Exactly two years after the Armistice which ended what HG Wells, now 54, has called
The War That Will End War,”
a ceremony is being held at Westminster Abbey to bury the remains of
A British Warrior who fell in the Great War 1914–1918 for King and Country.”
This soldier has been chosen from among six exhumed from six different battlefields in France.
The first ceremony for the interment of a British Unknown Warrior
Rev. David Railton, 36, former British Army chaplain and now vicar of St. John the Baptist Church in Margate, had first thought of the idea when, during the war, he saw a makeshift cross over a grave that said,
An unknown British soldier.”
He proposed the monument just a few months ago in a letter to the government.
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Simultaneously, less than 300 miles south, a similar ceremony is being held beneath the Arc de Triomphe, where La tombe du Soldat inconnu is being consecrated. A French Army veteran has chosen one out of eight coffins containing remains of unknown French soldiers.
Last year, France’s parliament voted into law the idea for such a tomb, proposed during the war by an officer of Le Souvenir français, France’s war memorials body.
Ceremony consecrating La tombe du Soldat inconnu
“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s, to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.
This fall I am talking about writers’ salons in Paris and New York after the Great War in the Osher Lifelong Learning program at the University of Pittsburgh.
If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.
My “Such Friends” presentations, The Founding of the Abbey Theatre and Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, are available to view on the website of PICT Classic Theatre.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions. Early next year I will be talking about Perkins, Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the Osher program at Carnegie-Mellon University.
SuchFriends Blog 