The families of those who fell in the Great War were told that a space had been reserved for a personal inscription

on the headstones that would stand in the soldiers' cemeteries, whether on the Western Front or on other battlefields.

What can we make of these inscriptions more than a century later?

On my first visit to the battlefields in Flanders in the summer of 1982 with my school, my old history teacher, the late Roger Bastable, told us how that after the Great War,

the families of the fallen paid for an inscription on

the headstones. And he inspired us as we walk those cemeteries of Flanders Fields to look for

inscriptions and to see what they told us about how families felt about the sacrifice of their

loved ones in the Great War and that fascination

with these inscriptions and the search for them continues for me to this very day when you visit

the battlefields of the Great War and you walk round the silent cities the cemeteries whether it's on

the Somme or in Flanders or on other

battlefields, much further afield. You're drawn to what is on there, not just the details of the

man himself and the regiment and the date of death, but that personal inscription that the

family's added after the war. And what you find over the years,

even if you've been to a cemetery on many, many occasions,

is that the planting of the shrubs and the flowers changes,

and sometimes they'd been obscuring an inscription that had been there,

and you hadn't seen it before.

So it's, for me me an evolving part of the

experience of visiting these battlefields of the Great War wandering along the rows of the graves

and reading the thoughts of those families from a century ago and it is a century now since

those families began to add those

...