THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER - ACTIVITY 1

In the present text, I’m going to analyse seven documents about the Unknown Soldier ritual.

Thanks to these articles, I am able to give value to the ritual of the Unknown Soldier and to reconstruct hih history.

First of all, I’m going to explain who the Unknown Soldier was: “he was one who give his life for the people of the British Empire”. He was an unidentified soldier of the WW1, and so, he serves as a symbol of all unknown dead. The anonymity of the soldier is the key of the symbolism of the monument: it could be the tomb of anyone who served the nation and for this reason it became a war memorial.

The idea of the Unknown Soldier was first conceived in 1916 by the Reverend David Railton, who, while was serving as a chaplain to British forces in France, had seen a make-shift grave across which was written “An Unknown British Soldier”.

The Reverend wrote to the Dean of Westminster to convey a remembrance of that scene.

The general L. J. Wyatt selected at random one of the four bodies exhumed from the battlefields, to become the Unknown Soldier.

The coffin was transported to Boulogne, to Dover and at the end to London.

In November 1920 the Unknown Soldier was transported through London’s crowd-line streets and, after that, the coffin was laid at the west end of the Nave of Westminster Abbey. It was celebrated and King George V sprinkled soil from the battlefield at Ypres. Thanks to this information the reader can understand the importance of the ritual. Some 1,2 million people visited the Abbey during the week after the burial to leave their last respects.

The documents we read had the function of teaching how the ritual of the Unknown Soldier was born, increasing understanding of the impact of armed conflicts and exploring feelings of people involved in armed conflicts.

In all the analysed documents, the writers use a journalistic language to explain facts in a simple and objective way to facilitate the divulgation of the history. Indeed, the authors don’t wrote any personal opinion of the events because the articles are informative texts.

In conclusion, thanks to the analysed articles, we are able to say who the Unknown Soldier is and what his function is.

We think the memory of the Unknown Soldier is very important because soldiers didn’t fight only for themselves but for their family, their friends, their mates and their country.