The Unknown Warrior

Yesterday I started listening to Stephen Fry's podcast The Secrets of the Roaring Twenties. In the first episode of the series Fry with his usual tongue-in-cheek manner sets the stage for the series by providing an overview of the 1920's and most of what we think went on in the 20's was a result of the catastrophe of The Great War. I, for one, happen to believe that The Great War quite literally changed the world forever. Fry hits on this theme in tangentially and the starts telling stories that occured in the year 1920.

After a couple of stories he went on to explain the origin of "The Unknown Warrior." Early in the war the military commands had decided to bury the dead where they died. It was not until after the war when families began requesting that the military retrieve the remains of their fallen husbands, sons, and brothers the the military realised that families needed closure. The entire nation was in mourning and did not have the comfort of having the remains or a funeral service.

Retrieving the remains of all the fallen would have been a monumental task. One which a post-war United Kingdom was incapable of doing. Someone (I think Fry mentions a Reverend David Railton an Army chaplain) came up with the idea of retrieving one soldier's remains from a battlefield bringing him back to the UK and burying him and providing a closure for the nation.

The entire process is detailed in this wikipedia article and at the Westminster Abbey site. I will not even attempt to redo what is so beautifully written on these sites.