In his magnum opus, De Jure Belli Libri Tres (1964, 278), the great Italian jurist Alberico Gentili maintained that “the peace of the dead is burial.” Gentili's remark offers more than a dignified opening for a review of Tim Grady's Burying the Enemy. It describes, with lapidary precision, the moral and political problem at the center of the book. At first glance, burial in war appears as a final and self-evident act: a necessary gesture of closure performed once organized violence has run its course. Grady shows that it is nothing of the sort. The burial of enemy dead, and still more the long labor of tending their graves, opens a field in which grief, power, and memory are forced into relation with one another. Indeed, his book is not merely about funerary practice in wartime Europe; it is about the ways in which the enemy dead remained present among the living, demanding forms of recognition that war itself had sought to foreclose.
At its core, Burying the Enemy examines what became of British and German soldiers who died on hostile soil during the two world wars and, above all, how civilians and local communities assumed responsibility for their burial and care. Grady uses this neglected subject to explore a larger historical problem: how the treatment of enemy dead connected intimate acts of mourning and decency to wider questions of state authority, postwar reconstruction, and the politics of memory. By following the movement from scattered local graves to more centralized forms of commemoration, the book shows how practices of care could briefly open spaces of recognition across national lines, even as later official interventions narrowed those possibilities and reabsorbed remembrance into national frameworks.
This is what makes the study so valuable. Grady has chosen a subject that sits at the edge of several established historiographies, without neatly fitting into any one of them. Historians of the world wars and, more broadly, scholars interested in military conflicts—myself among them—have written extensively on mourning, memorialization, military sacrifice, and the nationalization of remembrance. Much less attention, however, has been given to the people who looked after enemy graves, maintained burial sites, corresponded with bereaved relatives across borders, or treated the bodies of former foes as deserving of care rather than neglect. Grady places these actors and practices at the center of his inquiry and, in doing so, brings into view a dimension of twentieth-century warfare that has remained underexplored. The result is not a study with an antiquarian flavor, but a book that compels us to rethink how war ended, how memory was organized, and how enmity could be qualified without ever fully disappearing.
One of the strengths of the book lies in its precision in reconstructing a world of postwar obligations. The enemy dead did not vanish once the front moved on. They remained in fields, improvised cemeteries, churchyards, and village landscapes. Their continued presence generated practical demands and moral choices. Someone had to identify them, bury them, mark their resting places, protect them from desecration, and sometimes move them again. Around these acts gathered a wide range of figures: local civilians, clergy, municipal authorities, military officials, relatives, and state agencies charged with the administration of the war dead. Grady follows these interactions with a sense of intimacy and historical weight. What emerges is a study of care in which small acts of tending could carry meanings far larger than the individuals who performed them may have intended.
Gentili's phrase gains its full significance in this context. If “the peace of the dead” depends on burial, Grady asks what kind of peace burial actually secures, and for whom. The answer, in his story, is twofold. Burial may restore dignity to the dead, but it also places demands on the living. It compels surviving societies to decide whether the enemy corpse is to remain an object of hatred, indifference, administrative management, or human regard. In that sense, burial is never a merely material act. It is also a social act through which communities define the limits of exclusion and the reach of moral obligation. To care for enemy graves is not to abolish the “enemy distinction” on which war depends; it is, rather, to admit that such a politically crucial distinction does not settle every ethical question. One of the book's chief merits is that it keeps this tension fully in view. Grady is aware of generosity, reciprocity, and local attachments, but he does not convert them into a sentimental fable of reconciliation. The care of enemy dead could coexist perfectly well with nationalism, resentment, bureaucratic regulation, and diplomatic interest. The book is strong precisely because it never confuses humane conduct with the disappearance of conflict.
A further merit of Burying the Enemy is its refusal to choose between social history and political history. The book moves between the actions of individuals and the priorities of institutions. It focuses closely on those who planted flowers, repaired grave markers, or wrote letters to families on the other side of a former front line. Yet, it also shows how these gestures interacted with the ambitions of states and commemorative bodies that sought to classify, regulate, and nationalize the dead. Grady is particularly good at showing how the work of official organizations could narrow or even erase the space previously occupied by local forms of care. What had once been a relationship between villagers and nearby graves could be transformed into an impersonal administrative machine governed by state prerogatives and standardized forms of remembrance. The history of burial thus becomes, in Grady's narrative, a struggle over who has the authority to define the meaning of wartime death.
The book also deserves praise for the quality of its writing. Grady handles difficult material with unusual gracefulness. He has a clear sense of scale, moving from individual episodes to broader historical patterns without strain or overstatement. That style matters a great deal in a study of this kind, where the temptation to moralize and sentimentalize may be considerable. He writes with sympathy, but also with discipline.
For all these reasons, Burying the Enemy is an outstanding book. It addresses an overlooked subject with seriousness and imagination, showing that the history of ordinary people is inseparable from that of states and institutions. Above all, it shows why Gentili's dictum still matters. Burial may indeed be the peace of the dead, but Grady makes clear that such peace is never simple. His book is a remarkable and touching study of that fragile process.
