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History Corner
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Wade Davis On
Cremation In Britain After The FWW
Wade
Davis, Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 2011), p. 233.
‘In the
1890s the practice of cremation hardly existed, with fewer than a hundred bodies
being so disposed in all of Britain in a year; by the 1920s cremation was the
choice of tens of thousands.
Daily exposure [in the war trenches] to the horror of rotting flesh and bodies
gnawed by rats made it seem a clean, pure, and highly desirable alternative to
burial.
If faith and traditional
religion were among the casualties of the war, the rivers of dead inversely
caused a surge of interest in unconventional notions of the spirit, the more
esoteric the better, for mystics and oracles, mediums and soothsayers all
promised the possibility, however remote, that communication with the dead might
be achievable.’
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