<div class="page photo" style=""> <article> <header style=" background-image:url(/uploads/547a1516659d4.jpg); "> <div class="box"> <div class="intro" style="color: #ffffff;"> <h1 style="color: #ffffff !important;">Gardens of the Dead </h1> <p class="summary">An Essay </p> </div> </div> </header> <div class="main"> <div class="container"> <p class="byline">James Rimmer </p> <p>The power of the Commonwealth War Grave Commission is its ability to be the perfect cemetery before you had opinions on what you wanted a cemetery to be. </p><p>Setup after the First World War, the CWGC manages the graves some 1,700,000 people in 23,000 locations in 153 countries, who died fighting with and for Britain during the world wars. Funded by Commonwealth countries, the CWGC looks after graves from Newfoundland to Hong Kong, Berlin to Cape Town. </p><p>At each of those 23,000 sites, the scheme is the same. Immutable – like death. </p><p>A low wall separates the cemetery from the world. By the gate a plaque tells you the history of the conflict and the site's role within it. In the wall an alcove protects green binders with the history of the cemetery itself, an index of those buried and a guest book. A pen without a cap lets visitors sign. </p><p>Inside, you will be greeted by rows and rows of identical stones. From the back they are all equal, indistinguishable. </p><p>Only when you face them, only when you meet the dead do you see the individuals. Name, regimental or national crest, religious symbol, epitaph. Row upon row of individuals displayed identically. </p><p>Within the rows there is flexibility to experience. Belgians, Poles, civilians and resistance fighters all have their own stone designs, each slotted seamlessly into the rows. For aircraft or tank crews the stones touch. A concession to the fact in the burnt wreckage separating bodies would be impossible, it also subtlely's captures the shared experience of their death. Pilot and Copilot were killed shoulder to shoulder thus lie shoulder to shoulder. </p><p>At each grave a flower, of stock dependant on who’s grave it lives, with some concessions to local geography. </p><p>The green lawn is cut perfectly, the edges straight, the weeds non-existent. Each grave tended as tenderly as if by a mother. Many of the tiny sites – one or two graves in the corner of a churchyard, the care is so constant, so loving, the idea the grave is not maintained by family seems discordant - no bureaucracy could love a grave so well. </p><p>The sameness and the individuality intertwine – soldiers lie as they fell, not segregated based on race or creed or religion. Protestant Newfoundlanders lie beside London Jews beside Burmese Buddhists. Yet each has their name listed, each has their own faith stated. Every stone gets flowers, each an individual plant. Each cemetery the same, but each with an individual story, with an individual mix of graves.</p><p>It is this perfect balance of sameness and individuality that makes CWGC sites powerful. The visitor is forced to experience the individual and collective horror of war. </p><p>You weep because Tom Rimmer is dead and because 299 other dead Tom Rimmers lie beside him. </p><p>No other memorials capture that balance. The French lose too much individuality – their crosses state only the name - and when they concede to individual needs they do so glaringly. The eye easily and automatically picks out the square stones of Jews and Muslims.</p><p>Most damningly French sites are still fighting the politics of the post-war period. Notre-Dame de Lorette is the French National Military cemetery because of a scheming Bishop wanting to re-assert the Catholic Church’s role in French society. ‘The Church as a sanctuary and as a place of safety for a wounded France.’ A socialist atheist relative of the dead would have little air for their experience in this ‘national’ place of mourning. </p><p>For the Germans, whose instinct was for individual crosses and small sites like the Commonwealth, their sites reflect the concessions Germans have made to regain moral standing in Europe. Langemark, in Belgium, has a mass grave of 20,000 know dead because in the 1950s the Belgian’s forced Germany to congregate its dead into four sites. In France too the Germans were forced to do some post-war consolidations. </p><p>As a consequence only 20% of German war dead have an identified grave, and many of their cemeteries were re-build in the 1960s or later, meaning the fingerprints of later generations are all over them. They have at times an academic, distant, modernist air. </p><p>The resulting architectural experience is discombobulating. The German sites are at once overwhelming and far. </p><p>You get lost in Neuville St-Vaast. When you look up from the names you find yourself in the middle of a giant, seemingly unending field of dead. As far as the eye can see you see war dead. The horror is further amplified by the site’s low attendance. It’s not unusual to be only visitor. It is dislocating and crushing to be the only living man in a field of the dead. </p><p>But it is also a cold site, empty site. The love that permeates CWGS sites is not there. If CWGS sites are tender with the love of a childless mother, and French sites firm with the commandments of a father, German sites are run by the grandchildren of cousins. </p><p>It should be noted that unlike the massive French and German sites, who hold thousands upon thousands of graves, one must visit multiple CWGS sites to feel their full effect. To see one is to see a quaint English garden – the product of a bereaved eccentric. To see two is to see the career of an architect, one individual’s image. It is only on the visitor’s fourth or fifth site, ideally in different regions and spanning both conflicts, that the totality, the universality of the CWGS design becomes real. </p><p>That the totality, the universal, the unique horror of war is felt. </p> </div> </div> </article> </div><!-- /page-->