The first World War was less than a month old when Bernard Murphy, a 30-year-old Dubliner, was wounded in the foot at the Battle of Mons, the first engagement between the British and German armies in the war.
Murphy died 300km east of there in Dortmund in early September 1914. Though an enemy soldier on enemy soil, he was buried with military honours, surrounded by veterans of the Franco-Prussian War.
The purpose of such a display was not altogether altruistic. It was intended to demonstrate that the Germans were a civilised people, in the face of Allied propaganda that the “Huns” were no better than savages.
Thousands of British soldiers died in both wars in Germany, and thousands of Germans, many of them prisoners of war, died on British soil (and in Ireland during the first World War, as evidenced by the German cemetery at Glencree in Co Wicklow).
READ MORE
Tim Grady, a professor of modern European history at the University of Chester, has written a thoughtful book about these unfortunate men and what their treatment says about the two countries, and relations between them.
These victims of war were not abstracts made up of “fears, prejudices and national cliches” but a familiar presence in German and British communities, buried locally, a fact which humanised the dead and by extension the countries they represented.
During peacetime, thousands of these combatants were exhumed and put into what are called concentration cemeteries. Such grim business appears to have been done without much public awareness or commentary, Grady observes.
He chronicles how the graves of the British war dead were looked after very well in Germany in the interwar years, while the graves of the German dead in Britain were perceived by the Nazis to have been neglected.
This fuelled a process of Nazi memorialisation in Germany, glorifying the first World War dead despite the “stab in the back” defeat in that conflict.
Grady states boldly that British war memorialisation, as evidenced by the events of Remembrance Sunday every year, has done little to improve British-German relations. Instead, it has bred within the British “nothing but separation and insularity”.
Though he doesn’t mention the infamous European “B word” of recent years, the book would make you ponder how remembrance of British history, or more specifically the forgetting of British history, ended up fuelling the Brexit vote.
Ronan McGreevy is an Irish Times journalist and the author of Wherever the Firing Line Extends: Ireland and the Western Front. He runs WWI Western Front tours with GTI Travel.
