Tomorrow is Remembrance Sunday, when the memory of those who gave their lives in two world wars is honoured at the Cenotaph in Whitehall and at local war memorials throughout the country. It is also a time when one is reminded of the work of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in maintaining, so impeccably, British and other war cemeteries and memorials throughout the world.
Originally established as the Imperial War Graves Commission by royal charter on May 21 1917, the CWGC is now responsible for 2,410 war cemeteries, 208 memorials and the headstones to the 1,694,930 dead of two world wars in 23,052 burial grounds in 141 countries.
Of these, 762,730 have no known grave, many of them were either shot to pieces by the terrible artillery bombardment that took place on the Western Front, when an estimated 1.5 bn shells were fired in 1914-18, or they sank without trace in the treacherous mud to which the French and Belgian countryside was reduced.
Even today, more than 70 years later, farmers in Flanders and Picardy are still turning up the remains of 30-40 soldiers and 20,000-30,000 unexploded bombs and shells each year in what is known as “the iron harvest”.
This is because 30% of the shells fired along the 500 miles of the Western Front failed to explode. On the Somme alone, the Fourth Army used 1,637 field guns to fire more than 1.5m shells in a continuous barrage for seven days before zero hour on July 1 1916, when the infantry went over the top. By the end of that first day, British casualties were 57,470.
These precise statistics are characteristic of the work of the CWGC, since every one of the soldiers, sailors and aircrew who died is commemorated by a headstone, and those whose remains are unidentified are recorded on the walls of the various memorials to the missing.
At Thiepval, in Picardy, for example, the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, contains the names of 73,412 who have no known grave.
The names of 54,896 missing in Flanders are recorded on the walls of the Menin Gate at Ieper (Ypres) in Belgium, designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield, and a further 34,888 on Sir Herbert Baker’s memorial to the missing of the battle of Passchendaele at the Tyne Cot British Military Cemetery, where there are also 11,908 graves.
All this awesome precision is the result of the efforts of a remarkable man, Sir Fabian Ware (1869-1949), a former editor of The Morning Post, who, at the age of 45 when the first world war broke out, was put in charge of the British Red Cross Mobile Unit in France in 1914, and began to keep records about where British soldiers had died and were buried.
By February 1916, Ware had been given the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel and put in command of a new Directorate of Graves Registration and Enquiries. By the following year, when whole towns and villages on the Western Front had been reduced to rubble, woods cut down to stumps and the countryside turned into mud, the War Graves Commission had been established.
This was given powers to acquire and hold land for cemeteries and for permanent memorials, to provide for burials, to erect and maintain memorials, to plant trees, shrubs and flowers, and to look after graves outside its own cemeteries (for its headstones are found in many local cemeteries in Britain and elsewhere).
In practice, much of the land for the war cemeteries was given to the commission by the people of France and Belgium, but although there are notices proclaiming that the land was given in perpetuity, the correct legal position is that the land still belongs to the country in which it is located, but the commission has the right to use it as a cemetery in perpetuity.
What has never failed to impress people ever since are the standards that were set from the outset and scrupulously maintained ever since. Leading architects of the day (Lutyens, Blomfield, Baker, Charles Holden, Sir John Burnet, Sir Robert Lorimer and Edward Warren) were appointed to design the cemeteries and most of the memorials (though some major ones were the subject of international architectural competitions).
They were backed by architects such as W H Cowlishaw (who designed the Memorial to the Missing at Pozieres in Picardy) and Charlton Bradshaw (responsible for the Guard’s Memorial in St James’s Park and memorials at Louverval and Ploegsteert, and who became the first Secretary of the Royal Fine Art Commission).
The repatriation of bodies or remains was prohibited in both world wars, which is why it was important to record their place of burial or at least where they went missing. It was also considered essential to use only the best materials for the headstones, which were then carved with names, dates and regimental badges.
Fabian Ware adopted the recommendations of Sir Frederic Kenyon, director of the British Museum, that non-denominational headstones should be used for the graves instead of crosses, that officers should not be treated any differently from their men, and that there should be no individual memorials.
The question of a central monument in each cemetery aroused controversy, and eventually a typical British compromise was reached. Lutyens designed the deceptively simple eight-ton Stone of Remembrance, raised on three steps and bearing the words “Their Name Liveth for Evermore”, — found by Rudyard Kipling in the Book of Ecclesiasticus. But it was also decided that each cemetery should contain a Cross of Sacrifice, designed by Blomfield.
The Stone of Remembrance has been remarkably immune from vandalism, whereas the bronze swords on the Cross of Sacrifice have been prised away for scrap in many places in recent years. At first, the commission replaced them with glass-fibre swords, but these proved to be too realistic and were also wrenched away by vandals, so now reconstructed stone is used.
The latest annual report of the commission, published this week, shows running costs of £21.7m in the year to March 31 1990. This is borne by the countries of the Commonwealth (including South Africa) in proportion to the number of people commemorated, with Britain bearing the largest share, 77.81%, which comes out of the Ministry of Defence’s budget.
Most of the expenditure goes on staff costs, not so much on the 110 administrative staff in the commission’s award-winning headquarters at Maidenhead (designed by the Fitzroy Robinson Partnership) but on the 1,000 or more gardeners and craftsmen who tend the cemeteries.
Expenditure on the structural maintenance of cemeteries and memorials last year was £1.1m, with a further £1.3m spent on horticultural maintenance. Normal structural maintenance consists of the cleaning of the headstones, using high-pressure hoses, and the re-cutting of the inscriptions in the Portland stone.
From time to time, stones have to be replaced, either as a result of subsequent war damage (though it is surprising how many first world war memorials came through unscathed), storm damage or mindless vandalism.
Occasionally, major repairs are required, as when damaged external brick work on the Thiepval monument had to be replaced at a cost of more than £1m over a 10-year period, and when the stone roof of the Faubourg d’Amiens cemetery and memorial to the missing at Arras was replaced with lead in 1986 at a cost of £235,000.
The commission’s members include one property man, Sir Nigel Mobbs, while another chartered surveyor, Neil Osborne, is deputy director-general of operations. Sir Peter Shepheard, architect, planner and landscape architect, is the commission’s artistic adviser.
Rudyard Kipling, who lost his only son in 1915 at Loos, coined the phrase “silent cities” to describe the war cemeteries, and anyone who has visited them will know how fitting that is.
Silent Cities was also the title of a book published in 1929 describing and illustrating all the commission’s cemeteries. Compiled by a chartered surveyor, Sidney Hurst, it has been out of print for years. All it failed to record were the names of the architects.
That omission also used to be laid at the door of the commission, which maintains a register at every cemetery detailing the local battles and listing the names and rank of everyone buried or commemorated there.
Now, however, the commission is installing stainless-steel panels giving historical details of the military action (in English and the local language), often with a map, and including the architects of the cemetery or memorial, so that their names, too, will live for evermore.
