The way the death of a soldier from the British Empire was dealt with during the Great War (1914-1918) marked an emphatic departure from Victorian funeral customs. Victorian society was accustomed to a very public period of mourning which reinforced social and community ties. During the war, the death of a soldier was something many believed should not be mourned, as dying for "the cause," according to the rhetoric and propaganda of the Great War, was something to be celebrated rather than lamented. By looking at the purposes that rituals such as funeral rites serve a society, it becomes clear that funeral rites are a necessary part of human adaptation to death. The suppression of mourning from 1914-1918 acted to delay outpourings of grief but ultimately could not deny their emergence, in various forms, in the post-war period. 
 
 

Anthropologists define rituals as collective affairs that are staged events, following a standard protocol each time they are performed. They are social acts basic to humanity, and serve as a mode of communication within the culture. Often rituals have religious significance, but this is not an intrinsic feature. The defining aspect of a ritual is that it is a "performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers."[1] Rituals have standard features that must be conformed to, but certain elements are detailed by the specific situation of each individual performance. Rituals are the means by which the social bonds of a group are reinforced, important events are celebrated, and crises such as death are made less socially disruptive and easier for individuals to bear. Through prescriptive rituals, social control is maintained throughout various events that might otherwise prove disruptive. 
 
 

One category of ritual is the "rite of passage." Rites of passage, such as weddings, graduations, baptisms, and funerals, focus upon individuals and changes in their social statuses or identity. Any change of status, though often a normal part of the aging process, brings with it a period of anxiety and uncertainty for the individual and those in close relationships with this person. With a change of status comes an alteration or disturbance in the roles and expectations between this person and those close to this person. A social ritual serves to structure this transition, not only for the individual but for all those affected.[2] 
 
 

Arnold van Gennep, a Dutch anthropologist, first coined the term "rites of passage" in a study published in 1906.[3] Van Gennep suggested three phases for the rite of passage: separation, transition, and reincorporation. Separation refers to the ritual removal of the individual from society. A transitional period follows, with the isolation of the individual from society. The transitional stage is the most uncertain of these stages, for the individual is outside of society: he or she does not have a clearly defined role. Reincorporation occurs when the individual is accepted back into society in his or her new status. Arnold van Gennup used the Latin term limen (threshold) to describe these phases: pre-liminal, liminal, and post-liminal stages of the rites of passage.[4] This notion of liminality received further attention through the work of anthropologist Victor Turner. Turner further developed the concept of the liminal phase as a state of transition, defining those in this stage as being "betwixt and between" normal social roles,[5] in the sense that their social roles were in transition and thus not clearly defined. The funeral, of all the rites of passage, is the one with the greatest emphasis on liminality. The liminal phase is a phase in which the status of individuals is vague and indeterminate, and "death and liminality must, of their very natures, retain a certain elusiveness."[6] 
 
 

Death is a threat that has the power to destroy family structures and disrupt community networks. The threat it poses to society is controlled through the rite of passage of a funeral, which is a rite of passage in two ways. It is a rite of passage for the deceased person as the transition is made between life and death, which is constructed in various ways, such as heaven, a spirit world, or an afterlife. But a funeral is also a rite of passage for those individuals whose social status or identity is connected to that of the deceased. Ceremonies are held for the survivors, for they must shed some roles and statuses that were lost along with the deceased, and accept new roles as a result.[7] Thus the rites serve to redistribute the roles of the deceased among the living, altering the social roles of those remaining to ensure the continuation of the group. A funeral ritual suggests a pattern of behavior for the bereaved and thus it acts as a form of social control. The bereaved is provided with a standard of behavior that 

keeps his [sic] emotions under control, reduces his anxiety to cope with the new situation, awards him the new status, proclaims this new status in public, and reassures the bereaved that he will be accepted again in the world of the living and that the intermediate condition of his isolation is not permanent.[8] 

Mourning is a rite of passage because it traditionally involves a formal withdrawal from society, a period of seclusion, and then a reincorporation or a formal re-entry into society. Funerals are an essential part of this regulated mourning process, providing social support to the bereaved. The ritual of a funeral serves to reinforce the values of the group and reassure those affected that the social network will not disintegrate with the passing of the deceased. This notion has been expanded on by Avery Weisman, who has claimed that "the deceased who is honoured at a funeral is neither a person nor a corpse, but an idealized personification of the clan's central objectives."[10] This understanding of the purpose of the funeral ritual is based on the theories of the English anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown regarding the functionalism of society and rituals. Radcliffe-Brown viewed rituals as ceremonies that functioned to encourage social bonding: 

[C]eremonial customs are the means by which the society acts upon its individual members and keeps alive in their minds a certain system of sentiments. Without the ceremony those sentiments would not exist, and without them the social organization in its actual form could not exist.[11] 

The funeral has two other functions for mourners. It helps individual members of society, namely those most affected, to cope with their loss. The death ritual is a structured and controlled environment in which the mourner can begin to "confront realistically the crisis of loss."[13] While the funeral is only a small part of the grieving process, it is essential because of its public nature. It is through this public ritual that the experience of the bereaved and their emotions are accepted and responded to by the society.[14] The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, who often saw cultural practices as having a psychological function, initially proposed that the funeral was a form of social support to individual mourners. The psychological function of a death ritual was to provide social support against death. By emphasizing the social nature of humankind, the ritual provided "a basis for seeing humanity as social animals possessing a shared hope of survival."[15] Death was combated through social continuity. The death ritual served to re-enforce this notion among the bereaved by demonstrating the communal support each mourner had. 
 
 

The public nature of the funeral also has a personal and private impact on the mourners. Those affected by the loss of the deceased are encouraged to accept the reality of their loss through this ritual.[16] This is often done by the viewing of the body, but also by the public opportunity a funeral presents to acknowledge and express one's loss. Funerals serve as a public recognition of the demise of an individual, but at the same time they stimulate a private acceptance of the bereavement. Zygmunt Bauman, a sociologist, noted that funerals serve to combat death by giving members of a society the impression that death is under control.[17] That is, death rites maintain social order by giving the impression to members of a society that even death is culturally controlled and regulated. 
 
 

All of these functions of a funeral were evident in the Victorian rituals for funerals and mourning. Grieving was a social process demonstrated publicly by the mourning clothes that identified a bereaved person. Mourning could last up to two years, during which time the bereaved went through the slow and painful process of personal grieving. At all times, however, this grieving process was recognized publicly and supported by family, friends, and community. Rituals, ceremonies, and customs provided support and direction for the bereaved.[18] What many now view as a plethora of directives in fact gave bereaved Victorians some meaning, security, predictability, support, and control over their loss and their grieving process. According to the anthropological views presented above, the highly structured and regulated Victorian death rituals fulfilled the social functions of the funeral as a rite of passage. 
 
 

However, the Great War of 1914-1918 revolutionized Victorian mourning customs. The meaning of death changed, and mourning processes were altered to fit this definition. Outside of war, death was a calamity to be avoided. Should a person die, members of that person's family went into mourning, grieving over the loss of that individual's life. But in war, the understanding of death was different. It was an honour to die valiantly in battle, and this notion was idealized around the "happy warrior" of romantic Victorian rhetoric. The unprecedented numbers of dead brought a central contradiction to light: how could people and society mourn the brave and happy deaths of these warrior soldiers? This problem arose in Britain after the opening month of the war, as 1600 British soldiers died in the Battle of Mons on 22 August 1914. A campaign arose on the homefront to restructure the mourning process. Civilian letters were sent to the Times to protest the use of customary mourning rituals for soldier deaths. Public figures such as the Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Landsdowne, and other ladies who had relatives serving at the front, declared that because the soldiers had fallen "in a sacred cause," that they would "not show their sorrow as for those who come to a less glorious end."[19] Grief was no longer the acceptable result of bereavement: those bereft of soldiers who had died 'for the cause' were not expected to grieve but to rejoice that such valiant and heroic deaths had befallen their loved ones. Mourning clothes thus became inappropriate when celebrating the sacrifices of these men. Influential people in Britain such as Arthur Balfour and the Duchess of Devonshire headed a campaign to replace black armbands with white ones, for white better expressed "the pride we feel in knowing that those who are nearest and dearest have given their lives in their country's cause."[20] 
 
 

As the war progressed, the casualty lists grew longer and death became more pervasive. It is impossible to obtain exact figures, but for reference, it has been estimated that over 700,000 British service men died in the war, and that of the 6 million British soldiers who served in the Great War, one man in eight was killed and one in four wounded.[21] Aside from the rhetoric of war mythology that suggested the death of soldiers should not be mourned, the incompatibility of waging war and mourning the dead became apparent as the war dragged on. Many people felt the depressing effect of large numbers of people mourning male relatives. At the Eton and Harrow match at Eton in July 1916, as Lady Gainsford observed, "it was all rather sad and dull, such lots of people in deep mourning."[22] It was clear that waging a war of this scale required the full support of the civilian body. Mourning interfered with popular support for the war because it brought attention to the fact that so many lives had been lost, and so many families bereaved. Many felt that national morale and patriotic support for the war would be harmed should a huge percentage of the population emerge in full mourning-dress. 
 
 

The gap between how Victorian civilian deaths and deaths in war were understood was partially bridged by the Victorian war mythology. Christian doctrines of immortality were adapted to present the notion that the Empire's soldiers, dying in a patriotic crusade against evil, would go immediately to heaven.[23] Death in battle, then, was presented as a heroic sacrifice for which men would be granted the ultimate reward: immediate access to heaven. As such, deaths in battle were not something that should be mourned. Rather, the bereaved should celebrate the fact that their lost kin had died heroic deaths for which they would reap rewards in the afterlife. Victorian society adapted religious convictions to buttress support for its war effort. That is, religious notions were used to suppress mourning by bereaved families by suggesting that their losses were not to be grieved. 
 
 

Spiritualism joined religion in the various attempts to suppress mourning. Spiritualists were sought out during and after the war by the bereaved, who were hoping for some news from the deceased. During the war, spiritualists often provided information and advice that was consistent with the patriotic need to suppress mourning. Mediums claimed that dead soldiers wished to express their agony over being mourned and grieved. For instance, one spirit was described as grieving over his earthly home because it was "reeking with flowers, nasty old flowers too, with funeral bows on them," and over the demeanor of his family, for "his mother and even that dear little sister...[were] draped in black."[24] Another spirit complained that tears of grief served to torture the spirits of the fallen soldiers. He asked the medium to "tell the mothers and fathers and sisters and wives to stop crying. No man can stand the sight of tears, the sound of sobs....beg the mourners to stop crying and to cease wearing black clothes."[25] Spiritualists thus guided the bereaved into quelling any sign of grief. 
 
 

In practice, these admonishments translated into the attitude that mourning was to be replaced by the "carry-on" spirit. One pamphlet from 1917 embraced this notion, celebrating the carry-on mentality of British women and their decision not to wear mourning clothes: "Women should work, not mourn. 'Are we downhearted? No!' is their battle cry, too, and they 'carry on' as bravely as any warrior of them all."[26] Nationalist necessity superceded individual grief, and so those bereaved suppressed their grief, as mourning became unacceptable in wartime. Death was removed from the family sphere and became a patriotic sacrifice on the altar of the nation. Death could no longer be mourned by individual families grieving over the loss of a member.
 
 

In Canada, exhortations against public mourning were also present. Poets lauded the heroic deeds of the nation's warriors, and proceeded to remind the public that, "No funeral dirge or plaintive strain forlorn / Should sound the passing of their chivalry."[27] An official recognition of the idea that soldiers were not to be mourned arose over a suggestion to present crosses to mothers who had lost a son in the war. Sir Edmund Walker quickly suggested that a Maltese cross would be the most appropriate, as "a Latin cross which a woman would wear in memory of some sorrow would not, it seems to me, serve the purpose."[28] Sorrow was not the correct emotion to attach to losing a son in the war, according to the war mythology where valiant and heroic men made the ultimate sacrifice for which they were rewarded in the afterlife. 
 
 

Even those traditional mourning practices maintained during the war came to be less effective. Patricia Jalland notes this phenomenon in the case of condolence letters, a mainstay of mourning in the Victorian period. Condolence letters served to express sympathy and support for the bereaved in a wider social network. However, Jalland notes, 

in the context of mass deaths in wartime, condolence letters seemed to underline the hopelessness of the bereaved and the declining stocks of sympathy and energy among overworked family and community. Moreover, it was necessary that the rhetoric of patriotism and glory continue to be employed in condolence letters long after people had lost faith in it; recently bereaved families needed reassurance that their loved one had died bravely in a just cause.[29] 

The nature of death was changing as well. Gradual and peaceful deaths at home, followed by a funeral and a lengthy period of mourning, were the models of good Victorian deaths. Gruesome, sudden, violent deaths of healthy young men overseas were becoming the norm during the war. Bodies were often destroyed beyond recognition, if a body was even recovered. Certainly there was some attempt to rationalize that a quick death in the prime of life was a more noble and valiant demise than a slow decline in old age. However, mourning and grieving rituals of the pre-war period were unable to help people cope adequately with these deaths, hindered of course by the social sanctions against public mourning. The suddenness of the death meant that the family was unprepared for their loss, and the family support so essential in previous years had not been readied. The horrific deaths of the Great War, completely outside the norms of Victorian exposure to and handling of death, were a separation or break with past experience and thus were even more difficult to deal with. No social rituals had been developed in the Victorian era that could cope with the massive loss of life that occurred in the First World War. 
 
 

Pre-war Victorian society had provided outlets for the grief caused by bereavement, through a funeral and strict mourning procedure. During the war a funeral was impossible, and mourning was suppressed by social dictates. During the first few months of the war it was possible to exhume the bodies of the dead soldiers and transport them back to England, but this practice was soon halted as it became increasingly financially and numerically impractical.[30] Early in 1915, the War Office ordered that all soldiers had to be buried where they fell.[31] However, this was only part of the problem in funerals and burial rites. Nearly half of the total dead from the British Empire have no known burial place to this day.[32] Bodies were destroyed beyond recognition by shelling, or lost where remains were scattered by subsequent fighting. 
 
 

Normal grieving and mourning procedures were affected by the inability to retrieve the body or any definitive information about the death. Soldiers were listed as missing in action and/or presumed dead, but that presumption was easier for the military to make than for the families waiting anxiously on the homefront for news. The anxiety and uncertainty combined with hopes for the soldier's survival and the lack of traditional death rites made soldiers' deaths difficult for families to accept. The presence of the deceased's body and social rituals of mourning focused around this body help to prevent confusion and denial among the bereaved. Ned H. Cassem, a psychiatrist, has remarked on the importance of these rituals: "Those who have not been bereaved cannot conceptualize how extreme the sense of unreality may become during the time of acute grief. One of the most important functions of wakes, funerals, and burials is...to provide crucial opportunities for reality testing to take place during the time of acute grief."[33] These rituals serve to stimulate recognition of a loss and begin the grieving and mourning process for the bereaved. They force not only a social recognition of loss, but a recognition "within the psyche of the bereaved"[34] as well, and as such are essential stimulants of the psychological beginnings of coming to terms with a loss. Without these rituals, it was difficult for relatives to imagine or cope with the idea that the soldier they had last seen alive and well was now deceased, or in many cases, "presumed dead." 
 
 

The lack of a body, a funeral, often a burial site, and of public recognition of a loss meant that not only mourning was suppressed. Often grieving, the psychological process of accepting a death, was also ignored or avoided during the war. Death became ambiguous through the loss of these forms of social control and support. Pine has offered this rather elaborate, esoteric analysis:

Cultures must face the ambiguities of life and death. Since all life must die, to avoid funeral ceremonies may leave the bereaved unattended. If the finiteness of life is not ceremonially connected to the infiniteness of death, we have little more than transitory pains or pleasures.[35] 

While grief was generally quelled during the war, it did emerge in various manifestations in the post-war period. Many people experienced a form of delayed grief, which is clinically defined as a "grief reaction that occurs after an extensive delay, during which the expression of grief is inhibited. In the interim period the bereaved person may behave quite normally."[36] Often grief expressed itself in an obsession with the details of the soldier's death. Joy Damousi, in her work on Australia and the war, has suggested that this fascination allowed the bereaved to "absorb themselves in the presence of the soldier and resist the possibility of death."[37] Mourners in the post-war period seemed to adopt a course of action that often involved the construction of a memorial volume or other sort of "shrine" to the deceased that described his life in a celebratory manner and concluded with the minute details of his demise. Personal memories were recorded as a way to secure the lasting significance of lives cut short by the war.
 
 

The grave site was also a focus for bereaved families after the war. People were unwilling or unable to give up their need for a grave in order to focus their sense of reality in their bereavement. One Victorian commentator noted that cemeteries in the pre-war period were attended "by every individual more frequently than any other scene, except that of his daily occupation."[38] Thus families of fallen soldiers found it especially hard to conceive of their loss without the grave to center their attention on. An extreme example of this is the case of Private G.C. Hopkins. In May 1921, Hopkins' grave in Belgium was discovered "wrenched open, the body taken out and the coffin left in the grave."[39] An investigation revealed that the desecration had been done by Hopkins' parents, who sought to take their son's remains back to Canada and rebury them there. This attempt was unsuccessful, however, as the Hopkins were apprehended before they could leave Belgium and their son's remains were again buried in a military cemetery. 
 
 

However wartime bereavements were dealt with in the post-war period, it was clear that they would have to be done without a body. Service and sacrifice for the empire extended beyond the grave, and it was evident from the Hopkins case that war graves would remain public, patriotic memorials rather than sites of personal commemoration or mourning.[40] Although many arguments were fought with the Imperial War Graves Commission over this issue, mourners had to be content with visiting the foreign graves of their deceased. As early as 1919 tours of the "Devastated Regions" were being organized.[41] By 1931, 140,000 bereaved were visiting the cemeteries every year.[42] These visits were akin to pilgrimages, where people would undertake journeys as personal therapeutic acts to the actual site of an event or person having meaning for the pilgrims.[43] A delayed grief reaction was part of the impetus behind the drive for many people to travel to these sites. Emotional releases were experienced at the site of the grave, not only because the grave served to underline the fact that the deceased was really gone, but also because it provided a basis to centralize or focus emotions and thus aid in the grieving process. People reported that, "I felt complete having seen his gravestone," and "I felt I wanted to kiss my son's name when I saw it. I feel so happy to have seen that name."[44] Seeing the graves often brought an end to the guilt felt by survivors and brought order to other chaotic feelings. 
 
 

Another indication of post-war grieving was the increasing popularity of spiritualism. People had become discouraged with the established church, which was itself trying to come to terms with the war, the huge numbers of dead, and "its own grief, sorrow and sense of loss and incompetence."[45] Turning away from organized religion, many turned to spiritualism for comfort for their losses. By 1919 the number of spiritualist groups had doubled since 1913, and peaked in the 1930s with about one quarter of a million members.[46] With the felling of social support for bereavement, people turned to the deceased themselves for reassurance. They wanted tangible communication with the dead because the social aspect of mourning had been suppressed and there was little communication among the living about their losses. Spiritualism grew as a result of the failures of the church and society to provide adequate rituals of mourning for the bereaved. 
 
 

Delayed grief also had some influence over the creation of war memorials. Communities constructed memorials due to social pressure from the bereaved. The most striking instance of this was the Cenotaph in London. It was originally conceived of as a temporary monument, but popular demand forced the creation of a permanent version to stand as a commemorative shrine to the war dead. By the end of July 1919, the British Cabinet had agreed to replace the temporary structure with an identical, permanent one, at the cost of ten thousand pounds.[47] State commemoration was seen as necessary by the public who had been encouraged to consider their bereavements as sacrifices for the state. The traditional social means of coping with death had been suppressed, and war memorials and monuments emerged as new rituals of mourning. War memorials in various communities began to give voice to the feelings of grief and to acknowledge the losses of the war. Memorials and remembrance ceremonies were state organized mourning rituals, but they were publicly fueled. After the war, then, the bereaved demanded that the nation provide ceremonies and shrines to assure them that their losses had not been forgotten. 
 
 

Collective mourning through these ceremonies and memorials also helped to assist the process of private and individual mourning. Individuals took solace in the social rituals such as annual ceremonies. Through these rites, death in the Great War was collectively affirmed to have been significant. In a way, mourners were able to bring their private and individual grief to these public and corporate ceremonies.[48] Individuals were able to gain personal gratification for their private losses through the social recognition of their loss, though it remained couched in terms of national sacrifice. In some ways these ceremonies were never quite able to assist with private grief. Joy Damousi notes that those bereaved of soldiers in the war found themselves in a paradox of remembrance after the war. While participation in public ceremonies provided some social support and recognition for their losses, at the same time, "mourning of wartime loss involved a process of sustaining both a continuity with, and a detachment from, the lost soldier."[49] Individual expressions of grief remained hampered by the war mythology of the nation. Social memory of the war deaths was problematic, for while it provided a public network and ritual, it did not acknowledge private grief. 
 
 

Other manifestations of the impact of these changing attitudes toward death and the bereaved in the British Empire, can only be hinted at. With more research, the suppression of wartime grief and mourning might be linked to the increased flaunting of social rules that occurred in the 1920s. Society had not been able to reunite the survivors of war deaths and many felt alienated from society as a result. This isolationist feeling was also expressed in international politics in the interwar period. All of these features of the interwar period may be related to the inability of society to cope adequately with death and to reassure its members of group survival. 
 
 

Funeral rituals are a part of the human adaptation to death. Each culture constructs social mechanisms to deal with the loss of individual members and to reassure survivors. The Victorian funeral rituals did not survive the First World War because grief and mourning were officially discouraged for patriotic and nationalist motivations. While this was successful during the war, the culture of the British Empire emerged from the war extremely disrupted and disturbed, with many members filled with unresolved grief over bereavements that could not be publicly shown. Social support networks were eliminated as a source of comfort and stability for the bereaved. The lack of communal support meant that many felt isolated and cut off from society. In the interwar years, British society was obsessed with death; ceremonies were held, and monuments and memorials were constructed as displays of national bereavement. Customary rituals and social validations of private loss were replaced by these national commemorations, but nevertheless alienation from society remained. That these new methods of coping with death in the First World War were inadequate is demonstrated by the rise of various publicly fueled alternatives to mourning, none of which were able to truly reincorporate the bereaved back into society. 
 
 

ENDNOTES

1. Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (London: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 24. 
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2. Robert Francis Murphy, Cultural & Social Anthropology: An Overture, 3rd Ed. (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1989), 208. 
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3. First translated into English in 1960; see Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). 
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4. Douglas J. Davies, Death, Ritual and Belief: The Rhetoric of Funerary Rites (London: Cassell, 1997), 17. 
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5. Victor Turner quoted in Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington, Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual, 2nd Ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 32. 
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6. Metcalf and Huntington, 68. 
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7. Paul C. Rosenblatt, R. Patricia Walsh, and Douglas A. Jackson. Grief and Mourning in Cross-Cultural Perspective (no location [U.S.A.]: Human Relations Area Files, 1976). 
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8. Yorick Speigel, The Grief Process: Analysis and Counseling, Trans. Elsbeth Duke (Nashville: Abingdon, 1977), 125. 
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9. Various definitions of these three terms may be found in: Lynne Ann DeSpelder and Albert Lee Strickland, The Last Dance: Encountering Death and Dying, 2nd Ed. (Mountain View California: Mayfield, 1987), 206-207;Vanderlyn R. Pine, "Grief, Bereavement, and Mourning: The Realities of Loss," in Acute Grief and the Funeral, eds. Vanderlyn R. Pine et al. (Springfield, Illinios: Charles C. Thomas, 1976), 106; and Wolfgang Stroebe and Margaret S. Stroebe, Bereavement and Health: The Psychological and Physical Consequences of Partner Loss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 7. 
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10. Avery D. Weisman, "Why is a Funeral?," in Acute Grief and the Funeral, xiv. 
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11. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, quoted in Metcalf and Huntington, 47. 
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12. Durkheim, quoted in Davies, 14. 
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13. Paul E. Irion, "The Funeral and the Bereaved," in Acute Grief and the Funeral, 33. 
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14. Irion, 35. 
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15. Malinowski, quoted in Davies, 15. 
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16. Therese A. Rando, Grieving: How to Go on Living When Someone You Love Dies (Toronto: D.C. Heath and Company, 1988), 266, 267. 
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17. Bauman, in Davies, 15. 
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18. Jeffrey C. Lerner, "Changes in Attitudes Toward Death: The Widow in Great Britain in the Early Twentieth Century," in Bereavement: Its Psychosocial Aspects, ed. Bernard Schoenberg et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 97-99. 
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19. Quoted in Lerner, 101. 
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20. Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 221.
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21. Jay Winter, The Great War and the British People (1987), quoted in Patricia Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 199), 373. 
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22. Lady Gainford, quoted in Jalland, 371. 
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23. Jalland, 370. 
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24. Quoted in Bourke, 221. 
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25. Quoted in Bourke, 222. 
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26. H. Bell, British Women in the War (New York: G.A. Shaw, 1917), quoted in Lerner, 102. 
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27. A.M. Stephen, quoted in Jonathan F. Vance, Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning and the First World War (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997), 51. 
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28. Walker, quoted in Vance, 51. 
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29. Jalland, 372. 
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30. Lerner, 102. 
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31. Jalland, 188. 
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32. Jalland, 374. 
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33. Ned H. Cassem, "The First Three Steps Beyond the Grave," in Acute Grief and the Funeral, 15. 
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34. DeSpelder and Strickland, 166. 
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35. Vanderlyn R. Pine, "Social Meanings of the Funeral," in Acute Grief and the Funeral, 123. 
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36. Stroebe and Stroebe, 19. 
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37. Joy Damousi, The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 161. 
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38. Quoted in Lerner, 103. 
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39. Report of the Imperial War Graves Commission, quoted in Denise Thomson, "National Sorrow, National Pride: Commemoration of war in Canada, 1918-1945," Journal of Canadian Studies (30:4, 1995-1996, 5-27), 15.
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40. Thomson, 16. 
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41. Lerner, 103.
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42. Alan Wilkinson, "Changing English Attitudes to Death in the First World War," in The Changing Face of Death: Historical Accounts of Death and Disposal, eds. Peter C. Jupp and Glennys Howarth (London: Macmillan Press, 1997), 149-163. 
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43. Pilgrimages, definitions, see Alan Morinis, editor, Sacred Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage (Westport, Connecticut, 1992), 4, 8-9; and Jean Dalby Clift and Wallace B. Clift, The Archetype of Pilgrimage: Outer Action with Inner Meaning (New York: Paulist Press, 1996), 43-45. 
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44. Quoted in Wilkinson, 157. 
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45. Jon Davies, "War Memorials," In The Sociology of Death: Theory, Culture, Practice, ed. David Clark (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers for the Sociological Review, 1993), 114. 
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46. Jalland, 371.
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47. David Cannadine, "War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain," In Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, Editor, Joachim Whaley (London: Europa Publications, 1981), 219. 
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48. Cannadine, 226. 
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49. Damousi, 1. 
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