In distant corners of the planet, and also right here in Oxfordshire, there are war graves: resting places of Commonwealth people killed in action in the two world wars of the last century.

I have seen serried ranks of well maintained Portland stone headstones, quarried in Dorset, in the desert in faraway Egypt (El Alamein), and in Tunisia, all similar to those in the churchyard of, say, Black Bourton, near Witney, or the cemetery in Botley.

Now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC), which looks after more than 465,000 war graves worldwide, with 170,000 in 12,500 sites in the UK alone, is gearing up for next year’s centenary of the start of the First World War — a task it describes as “possibly the greatest it has faced since the end of the Second World War”.

The commission, based in Maidenhead, employs about 200 people in Britain. Nearly all the headstones it produces — and the job of replacing and restoring them is continuous, with thousands constantly needed — are made of Portland stone.

But the ‘blanks’, as they are called, are shipped from Dorset to Arras in France to be engraved with the names of the fallen; or with the words ‘Known unto God’ in the many cases in which the remans have proved unidentifiable.

The CWGC is also responsible for commemorating all those men and women, mainly lost at sea or in the skies, whose remains have never been found. In total it is responsible for perpetuating the memory of about 1.7m members of Imperial and, latterly, Commonwealth forces.

Part of next year’s programme, which will see one teacher and two pupils from every state-funded secondary school in Britain given the opportunity to visit the Great War battlefields of France, has involved installing interactive information panels using smartphone technology at 500 sites worldwide — 100 in UK.

Botley Cemetery, the largest of the 167 CWGC sites in Oxfordshire, with 740 burials, was one of the first to have such a panel installed, complete with a Quick Response (QR) code to enable smartphone users to gain more information.

From the high-tech panels, visitors may learn that during the First World War the university’s Examination Schools was converted into a hospital to house more than 1,500 officers and men, many of whom died.

There was also a hospital containing 580 beds at the Ashurst War Hospital, housed in the former Oxford County Asylum in Littlemore in 1918.

The cemetery, which unusually contains a stone of remembrance designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens (a feature usually reserved for sites containing more than 1,000 graves), was extended during the Second World War to accommodate another 516 graves. In addition there are the tombs of Czechs, Poles, Dutch, Belgians and the only Greek soldier casualty buried in the UK.

The graves of 33 German servicemen killed in 1944 are in a separate plot at the cemetery.

At Black Bourton, where the church of St Mary contains some of the most remarkable medieval frescoes in the county, dating from 1275, the war graves in the churchyard commemorate airmen killed in flying accidents at nearby RAF Brize Norton during the Second World War.

They are together in a group to the left of the entrance. The sheer number of accidents that occurred astonishes the peacetime visitor 70 years on.

The question of whether the remains of war victims should be repatriated was hugely controversial in 1916 when the CWGC was founded by Sir Fabian Ware; but it was Winston Churchill who was largely responsible for convincing members of the House of Commons that they should be honorably commemorated in the land in which they died — which is the historic reason why the headstones are inscribed in France, that being the country containing by far the largest number of war graves.