A Job “So Sacred”: The Roots of American Great War Commemoration

It seems so terrible sometimes the knowledge, that careless [and] indifferent strangers, officials to whom it is nothing but a job—must do all the last sad things that can be done for our loved ones, [and] we to whom it would be so sacred, can only sit here helpless [and] powerless.

—Louise “Lutie” Houston Bland to Sallie Maxwell Bennett, August 1, 1918¹

At noon on Friday, 26 May 1922, Herbert E. Ryle, the dean of Westminster Abbey, accepted a commemorative window dedicated to the “memory of officers and men of the British flying services who fell in the Great War, 1914–1918.”² Presented by the secretary of state for air, Captain the Honorable Frederick Edward Guest, the memorial window overlooked Britain’s Tomb of the Unknown Warrior in the Nave of Westminster Abbey. Unlike other public monuments in Britain, which historian Thomas Laquer describes as “little more than venues for names” no matter how imposing they appeared, the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) Memorial Window at Westminster Abbey was unique in that it embodied both public and private commemorative characteristics.³ Although some associate those characteristics with the Great War and modernism, they are in fact a much older means of memorialization; indeed, similar examples of public and private commemoration were representative of the American Civil War, when both the US government and private citizens sought to memorialize their war dead and convey their own interpretations of the war’s sacrifice and meaning. The RFC Memorial Window at Westminster Abbey serves as a stellar example of how American Civil War commemoration touched and converged with European Great War commemoration.

For Sallie Maxwell Bennett, the dedication of the RFC Memorial Window that afternoon in May must have been bittersweet, for she was the window’s donor and it was her interpretation of sacrifice that she wished to convey to the British Empire. In the space of a few months in 1918, she had lost her husband, received notification from British authorities that her son had gone missing “over the lines,” caught and survived Spanish influenza, wrangled a position as a war correspondent so that she could travel to war-torn Europe to find her son, learned of her son’s death, and conspired with a village priest to smuggle her son’s remains home to West Virginia. Despite the hardship and the loss, despite obdurate officials and bureaucracy, Sallie Maxwell Bennett had won the battle. Her interpretation of sacrifice, her message about the war’s meaning would be forever conveyed at what has been called the site for national mourning and remembrance of the British Empire.⁴

One may wonder why an American woman would seek to memorialize her son in the British Empire—or why a woman would undertake such a responsibility in a world dominated by men who were products of the Gilded Age. The answers lie, in part, with the nature of the Great War, a global catastrophe that was unprecedented in the annals of human conflict. It transcended borders, brought many nationalities together, forever changed Europe, created arbitrary national boundaries, and laid the foundations of the twentieth century. Its impact is felt even today, perhaps establishing the true “Common Era.”

Despite the transnational effect of the Great War and its lasting impact, World War I was not the first total war of the Industrial Revolution. One may find other answers in the American Civil War, which only in its later stages became the Industrial Revolution’s first total war. Although it was smaller in scope and the weapons’ technologies were less sophisticated than those of the Great War, the American Civil War was nonetheless an unprecedented catastrophe for its time. The slaughter that resulted from the weapons and tactics employed during the Civil War stunned soldiers and civilians alike. It proved bloodier than any war in US history, with over 750,000 soldier dead and an estimated 50,000 civilian dead. For the American South, it produced an overall mortality rate that exceeded “any country in World War I and that of all but the region between...