Collecting the dead

Locating the war dead

The grim work of the Directorate of Graves Registration & Enquiries on the Western Front after the Great War

I was reading a fascinating article by Lieutenant Colonel Graham Parker and Joanna Legg in Stand To!, the journal of the Western Front Association, this morning. In "The Unidentified Irish Guards Lieutenant at Loos: Laid to Rest", they make a very compelling case that in 1992, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission correctly identified the grave of Lieutenant John Kipling at St Mary's ADS cemetery near Loos, France. In my mind, their evidence brings to a close a century old mystery.

However, in one part of their article, they describe the work of the Directorate of Graves Registration & Enquiries, the organisation responsible for collecting the war dead and trying to identify the bodies for burial. There is a description from one of the men tasked with this grim work, and I reproduce it here. Private J McCauley, recovering from wounds, was attached to one of the new special burial details between August and November 1918. He noted how:

“For the first week or two I could scarcely endure the experiences we met with, but I gradually became hardened.

“Often have I picked up the remains of a fine brave man on a shovel. Just a little heap of bones and maggots to be carried to the common burial place. Numerous bodies were found lying submerged in the water in shell holes and mine craters: bodies that seemed quite whole, but which became like huge masses of white, slimy chalk when we handled them.

“I shuddered as my hands, covered in soft flesh and slime moved about in search of the disc, and I have had to pull bodies to pieces in order that they should not be buried unknown. It was very painful to have to bury the unknown.”

I am relived that my own great grandfather was fortunate enough to have been buried, identified, immediately after his death.