Sixty-six letters
In 1919 the Imperial War Graves Commission, now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, told families they could put a few words of their own on a soldier’s headstone. A space counted as a letter.
The stones were meant to be the same. Sir Frederic Kenyon, asked how the cemeteries should look, recommended one headstone for every grave, the same shape for an officer and for a private. The Commission chose a plain stone, two feet six inches by one foot three inches, with room for a regimental badge, a name and rank, and the symbol of the dead man’s faith. Kenyon had left space for a short inscription, of not more than three lines. Rudyard Kipling wrote the Commission’s account of the scheme. So that the lettering would be large enough to read, and would last in the weather, the inscription was limited to sixty-six letters. The space between two words counted as one.
On 3 June 1919 the Secretary of State for War told the Commons that the next of kin could have the words engraved, at about three and a half pence a letter. Sixty-six letters came to just under a pound. The hope was that a family would want to pay for its own sentence. The charge put a long line out of reach for many, and the Commission was accused of leaving those words to the families who could afford them. Australia and Canada took on the cost for their dead. New Zealand allowed no personal inscription, so that money would not decide who had one. The words were engraved even when a British family did not pay. A later letter, sent after the stone was up, asked only for a contribution of any sum up to a pound. By then many people, having heard of the charge, had written nothing.
The families who did write had to decide what would fit. A form, the Final Verification Form, went to the next of kin of each known casualty, to confirm the details and to leave a space for a line. Private John Gilbert Gill, of the 4th (London) Field Ambulance, died on 18 August 1917 and is buried in Brandhoek New Military Cemetery No. 3. His father, a textile worker from Waltham Forest in Essex, set down “I have only done my duty as a man is bound to do”, and then the name used at home, Gibbie. Private Alfred Fieldhouse, of the 1st Battalion, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, died on 2 October 1917 and lies in Tyne Cot Cemetery. His wife, Hannah, wrote “Sweet memory of Dadda is a priceless possession. Ray, Iris, Nan.” One line ends on a nickname. The other names three children. The Commission has recorded more than 229,000 inscriptions of this kind.
Kipling supplied the Commission with two lines. For a grave with no name he took “Known unto God.” For the Stone of Remembrance in the cemeteries he took a verse of Ecclesiasticus, “Their name liveth for evermore.” He had been the Commission’s literary adviser since 1917. His only son, John, a lieutenant in the Irish Guards, had been killed at Loos on 27 September 1915, aged eighteen, and there was no grave with his name on it. Every unidentified grave carries the same line. A named grave still had one sentence that somebody had to make short enough to cut.
A headstone has room for a name, a rank, a date and one sentence. The sentence was the part the family could still choose. Some never wrote it. Some gave it to a nickname, or to the names of children. The stone has kept the words that fitted.