John Batey is wrong to say “The British army buries its dead in separate sections of ‘officers and men’” (Letters, 23 April). Early in the formation of the then Imperial War Graves Commission, Fabian Ware, founder of the commission, stated that “no distinction should be made between officers and men lying in the same cemeteries in the form or nature of the memorials”.
In January 1918, the commission said the “governing consideration” in its decision on the uniformity of military graves was that “those who have given their lives are members of one family … and that, in death, all, from General to Private, of whatever race or creed, should receive equal honour under a memorial which should be the common symbol of their comradeship and of the cause for which they died”.
Trevor Lindley
Weymouth, Dorset
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