"Maintenance of the headstones." Top 5 Page for this destination War Memorials/Military Cemeteries Tip by breughel

Favorite thing: The Commonwealth War Graves Commission maintains over a million war graves as well as hundreds of memorials honouring the 750,000 war dead who have no known grave.
An important task of the CWGC is to keep the inscriptions on headstones and memorials legible. The commission has set criteria for the legibility: the inscriptions should be legible at a distance from two paces; if not the inscriptions are re-engraved without moving the headstone.
The process starts by sanding down the entire headstone followed by the re-engraving of the inscription by hand, using a drill, powered by compressed air. To finish, a fine sanding machine is used to smooth down the whole headstone. It is not an easy work as you can see from my photos taken at the cemetery of Etaples in the North of France.
The position of the CWGC is the following: "we believe that an eroded inscription is a brave man or woman forgotten and that is unacceptable."