British Identity in Belgian Soil

Abstract

This chapter looks at the different meanings of Britishness and Englishness as put forward in recent publications so as to contextualise my own definition of the concept. I then explain my take on nationality in the context of war cemeteries and war casualties by examining the association of nationality with the human body. Does nationality exist strictly within the human body so much so that it can be moved with that body and be assumed, or absorbed by the soil where that body is eventually buried? Is there, in other words, an embodiment of nationality? The British literary tradition seems to indicate that nationhood can be associated with the place of burial. Most famously, Rupert Brooke, in his “The Soldier,” claimed that if buried in a “foreign field” that place will be “forever England.” That dead body, Brooke writes, will enrich the earth that surrounds it: being English dust it will be better and richer than the surrounding soil. I compare the analysis of the Brooke poem with that of other poems such as Thomas Hardy’s “Drummer Hodge” as well as visitors’ comments in the visitors’ books of First World War cemeteries. The second line of thought explores the possibilities of the genre of the diary associated with the Grand Tour and the examples of William Beckford and John Evelyn’s travel writing and their discovery of the historical towns in Belgium. Through Beckford’s art collections we follow up on the connection between Northern European art and British artistic expressions in the nineteenth century.