Night has fallen on the cemetery of Sillery, in the Marne. Even though the fighting stopped several months ago, the surrounding area still bears the scars of the clashes of the First World War (July 1914 – November 1918): scratched trees, poisoned vegetation, earth lacerated by shrapnel. An open wound. Piercing the darkness, a lantern guides two whispering shadows between the graves. A car purrs nearby, ready to roar off if necessary.
The next morning, the local gravedigger finds that one of his tenants has “moved out.” A gaping grave, cleared under cover of night, spat out the body of André Lebeurre, who had fallen under German bullets three years earlier, in May 1917. Surprisingly, the coffin still contains the trunk of the unfortunate man; only his head and limbs were kidnapped. “It must therefore be assumed that the authors of this desecration were disturbed in their work”postulates the gendarmerie report, written on May 20, 1920.
The gravedigger sighs. In truth, he’s hardly surprised. Since the armistice, signed on November 11, 1918, these clandestine exhumations have multiplied across military cemeteries, particularly in the regions most damaged by the fighting. “An odious traffic that must be eliminated”the daily newspaper Le Journal was alarmed on July 22, 1919. Several dozen gendarmerie reports attest to this, written every day by overwhelmed officials.
Bodyguards
To understand the livelihood of corpse traffickers, we must go back to 1914. At the start of the Great War, nothing was planned concerning the remains of those fallen on the field of honor. The latter are often buried on the fringes of the battlefield by their comrades in arms, rolled up in a tent or simply buried in a shell hole.
To identify them, their improvised graves are topped with a wooden cross where their names are traced at the point of a bayonet. Sometimes, we simply plant a bottle containing the identification of the deceased in the ground, neck down, “something that will make the wreck recognizable later, when all is calm and the mourning women come to collect this glorious debris”wrote a French lieutenant in 1915.
On November 19, 1914, less than four months after France entered the war, the State prohibited the exhumation of soldiers killed in fire, to prevent any clandestine transfer. As the fighting increases in intensity, we quickly lose track of the anonymous people buried under the bombs or slipped pell-mell into the mass grave, whose families only have a mass said in their native parish to console them. It’s hard to imagine the fate of widows and orphans. Added to the disappearance of a loved one is the impossibility of watching over them in the family vault, as if their homeland refused them rest.
On December 29, 1915, a new law allowed poilus to rest individually in military cemeteries located on the fringes of the front: gigantic necropolises where hastily buried bodies were repatriated to end their days. There, they will benefit from a dignified burial and will rest for eternity alongside their brothers in arms, which constitutes a clear improvement. The counterpart: they will remain forever far from their homes, in the plains riddled with filings and warheads where they will have lost their lives… The Tricolor deputies are already struggling with the question: should we leave them there or send them back to their families?
“Demobilize” the dead
The question remained unresolved after the war. While war memorials are flourishing in the French communes, families are mobilizing to “demobilize” the dead, that is to say, repatriate them by all means. These are widows, orphans, brothers and sisters who write to local councilors or the military hierarchy, in order to assert their right to meditation. Alas, the authorities remained inflexible, so much so that during the years 1919 and 1920, many people bypassed the administrative route and called on “death entrepreneurs” to return the bodies of their deceased.
It is here that we find the clandestine gravediggers who, as we told earlier, violated a military grave in the Marne. “They proceed at night, with teams specially trained for these macabre tasks.castigated a journalist in 1919. Thus the ignoble commerce, for which only the privilege of money counts, extorts “customers” at will and establishes the most painful distinctions even in death.” Indeed, the prices of “mercantis of death” are exorbitant: from 1,500 to 15,000 francs per operation, transforming the practice into a lucrative industry which bleeds bereaved families. As for taxi drivers, a rate per kilometer is even applied.
These entrepreneurs do not all come from funeral homes. Sensing the right opportunity, some desert their former activities – they are printers, workers, handlers, farmers – to earn easy money. And too bad if the corpse they were paid to bring back is not the right one! “Obligated to proceed hastily, freed from all control, concerned above all to pocket the agreed remuneration, it often happens that the contractors of clandestine burials make mistakes, sometimes unintentionally, sometimes knowingly, and remove bodies which are not those they were tasked to bring back”Le Journal was also outraged in the summer of 1919.
Disrespect and confusion
Worse still, in their haste, the smugglers of dead people go beyond the conventions of hygiene and respect due to the dead who fell on the field of honor. “In the cemetery of Villers-Marmery (Marne), (…) the corpse-diggers were in such a hurry that, the next day, the inhabitants of this country saw “a dog dragging a poor arm where there was still a bandage afterwards””reported the weekly La Bonne Guerre in October 1919. They didn’t even bother taking the coffin: the fragmented remains were enough! A mother from Seine-et-Oise traveled to the Somme, where her son was buried, to collect his bones and store them in a box, which she then checked in as luggage during her return trip by train…
Obviously, trafficking in remains causes real confusion in the necropolises turned upside down by illegal excavators. Graves are violated, graves trampled, corpses removed by mistake. The result is that families who do not have the desire – or the means – to have their loved one illegally repatriated sometimes receive the terrible news that their body is missing.
Challenged by public opinion, the French government ended up authorizing the transfer of the bodies on July 31, 1920, in order to stem clandestine trafficking. A body restitution service (BRS) is established with the mission of repatriating, at the army’s expense, mortal remains to their communes of origin. At the end of a colossal “funeral migration”, it is estimated that 250,000 poilus buried in the army zone were returned to their homes, or 40% of the total identified dead. The wait is over; mourning can begin.
