[Antipodean Andy]

Leave our old soldiers to lie in that rich earth - Opinion - smh.com.au

With the excavation of Australian war dead under way in Fromelles, it is timely to recall Rupert Brooke's poem, The Soldier. Probably one of the most recited pieces from World War I, it begins: "If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England." Although Brooke himself died before ever reaching the battlefield, his patriotic words provided comfort to many of his countrymen facing the bleak future where their loved one had fallen in a foreign land.

In the history of warfare, World War I marked a new era. The scale of death was unprecedented and the immobility of the front meant that the living fought and died among the decomposing bodies of the already dead.

At Verdun, between February and December 1916, a battle that scarcely moved the front produced about 300,000 French and German dead and some 700,000 casualties. In a single day on the Somme at the start of July, 58,000 British troops were killed. The sheer volume of bodies constituted an enormous health risk. In periods of respite from battle, both sides buried the dead, their own and the enemy's. In the case of the mass grave under excavation at the Pheasant Wood site at Fromelles, the Germans, who were the victors in that battle, buried the bodies of the defeated British and Australian soldiers.

In World War I, the common soldier was recognised and remembered in a manner previously unknown. In earlier times, the footslogger appeared only in army size and body count statistics. By contrast, the name, rank and regiment of the first and last soldier killed in the British Expeditionary Forces is recorded. The latter, part of a Canadian unit, may be the unluckiest man in the war having been killed two minutes before the armistice was declared.

The US academic Thomas Laqueur has coined the term "hyper-nominalism" to describe World War I's compulsion to name the ordinary soldier. Where there was an identifiable body, it was placed in an individually-named grave and where there was no body, the dead were listed by individual name. The same obsession was carried back to the soldiers' home towns and villages. Masons and monumental sculptors could barely meet the demand.

In 1920, the creation of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, including a set of remains of an unidentified soldier, provided a physical body that could stand in for Britain and the Dominions where the absent individual bodies had been left in French and Belgian cemeteries.