31/10/2013 Meet the Author


31/10/2013

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Britain, an Italian poet and Afghanistan, as well as a story of

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First World War cemeteries and a biography of Margaret Thatcher. We

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have been speaking to each of the nominees.

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For almost a century, war cemeteries like these have been some of the

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most poignant memorials of the First World War. You will find all over

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the world, wherever soldiers from Britain and its empire fought, but

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the greatest concentration and lie along Western front in Belgium. This

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is the central character in Empires Of The Dead. . We spoke to the

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author. He was an unemployed journalist at the outbreak of the

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First World War. He was too old to fight and desperate to play some

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part. He had been warning the country against this war for the

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last ten years. He went over to France first as a volunteer as a

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member of the mobile ambulance unit. From those very humble and

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almost accidental beginnings, he developed his interest in the work

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that eventually blossomed into the Commonwealth Imperial walk grades

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commission. That existed in embryo as early as 1916 or 1917. It took

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very important `` two very important decisions. One was that none of the

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dead British soldiers were to be repaid to did. The other was that

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they would all be commemorated side`by`side. Officers and men

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alike, as close to the battlefield where they fell. Why were those

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decisions taken, and why were they so controversial? If you had allowed

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a freedom of choice with the gravestones or other commemoratives

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memorials, the rich would have buried in one way and the poor in

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another, and we would have had a hierarchy of commemoration that was

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the absolute opposite of everything he was striving for. From the

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perspective of now, it seems that where the cemeteries we have our

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self evidently the answer to the slaughter on the industrial scale of

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the First World War. But for families, particularly those with

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deeply Christian feelings, the idea that their sons or their husbands or

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their fathers should be buried in this uniform way, in this Prussian

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cemetery that was being planned, with absolute anathema. There is one

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memorial cupboard with more than 70,000 names, you suggest in the

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book is a front in kind to most of the cemeteries that the War Graves

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commission erected. Why is that different? The memorial poses

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different questions, and suggests more complex responses to the

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slaughter of the Somme than any other memorial does. The arches that

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disappear in to the fault of the sky just leaves one with an appalling

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sense of loss. You look at that monument and you think, what kind of

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government could have done this? Thank you.

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Tomorrow, Nick Higham will be talking to Charlotte Higgins, author

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of Under Another Skype, Journeys In Roman

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