Rudyard Kipling called them the silent cities of the Great War.

The cemeteries where the dead, the fallen of that conflict lay.

Here we return to discover more about their history.

I've just returned from leading a ledger battlefield tour, which we called the Silent Cities.

And in that tour, we worked with the Commonwealth Wargaves Commission today on the ground in Belgium and France

to look at the story of the Imperial Wargraves Commission at the end of the First World War

and in those years following the Great War withves Commission at the end of the First World War and in those years following the Great War

with the developments, the concentration and the construction

of the permanent cemeteries of the First World War.

It was a great tour to lead.

We had four coach loads of us following different routes around those battlefields.

We looked at three key areas of Arras, the Somme and Eep and we worked with Commonwealth Wargraves Commission

staff on the ground. Two of their excellent historians, Max Dutton and Linnell

Howson. They accompanied us during the course of the week to give us further

insights into the history of the cemeteries and the history of the work of the Wargraves Commission.

And we got to meet a lot of staff on the ground who do the day-to-day work. We heard amongst other things

how important worms are in the gardening aspects of the cemeteries.

We learnt about the maintenance of the walls and of the headstones and of the crosses of sacrifice

and the stones of remembrance.

Some of the group got a chance to actually work with one of the stone masons and see how they actually work on carving new bits of

stone to replace others that have been damaged. We saw the equipment that they used to cut the grass

because the cemeteries are not just these places where the dead of the Great War lie.

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