Mourning Practices

Never before: so much death due to war over so little time. The Great War created an unfamiliar cultural landscape of grieving for mourners, one that seemed as surreal as it was grotesque. The unprecedented scale of the trauma of loss and sorrow left an enduring legacy to those who remained to absorb the impact of individual and national tragedy. ‘I had not thought death had undone so many’, astutely observed T. S. Eliot in 1922 in The Waste Land. Rituals of mourning became embedded in cultural life during the interwar years in ways not seen before or since. The end of the war may have signalled an end to hostilities, but the community of mourners it created in its wake – those millions ‘undone’ by death – struggled to escape from the persistent shadow of bereavement. The wide circle of those affected – mothers, fathers, siblings, wives, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends – faced what Vera Brittain described as ‘the long, empty years’ after the war.