The Searchers: The Quest for the Lost of the First World War by Robert Sackville-West

 

From The Times, 19 September 2021

Robert Sackville-West’s new book is compelling and often horrifying. His subject is the First World War and its aftermath. The “searchers” of his title were initially the bereaved, who tried to get news of their lost loved ones (Where and how did they die? Were they perhaps taken prisoner and still alive?) by interviewing their surviving comrades, often in hospitals and casualty clearing stations. In the early months of the fighting you needed money—and courage—to cross the Channel and pursue your search in the war zone. Rudyard Kipling and his wife were there, looking for their son, John, killed at the Battle of Loos. So, too, was Lord Robert Cecil with his sister-in-law, Violet Cecil, looking for her son who, like John Kipling, was an 18-year-old second lieutenant in the Guards. . .

Throughout the 1920s hundreds of thousands of visitors made pilgrimages to the battlefields, and Thomas Cook and other travel companies ran tours. Many were shocked by the post-apocalyptic landscapes, still littered with the debris of war. The ghoulish work of exhumation and reburial was still going on, and there were moments of horror. One woman picked up a discarded boot as a souvenir, only to find there were human bones still in it. It seems, though, from Sackville-West’s closing pages, that the devout far outnumbered the sensation-seekers. Some mothers brought little bags of earth from home to sprinkle on their sons’ graves. But the many whose sons or husbands had no known grave had to be content with making a lead-pencil tracing of their name on the list of the lost, which they would take home and treasure. These are among the many images that linger in the mind from Sackville-West’s remarkable book.

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