'They buried him among the kings because he had done good toward God and toward his house'
I shall do a further Remembrance post on Wednesday but I recently looked into the history of the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior thanks to Richard Jenkyns' book Westminster Abbey published by Profile. This one of course made me realise that I haven't been to Westminster Abbey in years either, but how interesting to note that whilst you may walk around the Abbey and tread on the memorials of who knows who underfoot, no one steps on the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior. It's in a central entry spot too, blocking the path to the West door, but all processions, no matter how regal or solemn, must walk around it.
As Richard Jenkyns points out,
'the pain of war properly interrupts the smoothness of pageantry. And the commonplace lettering is humanising in its ordinariness, the sort of thing you might find on the grave of your own loved one.'
Imitated across the world but never quite with the significance that is created by burying 'everyman among the mighty', the body of the unknown soldier killed in the Great War was laid in the nave on November 11th 1920 and I had no idea that the grave was then filled with a hundred bags of soil brought from the battlefield. In the ensuing week that the grave was kept open, one and a quarter million people filed past it, how many must have hoped and imagined that it was their missing loved one lying there?
