Gavin Stamp

The Briton whose achievement equals that of the Pharaohs’

Fabian Ware overcame every difficulty to create a colossal memorial, as David Crane recounts in Empires of the Dead

The Menin Gate Memorial at Ypres lists 54,389 missing. Ware was determined that every individual casualty should be honoured. Credit: Getty Images 
issue 16 November 2013
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  • Empires of the Dead: How One Man’s Vision led to the Creation of WWI’s War Graves

    David Crane

    Collins, pp. 304

We constantly need to be reminded that the consequence of war is death. In the case of the first world war it led to death and destruction on an inconceivably vast scale. To convey the enormity of what the industrialised slaughter that supposedly civilised governments unleashed between 1914 and 1918, film-makers like to pan the camera over a vast sea of white crosses.

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