There some locations around the world that are able to move you to tears and among them are those places which acknowledge and commemorate those who gave their lives during the two world wars and other conflicts during the 20th century.

The American Cemetery in Normandy, France; the battlefields of the Gallipolli peninsula in Turkey; the watery gravesite of the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbour to name but a few.

I have been around the Western Front battlefields in Northern France, The Somme and the American Cemetery and they are incredible in their silent power – for every cross on a grave there was a life lost and when you stand and see the sheer number of crosses it is almost incomprehensible to take in.

One other place which really hits you in the solar plexus is the basement of the Red Cross headquarters in Geneva where the archives detail every single death in every single war since the Red Cross’s inception. You can walk around the room where the millions of little card indexes are housed behind glass – each card is a human being – each card old and yellowing. On many of those cards are not names of soldiers but merely details as so many were unidentified – but that is soon to change.

The archive holding the details of 20 million soldiers from 30 countries involved in WWI will soon be accessed for the first time since 1918 by historian Peter Barton.  Some of the records, in immaculate condition, refer to the sites of mass graves where the bodies of soldiers were piled alongside each other.

They give detailed directions about where they were dug – many have since been overgrown or built on – and include details which could lead to the identification of soldiers buried in them. ‘The emergence of this archive is hugely important,’ said Mr Barton. ‘It will change the way we look at World War One.

This archive has been hidden away – not deliberately – for 90 years, historians just did not know that this existed. Mr Barton, a First World War historian and author, stumbled across the records after being commissioned by the Australian government to find the identities of soldiers found at Pheasant Wood, Fromelles, France.  The trail led him to the Red Cross Museum in Geneva where he was given access to their basement. The records were passed to the Red Cross by the combatant countries at the end of the war.

The Red Cross acted as a go-between for the protagonists. Information was then copied and passed to the soldiers’ home countries but, according to Mr Barton, the UK’s copy of the data no longer exists, much of it having been destroyed in the Second World War. The same fate is believed to have befallen the records in France and Germany.

This new project will help to identify those whose families have spent the last 90 years wondering what happened to them; young men who went to war and disappeared into family folklore will now possibly be found…names can be printed on headstones at last.

They certainly deserve it.

Copyright © 2007-2012 Cultured Views. All rights reserved.