Plans for commemorating the victims of the First World War were already being drawn up during the conflict. The British government signed agreements with its French and Belgian counterparts (in 1915 and 1917 respectively) that granted to Britain 'in perpetuity' land on which British war graves and cemeteries were located. On 21 May 1917, the Imperial War Graves Commission was created by Royal Charter to create, mark and maintain the graves and cemeteries of every British empire servicemen who died in the war.

However, the process of commemoration did not begin in earnest until the conflict was over. Since 1918, this cult of remembrance has profoundly influenced modern perceptions of the First World War.

War memorials

British Legion

Cenotaph

Unknown Soldier

Among Britain's allies, Belgium and France led the way in establishing memorial sites. In July 1927, the Menin Gate at Ypres in Belgium was opened to the public as a 'Memorial for the Missing' from the battles fought there. France unveiled monuments at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre in 1928 (for those killed in the retreat from the Marne in September 1914) and at Verdun (the Ossuary of Douaumont) four years later. It also permitted former allies to construct their own sites of commemoration such as the giant Canadian war memorial at Vimy Ridge.

For the defeated Central Powers, commemorative sites were equally important. Aside from providing a focus for collective grief and remembrance, they were also intended to remind the world that the First World War had been fought honourably and with moral purpose on both sides. As Hindenburg remarked at the unveiling of the Tannenberg memorial in 1927, 'with clean hands we marched... with clean hands we fought'.

Gestures of regret or reconciliation were uncommon, as both sides continued to invoke a pious rhetoric of 'sacrifice' and 'duty' to justify their reasons for fighting in the first place. Turkey's decision to permanently open the Gallipoli peninsula to visitors from former enemy states was a rare exception.

In the first decade after the end of the First World War, people generally remembered the conflict and its victims in private circles. Widespread public discussion about the war did not begin until the late 1920s, when Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, a bleak portrayal of the life and death of a group of German soldiers, became a world-wide bestseller and, subsequently, a popular Hollywood film.

Remarque's novel confirmed the arrival of a genre that represented the First World War as a futile, bloody slaughter whose only heroes were the ordinary soldiers cast into its midst. Although such 'mud and blood literature' has deeply influenced modern perceptions of the First World War, it aroused great opposition during the 1930s among veterans' associations and the relatives of individuals killed in the conflict.

In the aftermath of the horrors of the Second World War, genocide and the nuclear bomb temporarily relegated the First World War and its more primitive weapons of destruction to the shadows. Since the 1960s, however, its defining role in shaping the 20th century has been almost universally re-established.

Tourist trips to the battlefields of the Western Front have become hugely popular. First World War poetry has become a fixed part of the English curriculum in British secondary schools. Memorials to the victims of the war are still being visited and even newly constructed - such as the rows of pinewood stakes and commemorative statue (unveiled in June 2001) in honour of Allied soldiers shot for desertion between 1914 and 1918 at the National Memorial Arboretum near Lichfield in Staffordshire.

At the beginning of the 21st century, only a small number of Great War veterans are still alive, and the conflict will soon slip beyond eyewitness recollections. However, public interest in it continues to grow. Preserving and displaying the sources that tell its story helps to ensure that the war and its millions of victims will remain unforgotten.