2 - Communities in mourning

Summary

Grief is a state of mind; bereavement a condition. Both are mediated by mourning, a set of acts and gestures through which survivors express grief and pass through stages of bereavement. Many of these moments are lived within families supported by social networks.

Families were torn apart by war. Nothing could have reversed completely this tide of separation and loss. But after 1914 there was as well a gathering together, as people related by blood or by experience tried to draw strength from each other during and after the war. The bonds thus formed were powerful and in many cases durable. The process of their formation and expression is at the heart of this chapter.

In all countries touched by the war, there was a progression of mutual help, a pathway along which many groups and individuals sought to provide knowledge, then consolation, then commemoration. These elements were always there, though the language in which they were expressed varied considerably.

First I approach the initial stages of bereavement in terms of discovery: of how relatives and friends heard the awful news about casualties, and what some of them were able to do about it. Some were near the front lines. Moreover, the sheer scale of the conflict made it difficult, if not impossible, to discover the whereabouts of individual soldiers, whether alive or dead, missing or at base camps, on leave or in transit.