A first-time visitor’s guide to Commonwealth War Graves cemeteries and memorials

Battlefield Cemeteries

Battlefield cemeteries were created during warfare when soldiers made makeshift graves for their fallen comrades. These sites tend to be quite small and were built very quickly before battlefield conditions changed.

Sometimes, despite their small size, these cemeteries hold mass graves, featuring servicemen buried together in a trench or shell hole. Their proximity to fighting meant they could be heavily damaged or destroyed, with grave markers and locations lost. As such, many battlefield sites hold thousands of soldiers, “Known Unto God”.

The layout of battlefield cemeteries tends to be less uniform than, say, concentration or medical cemeteries. The chaos and carnage of fighting at the front often precluded men from burying the fallen in neatly arrayed plots and rows.

Civilian churchyard/cemeteries

These sites have burials made during the wars in existing civilian burial grounds. You’ll find some early casualties of the Great War buried in such places in France and Belgium, but a variety of casualties can be found in local churchyards around the world.

In the early years of the First World War, when military units first arrived in new areas, existing cemeteries were turned over to the burial of the dead. As such, many individual graves and headstones are hidden among the civilian burials. Otherwise, military war dead may be placed into small, distinct plots or placed along cemetery boundaries.

Those who died away from the battlefield, or after they were discharged, may have been buried by their family locally, too. Likewise, Second World War airmen shot down over enemy territory were sometimes buried in churchyards and municipal cemeteries.

In France and Belgium, such burial grounds are usually called “Communal”. In the UK, many of our war graves are in local churchyards or cemeteries.

Concentration cemeteries

As former First World War battlefields were cleared of debris and landscapes returned to normality, thousands of small cemeteries and isolated battlefield burials littered the landscape.
 
The decision was made to bring these individual graves and smaller cemeteries together into existing sites or build new ones. This period was known as “concentration”.

Concentration cemeteries were mainly built after the war. After the Armistice in November 1918, the Commission entered its busiest period of work, which included locating and identifying war dead for proper commemoration and burial, wherever possible.

Post Second World War, this approach was taken again, with casualties brought from isolated or battlefield graves into purpose-built Commission cemeteries. Yokohama War Cemetery in Japan, for example, holds burials of servicemen who died in prison and labour camps around the country.

Headstones

Commonwealth War Graves headstones are easily identifiable. But did you know there are some subtle and not-so-subtle variations in our overall headstone design?

Our basic headstones are inscribed with the details of the individual they commemorate, including name, rank, awards, service number, religious emblem and a personal inscription supplied by our stone masons.

Sadly, some headstones bear the inscription “Known Unto God”. This is because, despite our best efforts, the person buried was not identifiable. The inscription was chosen by the famed writer and poet, and the Commission’s first Literary Officer, Rudyard Kipling.  

Where possible, any information that could be found has been inscribed, so you may come across headstones reading “A soldier of the Great War”, for example, or “A soldier of the Second War".

All Commonwealth servicemen and women of the World Wars with no known war grave are commemorated by name on our war memorials. Even now, 100 years after our founding, the recovery and commemorations team do whatever they can to identify new discoveries found on the World War’s former battlefields.

Flat Headstones

A flat or recumbent grave marker can be used to show multiple casualties in one spot, either due to lack of space or where multiple servicemen have been buried together. 

At Edinburgh (Comley Bank) Cemetery, where there are several burials in a limited space, flat markers were put in place to avoid creating an overcrowded feel that potentially would have come from individual headstones.

Geography also plays a role. At Wimereux Communal Cemetery, the soil is unable to support our usual standing headstones, hence the flat headstones lying in the cemetery. 

Foreign nationals’ headstones

In some of our cemeteries, you will notice several headstone designs which differ from our standard headstone, flat headstones, or pedestal markers. These are grave markers of foreign nationals in our care.
Each nation has its own different style, and in some cases, there may even be different style marker types within one country.
 
Cross-shaped headstone markers commemorate French and American burials. In the case of Jewish American soldiers, the cross is replaced by a Star of David.

With multiple nationalities buried alongside Commonwealth casualties, Brookwood Military Cemetery in Surrey, UK, is one of the best places to see our foreign national grave marker designs.

Cross of Sacrifice

Sir Reginald Blomfield’s Cross of Sacrifice is one of our most easily recognisable cemetery features. If you see the great stone cross with bronze sword peeking out over a Normandy hedgerow, or in Flanders fields, then you’ll have probably just gone by one of our cemeteries.

Of course, it is not just in Europe that you'll find the Cross of Sacrifice. It stands in practically all our territories and nations as an enduring symbol of those sadly lost in the World Wars.

The Cross is found in sites with over 40 commemorations and varies in size. Depending on the size of the cemetery, we have four different sizes to choose from, with the tallest standing at just over 9 metres tall.

The base is octagonal, giving designers and architects further flexibility to incorporate the Cross into other cemetery elements, such as boundary walls or visitor seating. The Cross of Sacrifice at Tyne Cot Cemetery, for instance, sits atop the remains of a large German bunkhouse at the suggestion of King George V.

Cemetery Register Box

These can usually be found built into the walls of a cemetery or inside the cemetery shelter buildings. Inside is a registry of all casualties commemorated at the site, alongside a cemetery plan mapping plots, rows, and graves.