‘Their dear remains belong to us alone’ soldiers’ bodies, commemoration, and cultural responses to exhumations after the Great War

Conceptualising the ‘Administration of the Dead’: Cadavers, war and public health in the early 20th century

“…To put it simply, extermination of civilians and ethnic minorities—and therefore the challenge of body disposal—forms the core of genocidal violence or extreme political persecution, whereas mass death in the First World War was ‘just’ a side effect of different strategic and geopolitical goals that resulted in unprecedented battlefield death, but also in starvation and epidemics on some home fronts. Therefore, historians of the First World War have yet to examine the dilemmas posed by the need to drastically and rapidly revise the treatment of human remains as a result of the industrial nature of the First World War; instead, they concentrate on aspects of the dead's identification, transportation, repatriation and commemoration rather than their disposal (Barrett, 2017; Cahir et al, 2019; Rodin, 2020; Smart, 2015; Tradii, 2019). Other scholars such as Mark Harrison (2010) and Ana Carden‐Coyne (2014), for example, have paid attention to limbs and moribund wards, although anthropologically limbs removed from living bodies after a medical procedure and providing care to a dying patient are quite different to the management of full cadavers.…”

A broken covenant

“…24 Historians' interest in this language of memorialisation has in turn eclipsed the public discourse about what happened to soldiers' dead bodies, instead focussing upon the memorial practices and architectonic features of cemeteries. 25 Furthermore, over the intervening years, much of the complexity and tension that accompanied the creation of cemeteries and memorials has been obscured by the dominant forms that commemoration has taken. Paul Gough notes that memorials have become bound up with an idealised form of reverence in a way that 'obscures' their alternative role as foci for protest, political agitation and dissent.…”