The Commonwealth War Graves near Bayeux in Normandy, France. Photo / Supplied Expand

The Commonwealth War Graves near Bayeux in Normandy, France. Photo / Supplied

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 patchwork of graveyards make a beautiful memorial to the ugly carnage of war.

The graveyards are the last resting places of 1.7 million fighting men and women who died for Britain and its dominions in the world wars of 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 neighbours, or Rosario Savarese, an Italian haunted by the one-legged veteran who could not bear to be far from his fallen comrades.

And there is the Welsh graves official who is coping with 350 World War I tombstones damaged when war came to the Gaza Strip.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission, representing Britain and its former colonies, tends the graves of more than 935,000 identified servicemen and 212,000 who have never been identified, as well as memorials to the almost 760,000 still listed as missing.

They are Britons, Irish, New Zealanders, Australians, Africans, Canadians, Indians and others, all from lands once ruled from London.

On November 11, the day World War I ended, which became known as Armistice Day, Veterans' Day or Remembrance Day, some of the cemeteries draw officials and other visitors. For the rest of the year they are largely left to their gardeners.

Other countries have similar debts to posterity. France maintains more than a million graves at home and in 64 other countries, and Germany has 1.2 million of its sons buried inside its borders and 2.3 million outside them. Of the 522,000 Americans killed in the world wars, 125,000 are buried abroad.

Many of the Commonwealth graveyards began as makeshift lots outside field hospitals. They are clustered around the battlegrounds of Northern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Some of the cemeteries are vast. Others, especially in the French, Belgian and German countryside, no more than a tiny enclosure in a farmer's field.

The graves are locally maintained and regularly inspected by war graves officials, says commission spokesman Ranald Leask.

Their spread attests to the vast geographical scope of the world wars - pilots who crashed in faraway countries, World War II secret agents captured, executed and buried in Albania, six British seamen from a torpedoed merchant ship whose bodies washed up on the Ivory Coast.