A century ago, work started to make the British cemeteries of the Great War permanent.

Lajad Kipling would call them the silent cities, these vast stone cities, where Britain's dead of that war would lie.

Across the battlefields where the fighting had taken place, they acted like beacons to the old

front line. What's their history? And what do they mean to those who walk that ground today?

Having discussed the story of the missing in a previous podcast, it only seems logical to look at the story of the missing in a previous podcast,

it only seems logical to look at the story of the cemeteries in this one.

Today, when we visit the Great War battlefields along the old front line,

the cemeteries are the most obvious reminders of the war that we see,

and for many people it is their first direct contacts, their tangible

experience with the men and the history of the Great War. These cemeteries are the sad

expression of the grief that families from Britain and the Empire had in that immediate post-war

period when they began to come to terms with the losses the million dead of the great war but these silent cities as rajard kipling called them these places where we find the dead of the great war did not happen by accident what led to their creation what is their history

and in this podcast we'll look at that. We'll examine the

background to the cemeteries. We'll look at the wartime burials, the care of graves, what was done

in the post-war period, the creation of permanent cemeteries, what the state of those cemeteries

were by 1939 and their experience during

the Second World War, and then we'll bring that up to the present day. When we look at the background

of the British and Commonwealth cemeteries from the First World War, in many ways we travelled back

100 years to Waterloo in 1815, when after that battle just outside of Brussels the dead were

collected off the field of conflict and buried largely in mass graves a few officers were taken away for

burial separately but there was no question that the men who'd fought so bravely shoulder to shoulder

would be

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