[BITList] The team that spends decades restoring the graves of fallen soldiers

[John Feltham]

Carve their names with pride: The team that spends decades
restoring the graves of fallen soldiers

By Robert Hardman for Daily Mail
08th November 2008

Full text reproduced at:

http://forums.canadiancontent.net/news/79131-team-restoring-graves-fallen-commonwealth.html

At the Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in
La Targette, northern France, a team is lovingly restoring the
gravestones of those soldiers from Britain and her Empire who
fell during the Great War.

There are so many gravestones that need repairing that the whole
process will take 28 years - then when it's done the whole thing will
start again.

There are nearly 800,000 individual World War I headstones - not to
mention 500,000 memorial inscriptions to those without an identified
grave - and each one must be restored by hand.

There are 641 graves in La Targette commonwealth war cemetery,
with the fallen from countries across the former British Empire -
Britain, Australia, India, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa etc.

Around 1.7 million soldiers from the British Empire died during the
Great War - around 1.1 million of those were British.

The £44 million budget for maintaining the graves of the dead from
the Commonwealth is shared amongst the Commonwealth nations
in direct proportion to the loss each nation suffered. Therefore,
Britain pays 78% of this budget.

The beautiful gravestones of the Commonwealth cemetery is in stark
contrast to that of the cemetery containing the bodies of the French
soldiers. The French graves are not engraved. Instead, they have
small marker plates attached to the crosses. There are no flowerbeds,
no grassy aisles, no intimacy. It is huge and impersonal.

'Here in France, we have a different culture,' says Robert Fontana
of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. 'People do not
remember their war dead like you. The British soldiers are looked
after much better.'

(Snip)

ooroo

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