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Beauty and tragedy in global network of war graves

In this photo taken Oct. 28, 2009, gardeners rest among gravestones in a military cemetery in Pretoria, South Africa. Scattered through 150 countries and managed from a modest office building near London's Heathrow Airport; a global patchwork of graveyards constitutes a beautiful memorial to the ugliest carnage: the 1.7 million fighting men and women who died for Britain and its dominions in the world wars of the last century. (AP Photo/Denis Farrell)

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This Oct. 28, 2009 photo shows Hong Kong's Sai Wan War Cemetery where the World War II defenders of the then British colony are buried. It is part of a global patchwork of graveyards, carefully tended and managed from London, that constitutes a beautiful memorial to the ugliest carnage: the 1.7 million fighting men and women who died for Britain and its dominions in the world wars of the last century. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)

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This Oct. 29, 2009 photo shows graves at Bolsena War Cemetery near a World War II Italian battlefield. Six hundred British, South African, Australian and New Zealand soldiers are buried here, part of a worldwide patchwork of cemeteries and memorials to the men and women from Britain and its dominions who were killed in the world wars. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

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By MATTI FRIEDMAN, The Associated Press Updated 12:06 AM Monday, November 9, 2009

Scattered across 150 countries and managed from a modest office building near London's Heathrow Airport, a global patchwork of graveyards constitutes a beautiful memorial to the ugliest carnage: the 1.7 million fighting men and women who died for Britain and its dominions in the world wars of the lastcentury.

Most were buried where they fell, and their graves are still tended by dedicated groundskeepers even as the wartime generations dwindle and visitors to the cemeteries become rare.

The caretakers are men like Mohammed Odeh, a Palestinian who grew up with only the dead for neighbors, or Rosario Savarese, an Italian haunted by the one-legged veteran who couldn't bear to be far from his fallen comrades. And there's the Welsh graves official who lately is coping with 350 World War I tombstones damaged when war came to the Gaza Strip.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission, representing Britain and its former colonies, tends the graves of more than 935,000 identified servicemen and of 212,000 who have never been identified, as well as memorials to the almost 760,000 still listed as missing.

They are Britons, Irish, Australians, Africans, Canadians, New Zealanders, Indians and others, all from the swaths of the world that once were ruled from London.

On November 11, the day World War I ended and became known as Armistice Day, Veterans' Day or Remembrance Day, some of the cemeteries draw officials and other visitors. For the rest of the year they are largely left to their gardeners.

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"We would play," Mohammed Odeh says of his childhood, "but not in between the headstones."

The 42-year-old Palestinian looks after the graves of 2,500 Commonwealth servicemen on the slope of a Jerusalem hill. He grew up in a house in the cemetery that has since been converted into an office and toolshed, and inherited his job from his father. Outside the door are the rows of dead soldiers who have been there since the British seized Palestine from the Ottoman Turks in 1917, their feet pointing to the walled Old City of Jerusalem with its Muslim, Christian and Jewish holy places.

Before it conquered Jerusalem, the British-led army fought in Gaza where it left some 4,000 men in two cemeteries. Ninety-one winters later, Israeli forces attacked Hamas militants in Gaza, and Paul Price, the Welshman in charge of the cemetery for the war graves commission, says he phoned his Gazan gardeners and ordered them to find safety. He told them: "Don't end up like the people you're looking after."

A war graves commission manual spells out every detail for proper maintenance of the graves: Geraniums, roses and gray-green cineraria are permitted; headstones must be 81.3 centimeters (32 inches) high.

The Jerusalem cemetery is striking for its peace and the care that goes into its preservation. But the verses chosen by family members and inscribed on some of the gravestones remind a visitor what the site really represents — 2,500 tragedies.

A typical inscription for a British soldier, Lt. A. Francis Dickson, killed in 1918 at age 27: "All you had hoped for, all you had you gave."

By Matti Friedman, Jerusalem

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Other countries have similar debts to posterity. France maintains more than a million graves at home and in 64 other countries, and Germany has 1.2 million of its sons buried inside its borders and 2.3 million outside them. Of the 522,000 Americans killed in the world wars, 125,000 are buried abroad.

Many of the Commonwealth graveyards began as makeshift lots outside the chaos of a field hospital. They are clustered around the battlegrounds of Northern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Some of the cemeteries are vast. Others, especially in the French, Belgian and German countryside, are no more than a tiny enclosure in a farmer's field.

The graves are locally maintained and regularly inspected by war graves officials, said Ranald Leask, a spokesman for the commission.

Their spread attests to the vast geographical scope of the world wars — pilots who crashed in faraway countries, World War II secret agents captured, executed and buried in Albania, six British seamen from a torpedoed merchant ship whose bodies washed up in Ivory Coast. Even in late 2002, as the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq loomed, a war graves official flew into Baghdad on a routine inspection of the tombs of British servicemen killed there in World War I.

There were several reasons not to bring the dead home. Wartime shipping was scarce and threatened by enemy submarines. Refrigeration was rare. Besides, the graves commission points out a survey of British troops conducted during World War I which showed that most would rather be buried where they fought. Only in the 1950s did the military begin flying the dead home.

Nowadays, if you're looking for a relative lost fighting for a Commonwealth army in a world war, you would probably find him or her at www.cwgc.org.

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Black South Africans serving in the world wars were treated by whites as inferiors: barred from bearing arms, paid less and discouraged from moving up the ranks.

In death, the graves of whites and blacks receive the same meticulous care. And today, as survivors die and their children's children forget, the graves seem equally lonely.

At the end of a dirt track near the town of Springs, outside Johannesburg, lies the Palmietkuil cemetery, where 60 squat oak trees guard the graves of 217 members of the Native Military Corps, a black volunteer contingent in World War II.

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