition of classic English country house gardening, in the desert and the tropics as well as in temperate northern Europe.
Other deeper literary influences were at work. The great war provoked in Britain—uniquely among combatant nations-a poetic response, much of it arcadian and pastoral. As Paul Fussell has noted in The Great War and Modern Memory: "Half the poems in the Oxford Book of English Verse are about flowers and a third seem to be about roses." He does not offer a similar count for first world war poetry, but the result might be the same. Certainly some of the most famous English poems are suffused with gardening themes.
The spectacle of the makeshift graves of the British in northern France inspired one of the most famous war poems, by the Canadian John McCrae, himself later killed in the war. It inspired the Bri- tish custom of wearing a poppy on Remembrance Sunday:
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.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Those themes were also used by Rupert Brooke in the most famous of all English war poems, "The Soldier." I can still repeat it by heart from childhood memory, and feel that Brooke's idea of making "some corner of a foreign field" a place that would be "forever England" was a principal motivation, conscious or not, in making the war cemetery a pastoral, arcadian garden. This has been the result.
What has been the effect of this partly intentional, partly accidental effort to honour the hundreds of thousands of British and imperial war dead within the principles of individual, yet uniform, commemoration? It is different from the French, who also buried their dead individually but under a cross, which creates a spiky and geometrical effect, lacking the mood of repose so immediately felt in British war cemeteries. It is certainly different from the Germans, whose dead lie in multiple or mass graves-such as that at Langemarck in Belgium, where 36,000 bodies of the young men killed in the first Battle of Ypres lie buried under a single giant slab-and whose cemeteries, heavy with evergreens and dark oaks, speak only of collective grief and national tragedy. It is also different from American cemeteries, in which the small size of the headstones (a pattern chosen after the civil war) the paucity of inscribed personal detail, and, as at Arlington, the intermixture of large private memorials, often to generals or distinguished civilians, diminishes the sense both of uniformity and of the importance of the individual. Moreover, the absence of flowering plants and horticultural design brings a harshness quite at variance with the gardened serenity of the British equivalent.
The method of commemoration chosen by the British towards the end of their national tragedy of 1914-18 was immensely effective. It created a deep bond of unity between the bereaved and within the nation as a whole, and reached out to include the peoples of the Empire and Commonwealth. Its emotional touch was so sure that it extinguished-after a brief but intense controversy in 1919—all demand for repatriation. The dead of the second world war are buried in the same manner, and today the only demand met by the British government regarding burial policy is that war widows should be assisted with travel costs when visiting their husbands' graves. Elderly women are now travelling as far as Burma and Malaysia on cemetery pilgrimages-usually returning consoled, if not positively inspired, by the beauty of the settings in which they find their husbands buried.
Often they find their husband's grave next to that of an Indian Muslim or a Burmese Buddhist, marked in the same way. That too has had, if not a unifying, at least a palliative effect. If the British parted with their imperial subjects on comparatively unacrimonious terms, that may be partly because they chose to make no distinction in the manner or the place where they buried those who fought the Empire's wars. Certainly it is remarkable that the rarest task of the War Graves Commission is the repair of desecration. War cemeteries in former colonial territory are hardly ever desecrated, even at times of outburst of nationalist rancour against the old imperial master.
Yet neither are graves desecrated in countries which were never part of the Empire or Commonwealth—former enemy countries such as Germany, or those which later went to war with Britain, such as Argentina or Iraq. Why should that be? To trample on the graves of an enemy is a universal if regrettable human instinct. One of the saddest places I have ever seen is the abandoned German war cemetery at Piontek in Poland, immaculately maintained until 1945, now a wilderness. Perhaps the immunity of British cemeteries is because Lutyens, Jekyll, Kipling, Ware and their army of gardeners succeeded in creating something symbolically more powerful than a site open to ritual desecration-a site of universally venerable sanctuary. There is a holiness in those cemeteries, both of the beauties of nature and of religion in all its forms, which defies hatred and brutishness; it speaks of the immortal, and touches eternity.
If foreigners are moved by those emanations, how much more the British themselves. When in 1920 they buried an unknown warrior in Westminster Abbey-the first of many unknown soldiers later buried by other countries-this inscription was chosen: "They buried him among the kings because he had done good towards God and towards His house." In burying their million and more warriors, known and unknown, in cemeteries evoking the country house gardens of the rich and propertied, the British in effect buried them, if not among kings, then among knights and lords. This decision ensured individual remembrance of the most humble, just as members of famous families are remembered in their ancestral plots—an evergreen and renewable remembrance, a celebration of pedigree and a testament of continual youth.
"I always feel young when I come here." The war widow who spoke was one of a party who had all lost their husbands in the Battle of Normandy 50 years before. None had remarried; time had taken its toll, but they returned each year to Bayeux to place flowers on the graves of men killed in their 20s, fighting to liberate Europe from Hitler in 1944. "I always feel young," she repeated, "just as if I was the same age as when I last saw him." She had grown very stout. It was difficult to picture the bride of the months before D-day. "Do stop, Betty," one of her friends interrupted, "or you'll make us all cry." It was I who was overcome with tears. The row of headstones of young soldiers of the East Yorkshire Regiment, the roses growing around the feet of their widows, the strange glow of happiness in the faces, were alto- gether too much for me. I was unable to speak-fortunately able to repress my impulse to embrace each in turn; to do so would have been an affront to our Englishness, to the fundamental Englishness of the place and the moment.
It was that same Englishness which overwhelmed my weeping companion in the Suda Bay cemetery on Crete. The tears I had shed in Normandy helped me to understand hers. In a certain sense, of course she would not have minded if her son had been killed. Britain's war cemeteries create an aesthetic strong enough to prevail over the agony of grief. To see a child to the grave brings the harshest pain human sensibility can suffer. Yet to find a child—or a husband or a father—buried as a hero, among coevals and comrades all raised to heroic states by a symbolism central to one's own culture, is to experience the transcendence of pain through the keenest emotions of pride in family and nation. The garden is a metaphor for beauty, renewal and immortality to many peoples and many creeds. If this is indeed an age without heroes, seeking monuments which can touch every human heart, the ideal garden may be what is sought. It is some image of the 2,000 English gardens around the world which allows us to repeat each November on Remembrance Sunday, without false sentiment, some of the most famous verses inspired by the great war. Laurence Binyon's "For the Fallen (September 1914)" is an epitaph for heroes of any time or place:
They shall grow not old, as we that
are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor
the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and
in the morning
We will remember them.
