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Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows a war cemetery somewhere in France, where many Australian soldiers who died in the First World War are buried, and refers to the work of the War Graves Commission, which maintains 1,000 cemeteries in France and Belgium. It includes a black-and-white archival photograph of two soldiers in the War surveying a burial ground with rows of white wooden crosses, and footage of stonemasons restoring the gravestones of fallen soldiers. The camera pans across the stonemasons’ engraving plates (inscriptions), which the narrator describes as a 'library of grief’.

Educational value points

• In Australia in 1914, matters of foreign affairs and declarations of war and peace were within the exclusive province of the British Imperial Government. Therefore, Australia entered the First World War after Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914 following German aggression against Belgium and France. Australian Prime Minister Andrew Fisher pledged that Australia would support Britain 'to the last man and the last shilling’. For many Australians the War was seen as a means for the fledgling nation to prove itself, but also to demonstrate an ongoing allegiance to Britain. Public support for Australia’s involvement in the War remained high until casualties began to mount.

• Australian troops served in the main theatre of war, the Western Front, in France and Belgium where they engaged in protracted trench warfare and suffered high casualties between March 1916 and Germany’s surrender in November 1918. The Western Front was the name given by the Germans to a continuous line of trenches that ran for about 700 km from the English Channel to the Swiss–German border. Five Australian Imperial Force (AIF) divisions, each of 20,000 men, served on the Front. In November 1917 the divisions became a single Australian Corps.

• The First World War remains Australia’s most costly conflict in terms of deaths and casualties. Enlistment to fight overseas was voluntary and from a population of less than 5 million, about 330,000 Australian men enlisted. Of these 60,000 were killed, 46,000 on the Western Front, where an additional 130,000 were wounded or exposed to poisonous mustard gas. At the Western Front battlefield of Pozières alone, Australia suffered 23,000 casualties in a period of less than 7 weeks. It is estimated that during the War a total of 9 million servicepeople and 6 million civilians from all sides of the conflict were killed, and that as many as one-third of them have no known grave.

• The Imperial War Graves Commission was set up in 1917 to identify and mark war graves, to make records of war dead and to establish cemeteries and memorials to soldiers who died in the First World War. Now called the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, it maintains the graves and memorials of almost 1.7 million Commonwealth servicemen and -women who died in both world wars; 212,000 of these war dead are unidentified. The Commission cares for 2,500 cemeteries throughout the world, including 1,000 on the Western Front.

• The Commonwealth War Graves Commission maintains war cemeteries so that future generations will remember the sacrifice made by the millions who died in the First and Second World Wars. Today, the remains of soldiers killed overseas are brought home, but during the First World War the cost and time involved and the huge numbers who died made the repatriation of remains impossible. The Commission also felt that war graves on the Western Front should remain as a symbol of the feeling of brotherhood that developed between those who served there. Soldiers’ remains are sometimes still found on former battlefields and are buried in war cemeteries. Because it was not possible to identify all the remains most war cemeteries include a 'tomb of the unknown soldier’.

• The sacrifices made by Australian soldiers on the Western Front created a bond between France and Australia that in France is acknowledged each year in special Anzac Day ceremonies. Australian soldiers gained a reputation among the French population for their courage and tenacity. Their liberation of the village of Villers-Bretonneux in 1918, for example, is seen as among the most impressive actions of the War, and today the village school has a plaque that honours Australian soldiers and celebrates the special bond their actions forged between the two nations.

This clip starts approximately 29 minutes into the documentary.

Footage includes a black-and-white archival photograph of two soldiers in the War surveying a burial ground with rows of white wooden crosses, and modern-day stonemasons restoring the gravestones of fallen soldiers.

Narrator Even now, still more bodies are being found. The War Graves Commission is responsible for more than 1,000 cemeteries along the Western Front. Every six years each gravestone is inspected and then repaired or renamed. The words on these engraving plates seem to have an innocent quality. They are, in fact, ‘library of grief’. The people who knew these men are, themselves, fading away.