War Graves for WW1 Dead

War Graves for WW1 Dead on The Western Front

From the very first battles in the early weeks of the fighting on The Western Front the number of military dead was already in the tens of thousands. The French Army suffered particularly badly, with a figure of 80,000 dead out of 250,000 killed and wounded by the end of the First Battle of the Marne (5^th to 12^th September 1914).

As the war progressed over four years the casualties at each battle, whether it was a large-scale offensive or a more localised attack, were often very high. This was mostly as a result of the destructive capabilities of the weapons being used and the type of warfare being waged at that time.

Military Burials Before 1914

Before the 19^th century soldiers killed in combat were generally buried in communal graves which were not marked specifically as military burial sites. Only certain leaders or famous heroes were given the honour of a marked individual war grave.
In some of the 19^th century battles, namely the Mexico-American War (1847-1850), the Crimean War at Sebastopol (1856) and Solferino (1859) and the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), soldiers were buried in marked military burial sites. However, the remains of the individual soldiers in these sites were not separated into individual graves.

Registration of the War Dead 1914-1918

The scale of casualties in the First World War was unprecedented. Thousands of soldiers were being buried on the battlefields in individual or communal graves by their comrades. They were often buried where they fell in action, or in a burial ground on or near the battlefield. A simple cross or marker might be put up to mark the location and give brief details of the individuals who had died. In the early weeks of the war the British Army had no official register to whom these battlefield burials could be formally reported with a name and the location of the grave.
Those individuals who reached a hospital in a safe area behind the fighting lines and who died of their wounds would usually be buried in a cemetery near to the hospital. Often it would be in an existing town or village cemetery or in a specially created annexed burial plot. These burials could be registered and their locations marked.
The large numbers of dead also confronted the warring nations with the question of what the military authorities and official authorities should do about registering the burials of the dead. The families who had lost a loved one would naturally expect that a record of the soldier's grave would be kept for pilgrimage visits or for the body's repatriation.
As a result, official war graves registration services were established by many of the fighting nations during or after the First World War.

The “Missing”

The difficult task for the graves registration services was increased by the nature of the fighting on certain battlefronts, such as the Western Front. The characteristics of siege and trench warfare on this battlefront meant that fighting often moved back and forth over the same ground. Between battle actions the day to day survival in filthy holes or trenches dug in to the ground and the hazards of exploding artillery shells, snipers and grenades resulted in many casualties from sickness and wounds. Many casualties were lost in collapsed underground tunnelling operations to mine under enemy positions.
Conditions in the landscape often added to the number of casualties. Heavy, prolonged rain could turn the landscape into a sea of mud. Accounts by soldiers during the 1917 Battle of Passchendaele at Ypres tell of men drowning and disappearing in the waterlogged shell craters and deep, deep mud.
Graves and burial grounds situated in the area of a battlefront were often damaged by subsequent fighting across the same location, resulting in the loss of the original marked graves. Some bodies simply could not be retrieved from underground.
Added to this, the technical developments in the weaponry used by all sides frequently caused such dreadful injuries that it was not possible to identify or even find a complete body for burial.
These factors were generally responsible for the high number of “missing” casualties on all sides and for the many thousands of graves for which the identity is described as “Unknown”.

The nations involved in the First World War have chosen to commemorate the missing in various ways. There may be an official tomb or coffins in which an “Unknown” burial has been selected to represent the thousands of unidentified war dead of that country. There may be memorial walls in military burial grounds with names carved in stone or etched in bronze. Or there may be monuments with many thousands of names in battle sites to commemorate the individuals who are known to have died in that area but who have no known grave.
It is usually the victors who have the opportunity to put up memorials to honour their military dead. There may be many military dead, known or missing, from some nations who will never have their memory carved in stone or etched in bronze. Indeed, the German war graves agency, the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräber Fürsorge (VDK) considers that there are still possibly approximately 80,000 German soldiers who fell in action in Flanders and whose remains cannot be accounted for. There is a similar figure for British casualties whose remains have never been found. They are all still “missing” in Flanders