The Briton whose achievement equals that of the Pharaohs’

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. But if they do, that cemetery will probably be French or American. It will certainly not be British. The only cross in a cemetery maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission will be a free-standing one with a bronze sword attached, a rather ‘Onwards Christian Soldiers’ symbol designed by Reginald Blomfield.

The graves themselves are marked by standard identical headstones, whether the body beneath (if identified) is that of an officer or private soldier, whether Anglican or Catholic, Jewish, Muslim or Hindu.

That the misused and squandered casualties of what certainly was a world war received such a dignified treatment in death was unprecedented (there are no cemeteries filled with the thousands who died at Waterloo) and, in the British empire, was largely the creation of one extraordinary man, Sir Fabian Ware.