There is an immense and growing literature on every aspect of the First World War and a very distinguished one on the subject of commemoration and remembrance addressed here. The first debt of anyone writing about the Imperial War Graves Commission will always be to its original historian Philip Longworth, but I hope that the most cursory glance at the bibliography and endnotes of this book will show how much it owes to the writers who have shaped the way we see our military cemeteries and memorials. Nobody, for instance, should visit Lutyens’s great memorial at Thiepval without taking along Gavin Stamp’s brilliant The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme.
I would like to thank all those friends and family who were prepared to talk about this book, read it in manuscript, provide photographs and visit the cemeteries with me, and in particular the Schröck family for their kindness and hospitality while I was looking at German war graves in Pforzheim. My thanks, too, to the Canadian volunteers at Vimy Ridge and the Newfoundland Memorial and Park at Beaumont-Hamel, who could not have been more helpful, and to Susanna Kerr for allowing me to quote from unpublished family material. I am grateful to everyone at William Collins who has worked on this book, but especially to Arabella Pike and Essie Cousins who suggested it in the first place, and to Kate Tolley. I have been greatly helped by the sympathetic and perceptive editing of Kate Johnson. My thanks, also, to Derek Johns.
Above all, this book would not have been possible without the kindness, patience and expertise of Roy Hemington at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission at Maidenhead. The Commission holds a vast archive covering the foundation and history of the Imperial War Graves Commission, and I could not even have begun to negotiate it without his help in answering my endless questions. I am very grateful to him and to the Commission for allowing me unstinted access to their archive, and to Peter Francis for his generous help in the latter stages of the book. I would also like to thank the Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford, for kind permission to quote from the papers of Viscount Milner. This book, as always, is for Honor.