Times and standards change. Today, western countries rarely if ever do battlefield burials; bodies are shipped back home to their families whenever they can b

Times and standards change. Today, western countries rarely if ever do battlefield burials; bodies are shipped back home to their families whenever they can be recovered. A hundred years ago, it was much more common to bury solders near where they died. Go back another hundred years, and it was common to see wounded soldiers executed with bayonets where they lay and left to rot, corpses were generally looted by locals and the bodies eventually pushed into unmarked mass graves. Henry Dunant witnessed this sort of thing in 1859 in the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino, and went on to found the Red Cross because of it. The modern premise of war cemeteries with individually marked graves was fairly novel during the mid 19th century when the the American Civil War was being fought. During the American Revolutionary War, bodies were scattered around the countryside, in (often unmarked) graves at whatever churchyard was closest. Most of these graves have been obliterated by the passage of time, like most other graves in old forgotten churchyards. That a hundred years ago these cemeteries weren't treated with the same reverence we expect today doesn't seem surprising. The way our culture treats dead soldiers has changed a great deal in a fairly short period of time. More on this subject: http://www.remembrancetrails-northernfrance.com/history/great-war-remembrance/the-history-of-military-graves-from-ancient-times-to-the-19th-century.html http://www.remembrancetrails-northernfrance.com/history/grea...