Description:
Military cemeteries are for many people, the most sacred and meaningful of the memorials built for the Great War (1914-1918). The cemeteries built by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) were located on the battlefields and as far as possible, the dead were buried close to where they fell. It is well known that despite their uniformity, each cemetery has its own story, and can be read as text, according to location, the date it was established and used and the nature of the battles in which the soldiers fought. This paper reports the results of an analysis of notations made by visitors in the visitor books at 66 CWGC cemeteries in France and Belgium. The study focused on the relationships between nationality and specific cemeteries. Some national visitation can be linked to specific battles while other sites appear to attract visitors for a range of other reasons. The results help to provide a picture of visitation patterns which represent the contemporary relationships between visitors and individual cemeteries.