Stand in any Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery today and you might feel inclined to agree with one of the first visitors who said he felt he was "in the presence of a splendid body of soldiers on parade", or with another who remarked with pleasure on their air of "seemliness and good feeling". The rows of identical pale headstones, set between immaculately mown paths among borders of English garden flowers still seem an appropriate way to have commemorated all those young men who died in the service of their country nearly a century ago.
But it wasn't everyone who felt like this and there was little 'good feeling' among many relatives when the Commission first published its proposals. These stated that there was to be absolutely no repatriation of bodies, that the dead were all to be buried in war cemeteries under identically shaped headstones and that private headstones would not be allowed. Words like high-handed, monstrous, repugnant, on the cheap, heartless and bitterly dissatisfied appeared in the letters column of The Times where the designs were described as 'looking like a dog's grave' and 'scarcely worthy of a side-street undertaker'. There were intemperate words in the House of Lords too where Lord Selborne accused the Commission of 'gross and wicked tyranny'.
For many the Commission's proposals amounted to a second bereavement; relatives had been looking forward to the time when they could bring their dead home, or deal in whatever way they wanted with the 'few feet of earth' that was all that was left to them. Surely the graves belonged to the bereaved, the wives, mothers and fathers of the dead. When before in the history of the world had families been denied the right to deal with their own dead? Who had given the Commission this right? What freedom had they all been fighting for if they were now going to have to submit to the bureaucratic tyranny of the state?