Hugh Jones was 29 when he was killed in action. On Wednesday, the eve of the 80th anniversary of D-Day, his grave at Bayeux – and those of 22,000 Commonwealth war dead in cemeteries across Normandy – was illuminated in a vigil to these silent witnesses to the pity of war.
All Commonwealth war cemeteries share a powerful aesthetic. There are more than 2,000 across 134 countries, and in each, lines of soldiers’ graves evoke a battalion on parade. In life, officers and soldiers may have been divided by religion, rank or class but they are unseparated in death. They sit, Kipling wrote, on ‘fair and level ground… Where high and low are one’.
It is difficult to imagine today how revolutionary these cemeteries were when they were built.
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