Nicknamed the Tiger for his fiery temperament, Georges Clemenceau was not averse to settling personal feuds by duel. He was anti-monarchy, anti-socialist and anti-Catholic. His father, Benjamin, who himself had been imprisoned for his republican views, was a doctor and although Clemenceau completed his medical studies, he didn’t take up the profession, being drawn instead to politics.

A staunch republican and troublemaker, like his father, Georges Clemenceau was once imprisoned for 73 days (some sources state 77 days) by Napoleon III’s government for publishing a republican newspaper and trying to incite demonstrations against the monarchy. In 1865, fearing another arrest, and possible incarceration on Devil’s Island, Clemenceau fled to the US, arriving towards the end of the American Civil War. He lived first in New York, where he worked as a journalist, and then in Connecticut where he became a teacher in a private girls’ school. Clemenceau married one of his American students, Mary Plummer, and together they had three children before divorcing seven years later. (Of his son, Clemenceau, known for his wit, said, ‘If he had not become a Communist at 22, I would have disowned him. If he is still a Communist at 30, I will do it then.’)

Five days after his divorce, Clemenceau returned to France and briefly worked as a doctor before returning to politics. In 1871, he witnessed France’s defeat to Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War.

‘A soldier of democracy’

An intellectual, Georges Clemenceau was fascinated by Ancient Greek culture, supported the work of the French Impressionists, wrote a book on Jewish history, and translated into French the works of English philosopher, John Stuart Mill. Following France’s defeat during the Franco-Prussian War, Clemenceau opposed France’s colonial ambitions, arguing that the country needed to concentrate its efforts on extracting revenge on the Germans and recovering Alsace Lorraine, territory it had lost to the Germans as part of the French surrender.

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In 1916, the vicar of Margate in Kent, the Reverend David Railton, was stationed as a padre on the Western Front near the French village of Armentières on the Belgian border when he noticed a temporary grave with the inscription, ‘An Unknown British Soldier’. Moved by this simple epitaph, he suggested an idea to the Dean of Westminster, who passed it onto Buckingham Palace. The idea of a tomb of the Unknown Warrior was well received and given the go ahead.

On 7 November 1920, the remains of six unidentified British soldiers were exhumed – one each from six different battlefields (Aisne, Arras, Cambrai, Marne, Somme and Ypres). The six corpses were transported to a chapel in the village of St Pol, near Ypres, where they were each laid out on a stretcher and covered by the Union flag. There, in the company of a padre (not Rev Railton), a blindfolded officer entered the chapel and touched one of the bodies.

The following morning, chaplains of the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church and Non-Conformist churches held a service for the chosen soldier. Placed in a plain coffin, the Unknown Soldier was taken back on a train to England via Boulogne. At Boulogne, the coffin was kept overnight in the town’s castle, a guard of honour keeping vigil.

A British Warrior

On the morning of the 9 November, the coffin was placed in a larger casket made from wood taken from an oak tree in the gardens of London’s Hampton Court Palace. Mounted on its side, a 16^th century sword from the collection at the Tower of London, especially chosen by the king, George V. Draped over the casket, the Union flag, which had used by the Rev Railton as an altar cloth during the war. The coffin plate bore the inscription ‘A British Warrior who fell in the Great War 1914-1918 for King and Country’.

The procession, led by a thousand French schoolchildren and accompanied by solemn military music, took the casket to the town’s harbour. There it was met by Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the Allies’ supreme commander, before being transported across the English Channel to Dover on board the HMS Verdun (named after the French battle).

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A friend of mine recently bought for a tidy sum Lord Kitchener’s Memorial Death Plaque. He asked me to get it valued. These 12 cm diameter bronze plaques (click picture to enlarge, although this one is not Kitchener’s) were presented to the next of kin of those that had died during the Great War in the name of Britain and her empire.

My friend has a rather macabre collection of over 3,000 of these things, including this one of Lord Kitchener’s. I took it to an auction house in London and yes, it was genuine but, given Kitchener’s status, they reckoned there are probably about five or six in existence. Nonetheless, my friend seems delighted to be the owner of one.

Commemoration

The British government decided in October 1916 to award a token of commemoration for the next of kin to those that had fallen in the war while serving Great Britain and her empire. They settled on a bronze plaque and set up a competition to design it. Judges included directors of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and National Gallery. The competition generated such interest that the deadline had to be extended to 31 December 1917. In the event, the judges received over 800 designs.

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On 5 May 2011, Claude Choules, an English-born Australian, died; he was 110 years old. He was also, having served on HMS Revenge, the last veteran to have seen action during World War One. With his death, the ‘Great War’ had truly passed from living memory into history.

Photographs of soldiers in the muddy trenches of the Western Front waiting to go ‘over the top’, from which many would not return, remain iconic images of the Twentieth Century. In Britain alone, barely a family was left untouched by a war that claimed the lives of 700,000 British soldiers, the ‘war to end all wars’. For generations, Britain was haunted by the Battle of the Somme. On its first day alone, 1 July 1916, we suffered 57,000 casualties, killed or wounded, the worst day in Britain’s military history. For the French, the Battle of Verdun holds equal horror.

The Urgency of War

Yet, throughout Europe and beyond, young men answered the call-to-arms in a way we find almost inconceivable today. My own father, Arthur Stutley Colley, born 1900, joined the army as an officer cadet in 1918 and wrote in his memoirs of his disappointment of having just missed the fight: ‘With the signing of the Armistice,’ he wrote, ‘the prospect of getting to the Front in time disappeared, and with it the possibility of any medal ribbons to sport on one’s chest. Faced with soldiering under peacetime conditions, after the compelling urgency of war, we were left feeling somewhat flat.’

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In the annals of notoriety, the name Gavrilo Princip should perhaps rank higher than it does. For this 19-year-old Serb committed a crime that, without overestimating the fact, set the agenda for the whole of the twentieth century. Princip was the man who shot and killed the heir to the Austrian-Hungarian throne, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Exactly one month after the assassination, Europe was at war, a war that quickly spread and became the Great War, or, as we know it, the First World War. And from the post-war seeds of discontent came the rise of Nazism and the road to the Second World War.

Born to an impoverished family in Bosnia on 25 July 1894, Gavrilo Princip was one of nine children, six of whom died during infancy. Suffering from tuberculosis, the frail and slight Princip learnt to read, the first in his family to do so, and devoured the histories of the Serbs and their oppression at the hands of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires.

The Black Hand

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