According to Empires of the Dead, an early Cenotaph Armistice Day service commentator described them thus:
''Imagine them moving in one long continuous column, four abreast. As the lead of that column reaches the Cenotaph (London), the last four men would be at Durham. It would take these million men 84 hours (3.5 days) to march past the Cenotaph.''
(Durham is in the north of England 457km from London).
Of the million or so dead, many thousands were unidentified or undiscovered as the maelstrom of war passed back and forth over the battlefields. The dead and missing were of every nationality, colour, creed and culture, each with a personal tradition of burial. Because of this, and with so many to appease around the world, the logistics of planning some sort of remembrance for the war dead was daunting, to say the least.
A man now largely forgotten, Fabian Ware, had the singular foresight, vision and will to take on the task and found what is today's Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC).
In Mr Ware's biography, Empires of the Dead, David Crane explores the herculean task Mr Ware undertook and the organisation that is at the very heart of ongoing remembrance of the war dead.
Mr Crane, with a brother in the Ghurkhas, a father in the Paras and a grandfather in the Cheshires, has lived with this history and that of the British army. In an interview with the CWGC, he remembers how, as a child growing up in Aldershot in the 1950s, he watched each Armistice Sunday the dwindling number of ''Old Contemptibles'' parade to the Garrison Church.
Mr Crane said he found the story of Mr Ware and the founding of the Imperial War Graves Commission an astonishing example of an individual's ability to shape events.
In his book, Mr Crane details how Mr Ware, in five years and facing huge resistance and difficulties, created today's organisation and the 23,000 cemeteries worldwide. All from a Western Front mobile ambulance unit.
Empires of the Dead is, as Mr Crane says, a book that needed writing to remind us where the idea for memorials came from, of the battles that had to be fought before the idea could be realised, and to remind us of the man who was responsible for the cemeteries and memorials we all take for granted.
''I have many times asked myself whether there can be more potent advocates of peace on Earth than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to the desolation of war.''
- King George V, Terlincthun Cemetery, Tour of Western Front, 1922.
• Ted Fox is a Dunedin online marketing consultant.
