Chapter 311: The Appointed Hour

On the twenty-eighth of June, 1914, in Sarajevo, in a car, Gavrilo Princip shot two people: Franz Ferdinand, the heir of Austria-Hungary, And Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, his wife; she died with him. A pistol is not a war: The war was dated afterward, by cabinets, in a month of signing and hurry. On the twenty-third of July, Austria-Hungary sent Serbia an ultimatum, and on the twenty-eighth declared; On the first of August, Germany declared on Russia; on the third, on France; on the fourth it entered Belgium; And Britain's ultimatum, sent that afternoon, expired at eleven at night, with no answer. Britain declared, And the empire followed the declaration. On the twenty-third of August came the summons Of Japan: it declared war on Germany, in a rescript in the name of the emperor Yoshihito, Who said he had hoped to keep the peace of the East, and that he mourned his mother still. An ultimatum in the middle of the month had not been accepted. And so, true to The alliance it had kept with Britain twelve years, Japan went to fulfil Its part: Qingdao, the German port on the Shandong coast, a base for the raiders of the sea, Was the object; a Japanese force, with a smaller British one beside it, took the place, And the German garrison surrendered on the seventh of November. So the two anchors of this book, we see, Were in the same war, on the same side, allies, as they had promised, face to face. The killing in Europe did not pause for a register. Graves were dug where the line happened to lie, And the next fight went over them, and the mark was gone. Fabian Ware was forty-five, Too old for the army; in September of 1914 he was in France, at the head, nearby The front, of a mobile unit of the British Red Cross; and, while the war was alive, He began to write down the graves his unit found. In 1915 the army took the work, and the name Was the Graves Registration Commission; in 1916 it widened, the Directorate of Grave Registration and Enquiries: The dead were being made into a file while they were still being made. Then came The twenty-first of May, 1917: a royal charter, and the Imperial War Graves Commission, with its duties To the graves of the empire's dead in that war, and their care after, and the names of the missing, Not for a season: the charter said the care was to last. The Prince of Wales was president; Ware, vice-chairman. Frederic Kenyon, director of the British Museum, was asked, on the twentieth of November, to bring The marking to a rule, and he put equality at its centre: the same stone, for the private and the man Of rank, and no private monument as the rule. He signed his report on the twenty-fourth of January, 1918; The commission had it in February; it was published in November. The architects named were Edwin Lutyens, Herbert Baker and Reginald Blomfield. The stones were mostly still unseen, But the rule was written. Rudyard Kipling gave the sentence for a body with no name, to stir Over the unknown: Known unto God. His own son, John Kipling, had been missing since the twenty-seventh Of September, 1915, at Loos. It was the British Empire's rule for its own dead, a decision, not a discovery; In May of 1920 the families' quarrel with it reached Parliament: many wanted, under heaven, Their own dead home, or a stone of their own choosing; the commission held to the ground, and the one form, the delivery Of permanence. And the stopping was also a decision, and timed. In a railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne, Before dawn on the eleventh of November, 1918, the armistice was signed: Ferdinand Foch for the Allies, Matthias Erzberger at the head of the Germans; and the terms ran That the operations on land and in the air would cease six hours after, by the clock; and the government, assigned To tell Parliament, said that day it was signed at five in the morning, and the war ceased at eleven. The hour was appointed. Until it, orders still ran on both sides of a line that had a clock and no peace yet. Princip fired; Sophie died with the heir; the declarations were signed on later days, and given, By other men; and the end was given too, by an hour, as a debt Is paid at an hour. The register had begun years before, because the ground was not keeping what it was given; Ware's file is the refusal to let the next advance be the erasure: count the named; cut the same stone for the private and the rank; Keep the missing as missing, which is a kind of name. And keep the day both ways: the grief, for the millions driven Into the ground, and the joy, for the guns gone quiet at eleven, the bells, the crowds, the thanks. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day: a mourning and a feast at once, kept as one. Known unto God is a sentence for a body, kept over the field where the body lay. The day keeps the hour they appointed, and the names the hour did not give back to anyone, And the living who came home, and danced, and lived, and are ancestors today.