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Last November, when I was walking home from town, I saw something in the gutter half hidden by fallen leaves. I bent down, brushed away the leaves and debris and found it to be a green plastic WW1 soldier – the kind my brother possessed and played with in the 1960’s. There he was fallen, unknown and almost forgotten.
It inspired me to look into the history of the Unknown warrior tomb in Westminster Abbey.
He is an unidentified member of the British armed forces who died on the Western front during the First World War. He was given a state funeral and buried on 11 November 1920. He is a ‘warrior’ as he could be from the army, navy or air force and from any part of the British Empire at that time.
Rev. David Railton, while serving as an army chaplain on the Western Front in 1916, first had the idea when he saw a grave marked by a crosswith a pencil written notice ‘An unknown British Soldier.’ So, he wrote to the Dean of Westminster Herbert Ryle proposing that an unidentified soldier be buried ‘amongst the kings’ in Westminster Abbey to represent the many thousands who died. The idea was strongly supported by the Prime Minister David Lloyd George who later wrote, “The Cenotaph is the token of our mourning as a nation; the Grave of the Unknown Warrior is the token of our mourning as individuals”.
Suitable remains were exhumed from various battlefields and brought to the chapel at Saint-Pol-sur-Ternoise near Arras, France, on the night of 8 November 1920. The remains were then placed in four plain coffins each covered by Union Flags: the officers did not know from which battlefield any individual soldier had come. Brigadier Wyatt with closed eyes rested his hand on one of the coffins. The other soldiers were then taken away for reburial.
The Unknown Warrior was granted a full state funeral, the only time that this honour has been bestowed on an anonymous person or a representative of a whole group of people The guests of honour were a group of about 100 women. They had been chosen because they had each lost their husband and all their sons in the war. The coffin was buried only a few feet from the entrance in soil brought from each of the main battlefields.
The grave was capped with a black Belgian marble stone – the only tombstone in the Abbey on which it is forbidden to walk.
No-one knows who the warrior is but we all know what they did. They gave their life to save others. One of the inscriptions on the side of the memorial is from John 15:13 ‘Greater love has no man than this, that they lay down their life for their friends.”
Jesus, too, laid down His life, that we might be saved and enjoy eternal life. When we think of the blood shed by so many for others on Remembrance Sunday, let’s also remember Jesus’ blood shed that we might all share in complete forever salvation.