Grave of an unknown sailor

There is something infinitely sad and poignant about gravestones like this. Many thousands of lives were lost during World War II, and most of those victims have graves which family members can visit to pay their respects, but sometimes this cannot be done.

When a dead body cannot be identified, for whatever reason, the authorities still need to pay proper respect to whoever it was, and so gravestones like this are necessary.

There are all sorts of stories that might lie behind the placing of this stone, and none of them are particularly pleasant. High explosives do very nasty things to human flesh, as does the sea when a body spends a long time in it before being washed ashore, and the body that was buried here might simply have been unrecognisable when discovered. The sailor’s identity tag could easily have been lost or rendered unreadable.

There is also the sad story that belongs to the victim’s family. Not only did a son or husband never come home, but the family never knew what had happened to him or where his remains were to be found. It may be that the sailor was from overseas and the family simply did not have the means to investigate the circumstances.

It sometimes happened that there was no family left to mourn a disappeared serviceman. Whole families were sometimes killed by a single bomb during the London blitz, and if the son in the Navy also died a whole generation could just vanish.

And yet this life, whoever’s it was, was just as valuable as those of the other sailors in this cemetery whose descendants still pay visits to place flowers on their graves. They all gave their lives for a cause that was not of their choosing, and all such sacrifices deserve equal recognition.

Such a grave is also a reminder of the obscenity of war, in all ages, in that lives are snuffed out as if they had never existed. Real human beings, just like you and me with all our complexities and capacity for good and bad, can simply disappear without even a name to remember them by. And yet stupid humanity goes on doing it. As Pete Seeger sang, when will we ever learn?

© John Welford