...At the back of my mind I have a memory of there being a book about how he was chosen (UK version). Am I going mad or does such a book exist?
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The Unknown Warrior
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Originally posted by Levin View PostAre you maybe thinking of Neil Hanson "The Unknown Soldier"? But that seems to be much wider than just the unknown warrior.
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"An Unknown Warrior" is currently being serialised on Radio 4, if that's of interest to you. See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000p7bc
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I had a similar vague recollection, and think it is likely to have been of this paragraph in a Marina Warner piece
Burial practices and ceremonies that seem immemorial to us now were new-fangled and strange not that long ago, it turns out: it is not known who proposed the tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey, and many were doubtful about the prospect (not British enough, or Protestant). But the process went ahead, with much ritual: bags of bones from four unidentified victims of the battlefield were placed on a table; then, at midnight, a general wearing a blindfold picked one lot of remains; they were sent under escort across the Channel on a destroyer, and from Dover ‘guarded as the most precious of relics until the ceremonies on the next day’. Not since Henry V’s bones were brought back from France (after his body had been boiled to clean them) can there have been such a solemn translation. The Cenotaph in the Mall – which is empty – was dedicated the same day. Edwin Lutyens only provided a sketch, as he thought it was going to be temporary. No one had thought this idea would catch on either (again too foreign, too Catholic). But it did, resoundingly. The idea of honouring the Unknown Soldier recurred around the same time everywhere, Laqueur tells us. Such monuments express the hope that no one will be left out: Old Hamlet will not return to call out reproachfully ‘Remember me’; there will be no 13th fairy to disrupt the peace and ask for vengeance.
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Diable Rouge R - The grave stone actually begins "Beneath this stone rests the body/Of a British warrior", by rights it should always have been warrior rather than soldier.
ursus arctos - yes, that's the one! But i'm sure there's a book somewhere out there.
Aitch - cheers! I shall download those. Are they based on the Hanson book?
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