Epitaphs from the Great War find new life on Twitter

By I.M.

EVERY day at 5.30pm, an epitaph from the grave of a Commonwealth soldier or nurse killed during the Great War is posted on Twitter. They vary from the emotive (“Brave, upright, sincere, kind, a loved son, a widowed mother’s pride”), to the patriotic (“Surrendered self to duty, to his old home, and England his country”). The poetic—“Whose distant footsteps echo through the corridors of time”—stand alongside the subversive: “Sacrificed to the fallacy that war can end war.” Sarah Wearne, the historian behind the @WWInscriptions account, has been tweeting since August 4th 2014 and will continue until November 11th 2018, the centenary of the armistice agreement. She wanted to mark the anniversary of the first world war and honour the lives lost, and was struck by the space constraints of both headstones and the social media site. Twitter limits the writer to 140 characters; when family members tried to sum up the lives of those they had lost, they were given only 66.

In May 1915 the army forbade the repatriation of bodies from war zones. People presumed it would be lifted in peacetime and that their loved ones would be returned. A report in 1918 suggested otherwise: the War Graves Commission did not want those who could afford to bring their dead home doing so and leaving the war cemeteries as paupers’ graveyards. They wanted the graves to “speak in one voice of one death, one sacrifice, endured by Britain for the freedom of nations and the freedom of man”. This brought another controversial decision—banning private headstones. They were instead to be uniform curve-topped stones, whether for a general or a private, a cobbler or an earl.

The Roman Catholic community insisted that the headstone should feature a prayer or an excerpt from scripture to help the soul through purgatory (the deceased likely did not receive their last rites). The commission, choosing not to favour one religion or denomination, stated that the next-of-kin could choose an inscription, so long as it was in the Roman alphabet and no more than 66 characters so as “to avoid unduly crowding the headstones”. As a result, these cemeteries “articulate the greatest individuality of any buried army in history,” says Ms Wearne.

With each tweet, Ms Wearne adds a link to her blog where she tries to decipher the cryptic nature of some of the epitaphs. Many allusions are rather opaque to us 100 years on, especially because families were creative. “After one crowded hour of glorious life, he sleeps well,” combines the words of William Shakespeare and Thomas Osbert Mordaunt, an 18th-century British officer and poet. Some expanded on famous phrases: one family elaborated upon Rudyard Kipling’s “Who dies if England lives?” by adding “Who lives if England dies?” The next-of-kin found inspiration in myriad sources: hymns, ditties, classical civilisation, novels, love duets and even Irish sailors’ songs (some prove oddly poignant: “When the fields are white with daisies, I’ll return”).

Ms Wearne doesn’t just unpick the literary references in the epitaphs but uses them as a starting point to understand the individual, how they died and the families they left behind. A grave marked “A noble type of good heroic womanhood” was written for Nellie Spindler, a 26-year-old nurse who was killed in France during the shelling of a hospital. Nellie’s mother chose her inscription; it comes from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1857 tribute to Florence Nightingale. It serves as a testament to the bravery of women on the front lines, but also to the pride which Nellie’s family felt for her contribution.

Inevitably, the epitaphs also offer political commentary. A headstone for an Australian marked “It is men, of my age and single, who are expected to do their duty” provides a brief insight into Australia’s conscription debate. “An Irish Volunteer he died for the freedom of small nations” is a pointed reference to Ireland’s struggle for independence from Britain. “Fell in a righteous cause, an Englishman and a Jew” is not simply listing the facets of a soldier’s identity: it was a challenge to those who had felt Britain’s Jewish community had been slow to enlist. But many Jewish people had felt torn about joining an army allied to Russia, where there had been vicious anti-Jewish pogroms in recent history.

Despite the intransigence of the rules, exceptions exist. There are inscriptions in Hebrew, inscriptions that far exceed 66 characters and Una Mary Langton even managed to get six notes of a musical phrase for her husband, a musician. Sadly, not all those who died received such a personal tribute: only 20% of the graves have them (but then almost 50% of fatalities have no grave at all). Some families were untraceable, or had died before the War Graves Commission contacted them. But the inscriptions we do have are significant. They reveal contemporary cultural preferences—Alfred Lord Tennyson is the most cited poet—and show that duty provided the motivation for enlisting. People were willing to sacrifice their lives for “King and Country”, for Australia, Scotland, or “the honour of Bristol”. They fought for freedom, civilisation or liberty, some fought “to end war”. One soldier’s family believed he had died for the “greatest cause in history”, another for “his wife and little son”. On Twitter, a platform designed to make room for a multitude of voices and opinions, Ms Wearne seeks to prove that “there is no single narrative”. The voices of those long silenced, and the memories of their families, may now be heard again.

Epitaphs of the Great War: The Somme and Epitaphs of the Great War: Passchendaele. Uniform Press; 132 pages; £10.99