Critically acclaimed author David Crane gives a profoundly moving account of the creation of the great citadels to the dead, which involved leading figures of the day, including Rudyard Kipling. As reports of their work became public, the Commission was flooded with letters from grieving relatives around the world. His work was officially recognised, with a Graves Registration Commission being set up. Horrified by the hasty burials, he recorded the identity and position of the graves. In 1914, Fabian Ware joined the Red Cross, working on the frontline in France.

The great cemeteries of WWI came about as a result of the efforts of one inspired visionary. Soldiers were often unceremoniously dumped in a mass grave officers shipped home for burial. Before WWI, little provision was made for the burial of the war dead. The extraordinary and forgotten story of the building of the World War One cemeteries, due to the efforts of one remarkable man, Fabian Ware. Of course, to give proper context the story is not confined to that hour alone, nor is the time always particularly relevant.Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction. The book is broken up into twenty-four main chapters, each one representing an hour of the day of battle. His declared intention is to explore ‘the intersection of the private and public spheres’ and the ‘ways in which individuals are touched by remote events, and how much – or how little – of what we usually think of as mainstream history actually impinged on the lives of ordinary men and women who witnessed Waterloo’. He tries to do something similar with Went the Day Well?, shifting the narrative from the battlefield to Britain and back again and working in a huge cast of disparate characters in contrasting settings. His Empires of the Dead, an account of the creation of the War Graves Commission, was described by one reviewer as the ‘most original, shortest and best written of the year’s tsunami of books on the impact of the Great War’ and was deservedly shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. Now that the initial deluge of books commemorating the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo has slowed to a trickle, it is refreshing to see the publication of two histories that observe 18 June 1815 from a much broader cultural perspective.ĭavid Crane has form with this type of approach.

Empires of the Dead by David Crane