In the present text I’m going to discuss the idea of the ritual of the Unknown Soldier and the idea of war that come to life from the texts we analyzed, saying if and how they somehow promote peace or not.

As regard the idea of the ritual of the Unknown Soldier, the texts make the reader understand that David Railton strongly believed in his idea of creating a memorial for the fallen of the Great War, without a tomb and he fought to see it realized. It is as if it was the dream of all the people that lost someone they loved in war. From the documents the reader can understand that rituals have the function of helping people to process and overcome the mourning and in this way they can easier find a sense in the death of their relatives.Indeed funeral rituals have the function of make people acknowledge the reality of the death. When someone we love dies, we use to accept the reality and the finality of the death to move forward with our grief. Funeral ceremonies can serve as points of departure to understand it.Remember the person who died is another function of funeral rituals or memorials. They represents something immortal, that last in time in contrast with the death of the casualties, indeed we are immortal only in the memory of us.

As regard the idea of the war, from most of the texts emerges a condemnation to the war. At the end of the war the nation and the Church have the necessity of justifying all the deaths and give a sense of unity, filling the void left by death. For this reason the government approved the idea of the Reverend to create a memorial for the fallen in war, changing the memorial to their advantage. From the documents the reader can understand how pain becomes celebratory and the mourning switches from the private sphere to the public sphere. Considering that I can affirm that most of texts condemn war directly or indirectly, but there are some documents that celebrate the war and the soldiers dead to save the homeland. So the vision and the idea of the war depends by the point of view of the writer and his content.