The British government established the Imperial War Graves Commission in 1917 to look after the graves of the Empire’s soldiers who died overseas. This new organisation, which grew out of the British Empire’s Graves Registration Commission, established in 1915, was renamed the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) in 1960.
Today, the CWGC looks after the graves of 1.7 million Commonwealth forces in 2,500 cemeteries in more than 170 countries. The Commission has six member countries: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and South Africa.
The British Empire chose to bury its dead on the battlefields of the First World War close to where they had fallen, rather than repatriating them to their home countries as many politicians and grieving families had called for. While thousands of bodies had been buried in makeshift graves during the fighting, military units, first assisted by the Red Cross and later by official grave registrars, had worked to record the locations of temporary graves for future reburials. After the fighting, special burial detachments worked to recover the unburied dead for proper burial and to exhume the remains from temporary graves for proper reburial elsewhere. After the Armistice, the greatly expanded Imperial War Graves Commission carried out this task carefully, transporting the remains to newly established military cemeteries. The process involved tens of thousands of graves and took many years. It continues, on a smaller scale, as agricultural or construction work on the sites of former battlefields regularly leads to the exhumation of other human remains.