In the autumn of 1914, the necessity for a continued organization to undertake the supervision of graves was recognised, both from the point of view of national feeling, and to discourage the disconnected and spasmodic efforts of private individuals, which were threatening to create friction and confusion. The services of Mr. Fabian Waro, who, while employed under the British Red Cross with French troops, had already interested himself in the subject, were obtained by the Army, and, later, this gentleman was granted a commission in order to supervise the department of which he is now Director. It was not until March, 1915, that the organization of the Commission of Graves Registration and Enquiries finally assumed its present shape.

Under the Directorate are the Graves Registration Units in the different spheres of military activity. In France and Belgium there are four of these units, each with their two or three sections. Three of the four units divide the British front between them, from north of Ypres to the Somme battlefield. The fourth unit deals with everything outside and behind the beats of these three. When an officer or man is killed at the front, or dies of wounds, his burial is at once reported to the Director as well as to the base. If killed in action, he may still be buried, in the old way, somewhere near the trench. If so, the chaplain or officer who buries him reports the position of the grave, and one of the officers of the Graves Registration Units visits it, verifies the record, affixes, if necessary, a durable cross, with the date, the man's name, rank, regiment and regimental number upon it, clearly stamped on aluminium tape, and enters these particulars and the exact site of the grave in the register. But this mode of burial is becoming much less common. The Army has been quick to realise the desirability of burying its dead in the nearest of the 300 or more recognised cemeteries behind the line. The bodies are carried back by road or light railway to one of the little wooden, iron, or canvas mortuaries which the Graves Registration Units have set up in the cemeteries. There the soldiers in charge of the cemetery do all that remains to be done, and an eye-witness can assure the friends of soldiers at home that there is nothing perfunctory about these funerals. Everything is done as tenderly and reverently as if the dead man were in an English churchyard among themselves.

When a death takes place in a hospital, there is, of course, a regular cemetery at hand, and registration is simple.

Some of the cemeteries are great extensions of little village graveyards. Some were begun by special corps or divisions, which wished to bury their dead all together. In one you find a separate plot, each with its special entrance, for Gurkhas, Sikhs and Punjabis. Under the great trees of another, where are many of those who fell at Festhubert, some of our Indian soldiers have built, for their comrades, brick tombs of extraordinary massiveness. At Villers-aux-Bois the French buried 2,500 of those who were killed in winning the Vimy Ridge. On each grave, at the foot of its wooden cross, there is still stuck in the earth, neck downwards, the bottle in which the first hasty record of the interment was placed. A tiny chapel at one end shelters the Christ brought from the ruined Calvary of Carency, and a little coloured image of the Virgin riddled with German bullet-holes. In all the cemeteries the Graves Registration Units keep the graves, British and French, in repair; they sow grass and plant flowers and shrubs, under the advice of the Headquarters of British gardening at Kew. A few of these places are already gay with autumn flowers in full bloom. More will be brightened in this way next year, when all the arrears of tidying and restoration that the units found waiting for them have been overtaken.

Outside the cemeteries themselves an immense amount of work is done. The staffs of the units are constantly searching all possible and almost impossible places for isolated graves that may have escaped registration. The Directorate answers every enquiry[A] sent by a soldier's friends, and will, if they wish, take a photograph of a grave and send it to them, for nothing, thanks to the funds provided for this purpose by the Joint War Committee of the British Red Cross Society and St. John's Ambulance. The Director and his officers co-operate with the French engineers, sanitary authorities and communal councils in making arrangements to take advantage of the noble and moving gift made by the French nation on December 29th, 1915, when the law was passed which acquires for ever, in the name of the French Government, the special cemeteries where most of our dead in France are buried.

No money is wasted, and no energy is diverted that might have been spent in fighting; all the officers of the units are men disqualified by age, or other disability, for combatant service; the other ranks are filled with men permanently relegated, through age, wounds, or sickness, to duty behind the front. But much of the work is done under fire. One officer, Captain J. D. Macdonald, has already been killed on duty, and two others and several men wounded.

In all wars it has been one of the fears haunting a soldier's friends that his body may be utterly lost. Even in this war there have been such irretrievable losses. But in no great war has so much been done as in this, to prevent the addition of that special torment to the pains of anxiety and of bereavement.

Printed in Great Britain by
Eyre & Spottiswoode, Ltd., East Harding Street, London, E.C.