ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the processes of death, burial and exhumation on the Western Front. It also explores the complex processes and iconography of remembrance, including the ritual surrounding the exhumation and re-burial of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey. The chapter explores how different artists created images that appeared to revive and resurrect the battle-dead focusing on Stanley Spencer and his fascination with the ideas of redemption and resurrection. It addresses some of the key visual and phenomenological tropes of the British experience of Western Front during the Great War. Faced with phantasmagoric lunar face of the Western Front, the imagination froze: One writer who visited the Western Front Reginald Farrer suggested that it was quite wrong to regard the 'huge, haunted solitude' of modern battlefield as empty. During the static years of siege warfare on the Western Front graves were dug in advance, some regiments setting aside plots of land for their own dead, even barring others from trespassing.
