Dead soldiers belonged to the Army, something that had never occurred to the next-of-kin of the 1,114,747 British, Dominion, Indian and Colonial servicemen who died during the war. Today we're used to the repatriation of the bodies of British soldiers from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, but in April 1915 repatriation was expressly forbidden by the War Office, a decision that it reconfirmed immediately hostilities ceased in November 1918. The dead were buried by the Army in the country where they died and the Imperial War Graves Commission - founded by Royal Charter in May 1917 - was made responsible for the design and maintenance of the war cemeteries where private headstones too were forbidden, and any that had already been erected had to be taken down.
Every casualty was to be buried under an identical headstone, 2'6" high and 1'3" wide, carved with an emblem of his regiment, his army number, name, rank, regiment, age and date of death. The family could chose whether or not to have a cross or a star of David on the headstone but otherwise they were all to be identical. There was to be absolutely no difference between the grave of a private or that of a General, the grave of an aristocrat or that of a factory worker, identical headstones were to be the symbol of the common and equal sacrifice of all the dead.
Despite these egalitarian principles there was an outpouring of resistance to the Commission's plans; but it was intransigent. The cemeteries were going to "speak in one voice of one death, one sacrifice, endured by Britain for the freedom of nations and the freedom of man". To allow relations to choose whatever size, shape or style of headstone they wanted would, as far as the Commission was concerned, destroy the cemeteries as a visual symbol of a great army that had fought and died together in one common cause. Worse, it would destroy the outward and visible sign of the fact that to the State all these deaths were equal.