Placing the war dead: Histon Road Cemetery, Cambridge (England)

The placing of the military dead of modern wars abstracts (physically and/or symbolically) the soldier from their peacetime identity and social networks in order to integrate them into a community of those who died for a higher cause. This article considers the case of military burials within a ‘civilian’ cemetery to argue that in this case, military dead stay connected to their families and communities, who remain involved in the post-mortem transformation of their identities, sometimes over the very long term. This unsettles the idea of a temporally and spatially finite funerary sequence completed by the burial and/or commemoration alongside other soldiers. Military cemeteries are designed to convey a sense of enduring permanence, whereas Histon Rd shows how war graves are sites of active change and memory work. Looking at cemeteries as places through which survivors forge a heartfelt and embodied relationship with ‘their’ dead shows that the post-mortem ‘life’ of the military dead is not reducible to that envisaged by the nation state. In particular being placed within a 'civilian' space, soldiers' identity as 'kinned' persons is made more visible. If burial in a military cemetery enshrines the nature of the soldier's body as a token of necropolitical sacrifice, placing soldiers' remains and names in a civilian cemetery locates them within alternative relationships of care and memory that reclaim them from the state to the reciprocities of family and community.