‘Their dear remains belong to us alone’ soldiers’ bodies, commemoration, and cultural responses to exhumations after the Great War

Historians have generally analysed the commemorative activities of the Imperial War Graves Commission in terms of their symbolic function for a nation traumatized by the horrors of the First World War. In this article, I shift the focus to the dead bodies of British soldiers, whose repatriation was prohibited, and which were buried in appositely built military cemeteries near the battlefields where they had died. By exploring the large-scale exhumations performed by the IWGC and the British responses to the ban on repatriation, I argue that the Imperial War Graves Commission negotiated the demands of public opinion for adopting civilian notions of decency in the burial of soldiers with the difficulties posed by the necessity of exhuming, transporting, and burying hundreds of thousands of cadavers. This research is located at the intersection between the cultural history of the body and the anthropology of body-politics. By focussing on dead soldiers as bodies, the treatment of corpses yields insights into changing notions of decency, class conflicts, and the demands of a vocal public opinion which was closely concerned with the fate of casualties that needed to be commemorated both as civilians and as soldiers.