Commemoration begins for the commonwealth and its allies

Abstract

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission's interest in the peninsula was largely concentrated in the areas where the Allied graves were located and attention was paid to completing infrastructure projects such as roads, small railways, nurseries, and wells, all which were needed to facilitate the building and landscape work for the many commemorative projects envisioned for the former battlefields. Compared to the Gallipoli battlefields, war on the Western Front had stretched out for longer, and the number of casualties was far higher. The British government, therefore, had decided within the first months of the war that the state should take over the responsibility for the burial and commemoration of its war dead. Once the standards and guidelines for memorializing the war dead were decided, headstones of uniform design and dimensions were created for Gallipoli, as they were throughout the cemeteries of Europe.