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Article: Beauty and tragedy in global network of war graves
- Article from:
- AP Online
- Article date:
- November 8, 2009
- Author:
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It is the British empire of the dead.
Scattered across 150 countries and managed from a modest office building near London's Heathrow Airport, a global patchwork of graveyards constitutes a beautiful memorial to the ugliest carnage: the 1.7 million fighting men and women who died for Britain and its dominions in the world wars of the last century.
Most were buried where they fell, and their graves are still tended by dedicated groundskeepers even as the wartime generations dwindle and visitors to the cemeteries become rare.
The caretakers are men like Mohammed Odeh, a Palestinian who grew up with only the dead for neighbors, or Rosario Savarese, an Italian haunted by the ...