Garden of stone

Perhaps others think of places further afield whose names evoke the memories of terrible battles: Alamein, Tobruk, Gallipoli, Kohima.

Spare a moment, however, to wonder how these places came into being. How, in the midst of the gargantuan destruction and human tragedy of the First World War, could anyone have had the vision to create one of the most ambitious and astonishing memorials to its war dead?

Described by Rudyard Kipling as "the biggest single bit of work since any of the Pharaohs" the commemoration of a million Empire dead has no parallel in British history.

The Imperial War Graves Commission was founded on May 21, 1917, by Royal Charter and was based on the idea of a senior Red Cross Official, Fabian Ware.

Ware had been sent out to France in September 1914 to take charge of the fleet' of ambulances belonging to the Red Cross, in reality a motley crew of private cars and lorries supplied voluntarily to ferry the injured to the makeshift hospitals as casualty figures amongst the British Expeditionary Force reached alarming rates.

Ware soon realised that the men who fell in France and Belgium, and later further afield, were dying in large numbers, yet there was no one tasked with recording where they were buried. He immediately offered to take over the responsibility himself.

In March 1915 his work was deemed significant enough for it to be recognised officially by the Army, and Ware was given the title of Major. He had succeeded in locating and recording the sites of over 30,000 scattered graves.

By May 1916, Ware had created the National Committee for the Care of Soldiers Graves as well as the Directorate of Graves Registration and had selected sites along the Western Front for 200 permanent cemeteries.

There was also concern for soldiers graves in other parts of the world -in Mesopotamia (now Iraq), in Italy, in Greece and in Gallipoli. By 1917, a full 18 months before the end of the First World War and just two months before the third battle of Ypres, known as Passchendaele, the Imperial War Graves Commission officially came into being.

Its brief was one of the most ambitious ever undertaken: to commemorate in perpetuity those who had died in the service of the British Empire in the Great War - a task made all the more difficult after the onset of the Second World War in 1939.

Today, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (renamed in 1960 to reflect the changing times) honours 1,700,000 men and women of the Commonwealth forces who died in the two world wars and looks after their graves and memorials at some 23,000 locations in 150 countries.

Its guiding principle is equality of treatment for all the war dead, irrespective of military or civil rank, race or creed.

The commissioners were ambitious, not only in their objectives of equality for all but in their desire to enlist the help and support of the best architects, engineers, horticultural experts and artists of the day.

The list of those who gave their time freely to the commission reads like a Who's Who of the early 20th century - Edwin Lutyens, Reginald Blomfield and Herbert Baker were consultant architects; Gertrude Jekyll advised on garden design; Arthur Hill, of Kew Gardens, on horticulture, and Rudyard Kipling, as literary adviser to the Commission, on all inscriptions.

What few readers perhaps realise is that of the 23,000 burial sites cared for by the Commission worldwide, some 12,350 of these are in the United Kingdom, with 170,000 burials and a further 134,000 names commemorated on various memorials.

This to some surprising statistic is explained by several facts: one is that qualification for burial in a CWGC cemetery was that the man or woman should have been serving at the time of their death, regardless of where they died.

A second is that the Air Force, the Mercantile Marine and the Navy all have significant memorials in this country for their servicemen and women who have no known grave, and a third is that the time limit set for burials was fixed in 1921 by the Definition of the End of War Act which effectively called an official end to the First World War on August 31, 1921.

After the Second World War, the member governments of the Commonwealth decided that a similar length of time should be granted for burial to those who had died in that conflict. This had the perhaps unintentional result of according military burial to those who came back to Britain after the war and died of their wounds, illness or in accidents.

Throughout Oxfordshire there are Commonwealth War Graves - sometimes scattered individually in a cemetery, at other times arranged in neat rows. Behind every headstone there is a story, an individual, a bereaved family and echoes of great sadness. In the churchyard of St Mary in Kidlington is the isolated grave of Private William Dorrell of the Royal Defence Corps.

He was 50 when he died on Christmas Eve 1916. Possibly he died of wounds sustained.

disease. We may never know. But it is certain that his wife, Edith Emily Dorrell of St Clements in Oxford, had a sad Christmas that year.

On the headstone she asked for the personal inscription to read: His memory is as dear today as in the hour he passed away.' Over the wall is a beautifully tended plot of some two dozen headstones from the Second World War. The burial ground was opened in November 1940 and used by the RAF station at Kidlington.

Most of the war graves here are those of airmen and they include members of the Australian, Canadian and New Zealand Royal Air Forces as well as the RAF. Among their number is a Polish airman, Pilot Zbigniew Slomkowski, who died on November 30, 1942, at the age of 26. He was one of many Polish pilots who flew for the RAF in World War Two.

Perhaps the most poignant headstone is that of 16 year-old Leslie Shearwood. He was a cadet, 1st Class in the Air Training Corps, and died on April 4, 1944. The personal inscription on his headstone reads He wanted to fly so God gave him wings.' Men from Oxfordshire are buried all over the world in Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries. Those with no name are remembered on the massive memorials that stand at such places as the Menin Gate at Ypres, the Thiepval Memorial on the Somme, at Lake Doiran in Greece, on the Hong Kong and Singapore memorials in the Far East.

At Tyne Cot, the commission's largest cemetery, there are recorded among the 35,000 on the memorial the names of 543 members of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry Regiment. The majority of these men died in the first battle of Ypres.

At Thiepval there are a further 641 and of those, some 187 were from the city of Oxford itself.

Perhaps the most famous Oxford born and educated man to be buried in a commission cemetery is Captain Noel Chavasse, VC and Bar. His grave is in Brandhoek New Military Cemetery, near Poperinge in Belgium.

Chavasse was a doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps and died of injuries sustained while rescuing men from the front under fire, for which he received his second Victoria Cross and the citation in the London Gazette: "By his extraordinary energy and inspiring example, he was instrumental in rescuing many wounded who would have otherwise undoubtedly succumbed under the bad weather conditions. This devoted and gallant officer, subsequently died of his wounds."

The largest collection of graves in Oxfordshire is at Botley. A plot in the cemetery is beautifully maintained and accommodates the graves of 156 men from the First World War and a further 655 from the Second World War, including 70 war graves of other nationalities - Italian, Polish, French, German and Czech.

Despite cars rumbling by on the busy A34, this is a beautiful spot tucked away from the hurly burly of everyday life.

For me it is a microcosm of the Commission's work worldwide and a reminder of the extraordinary commitment of the early commissioners to remember the dead of two world wars in perpetuity.

In 1920 Winston Churchill announced prophetically in the House of Commons: "The cemeteries . . . will be entirely different from the ordinary cemeteries which mark the resting place of those who pass out in the common flow of human fate from year to year. There is no reason at all why, in periods as remote from our own as we ourselves are from the Tudors, the graveyards of this Great War shall not remain an abiding and supreme memorial to the efforts and the glory of the British Army, and the sacrifices made in the great cause."

Although much of the maintenance work of the Commission cemeteries is undertaken by their horticultural staff, some care of graves, particularly in the smaller churchyards throughout Britain, is a more local affair.

At Woodstock, children from the Marlborough School tend the 14 First and Second World War graves, advised by the local branch of the British Legion - an important link for the present with the past.

It is all too easy to take remembrance for granted. Were it not for the work of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, remembrance as we know it today would not exist. The sites of many of the great battles of the two world wars would have been swallowed up by the landscape, by agriculture and by development, lost forever.

Ninety years on, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission is still working to maintain to the highest possible standard the fabric upon which our remembrance of the war dead is focused.

n Julie Summers is the author of Remembered, a history of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, with photographs by Brian Harris and a foreword by Ian Hislop, published by Merrell Publishers, London May 2007. Remembered is a celebration in pictures of the extraordinary and diligent efforts of those who believed the war dead should be remembered in perpetuity. It illustrates the lengths to which the Commission went to ensure a dignified, equal and fitting tribute to every Commonwealth man and woman who gave their lives in war.