WW100 AFTERMATH

2 1914 The task of recording and remembering the dead began as early as 1914, when Major General Sir Fabian Ware, having been rejected by the British Army due to his age (he was 45 at the time), was put in command of a mobile ambulance unit provided by the British Red Cross Society. Ware was both struck and concerned by the fact that soldiers in their thousands were being buried by their comrades, in individual and mass graves along the Western Front, under markers which would not last and with no official record of the locations. Aware that marking, or registering, a grave is the first act of Remembrance – as well as a mark of honour and of huge psychological importance for relatives – Ware and his unit began recording and caring for all the graves they could find. A British Red Cross Society mobile ambulance.