1914: Then Came Armageddon
Death and Memorialization
The human cost of the war left the world with millions of casualties prompting leaders to create new memorials for the deceased
The Human Cost
Those who survived combat were surrounded by death. Estimates on the number of dead WWI soldiers range from about 8.5 million to 10 million. The German Empire suffered the most combat casualties (2 million), followed by Russia (1.99 million) and then France (1.32 million). France suffered the worst casualty rate relative to its population. Dead soldiers were most often buried at or near the battlefield, although after the war, depending on each country’s policy, families could request the bodies of their fallen sons, fathers, or husbands. When the military buried bodies, each identifiable dead soldier received his own grave with his name on it, a departure from past practice where only officers received individually named war graves. This new procedure reflected how close the army and the state had become in this new era of conscription and nationalism. Many soldiers whose remains could not be found were memorialized on walls near war graves. The war also gave rise to ceremonial tombs to unknown (unidentifiable) soldiers.
The Imperial War Graves Commission
The Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC) was created at the beginning of World War I to register, mark, and tend the graves of British soldiers. Later, a National Committee was constituted and expanded into an Imperial Commission representing India, the British dominions and colonies, and other groups that fought in the war. Establishing permanent burial grounds became a core responsibility of the commission. The commission sought to create individual graves for every soldier. After so many years of fighting over densely populated Western European countries such as France and Belgium, it was inevitable that graves were placed where they could not be reached or tended because many were placed in uninhabited areas with no population to care for these graves. As the commission began to think beyond the war, they found many of the graves would be hard to maintain or would be isolated.
Debating Memorializing the War
The conclusion of the war posed a major problem for the erection of monuments on the Western Front. During the war and after, there was a tremendous effort to preserve and remember the names of soldiers. The sheer loss of life during the war made it extremely difficult to record every name and therefore many soldiers were left unidentified. Artists after 1918 sought to memorialize soldiers by showcasing the names of the deceased or missing. The central issue of designing war memorials was to find room for the plethora of names. This, coupled with the amount of unidentifiable bodies, led to the necessity to create a new type of memorialization.
During the war, one soldier wrote, “In all wars, it has been one of the fears haunting a soldier’s friends that his body may be utterly lost. Even in this war, there have been such irretrievable losses. But in no great war has so much been done as in this, to prevent the addition of that special torment to the pains of anxiety and of bereavement.”
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
The Italians, French, and British each constructed a “Tomb of the Unknown Soldier” during the aftermath of World War I to properly memorialize the thousands of unidentifiable soldiers. By 1920, all three countries began digging up trenches in the major battlefields to transport their soldiers’ bodies home. The British and French buried unidentifiable remains in late 1920, while Italians and Americans did so in 1921. Today, the sites remain significant historical landmarks to the unimaginable casualties of the First World War.
Video footage of the French burial of the Unknown Soldier in 1920 at The Arc de Triomphe in Paris and the American burial in 1921 at Arlington National Cemetary in Virginia.