Among official guests at this gathering was Sir Fabian Ware, vice-chairman and in effect director of the Imperial War Graves Commission, an organisation which, in Bart Ziino’s words, had secured a mandate to act for the bereaved of the empire. The Commission had undertaken two huge projects on behalf of the bereaved: first, to bury their sons, husbands, fathers and lovers in monumental war cemeteries; second, to commemorate in massive memorials those men who had no known grave. At Lone Pine in Gallipoli, at Villers­Bretonneux on the Somme, at the Menin Gate outside Ypres or leper, Ware’s Commission raised memorials to those Australian dead whose bodies were never recovered or identified. In a term that inspired anguish but also, as Bart shows, an almost always forlorn hope, they were ‘the missing’. The structure at Villers-Bretonneux had yet to be built when the Shrine was inaugurated. It would complete the Commission’s mighty task.

The ceremony at the Shrine was deeply gratifying to Ware. He rightly counted the event a grand imperial occasion. Ware saw himself as a servant of the whole British Empire, that empire on which, as imperial patriots boasted, the sun never set. Now the sun would never set on the empire’s war dead. Ziino has a telling quotation from Ware’s Commission: ‘A chain of graves of nearly one million and twenty thousand men encircles the earth.’ Another great war would lengthen and thicken that chain, and the Commission would change its name from Imperial to Commonwealth.

Ware had particular cause to contemplate with satisfaction the Shrine’s Rock of Remembrance, and to be relieved that it was not the tomb of an Unknown Soldier. Many people to this day, including historians, believe that it is the tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier. The mistake is significant. It expresses a feeling about what the object in the pavement of the Sanctuary should be. But in the vision of Ware and other custodians of wartime memory, there could be only one Unknown Soldier. The body buried in Westminster Abbey on 11 November 1920 had to represent the whole empire. That view was to prevail until the empire itself had become history. In 1993 the Australian War Memorial in Canberra became, without controversy, the last resting place of a body dug up from a war cemetery on the Somme and consecrated as the Unknown Australian Soldier. I hadn’t known, until I read this book, how persistently, over how many years, some people had pleaded for an Australian. I was not aware of calls for an unknown Australian soldier – or two, one from Gallipoli and one from Flanders – to be entombed in the Shrine of Remembrance.

This controversy is central to Ziino’s book. An unknown soldier, wrote one bereaved mother of a man listed among the Missing, ‘may be my own son who is laid there’. The relatives of the missing, she went on, ‘would be able to pay homage at the resting place of Victoria’s glorious dead who, for aught they know, may actually be their own dear loved ones’. ‘In the two decades after the war,’ Ziino observes, ‘the urge to return a body was a popular sentiment that sought to close the distance between mourners and graves.’ That sentence embodies two of the book’s themes: the discontent of grieving kinsfolk with imperial arrangements for war graves, and the role of those arrangements in enhancing what Geoffrey Blainey has so unforgettably called ‘the tyranny of distance’. This book could almost be subtitled ‘the cruelty of distance’.

‘The bodies of the dead,’ Ziino writes, ‘while remaining the recognised focus of private grief, were prescribed a role in the creation of an imperial memorial.’ No relatives were allowed to bring bodies home, or to make graves of their own on or near battlefields. All identifiable bodies were buried in cemeteries containing a Stone of Remembrance and a Cross of Sacrifice, under uniform headstones, placed, as if on parade, in straight rows, with tightly controlled inscriptions. The Commission saw no contradiction in making dead soldiers into monuments. Others did see a contradiction, or at least a serious tension. Ziino quotes a Canadian critic: ‘I consider the relatives do not come first with the Commission.’

They were granted small concessions. They could, if they wished, nominate a religious emblem; most, but not all, chose a cross. In 1922 the Commission yielded to pleas that a man’s age be included on his headstone – a gesture which helped to make the graves more meaningful to a future generation of pilgrims. These days, young backpackers at Gallipoli marvel to see how many of the men buried there were about the same age as themselves. The Commission also allowed bereaved kin an inscription of up to sixty-six letters, including spaces, at the base of the headstone, if they could afford to pay for it. The words they composed or borrowed give us poignant glimpses of private grief.

Until lately, most scholars who have written about the memory of that war, myself included, have had more to say about public mourning than about private expressions of grief. Ziino gives scrupulous acknowledgement to earlier writers, including recent ones – Joy Damousi, Bruce Scates, Pat Jalland – who have begun to recover private grief. What makes his book distinctive, and powerful, is his energetic and skilful use of manuscript and published sources to connect the public story of the War Graves Commission with the private stories of grief.

The book is orderly in structure. You always know where you are, beginning with how the newly bereaved attempted to engage with the death and burial of loved ones, and ending with pilgrimages to the cemeteries.

In texture, A Distant Grief reminds me of Bill Gammage’s classic The Broken Years (1974). Both authors are good at weaving the subjects’ words with their own. Ziino on early pilgrimages: ‘YMCA workers conducted funeral services over graves where desired, yet most pilgrims chose less formal ways of marking their visit. One Australian visitor was observed sending out ‘a message to the dead’. It was a simple ‘Cooee’, and over the plains of Australia’s dead came back the answering echo.’

The book ends, as it begins, with the tyranny of distance. Though thousands of us can now undertake pilgrimages to fields of battle, Ziino reflects, ‘distance remains important to Australians’ relationships to the Great War. While it has contracted physically, distance has lengthened chronologically ... Its tyranny ... is no longer the inability to visit graves, but its drawing away from Australians the living links to the past and a past memory of the war. The graves and memorials of 1914–18 are no longer the imagined sites of a distant grief, but the very real sites at which Australians encounter their own memory of a distant tragedy.’ That is the last sentence of the book, and it contributes to a vigorous debate among scholars all over the world about memory and history.

The publishers have done a handsome job, allowing the author plenty of well-chosen illustrations, including a striking one on the cover: a forest of plain wooden crosses in a field, and in the front a Celtic cross with a small replica of the AIF’s emblem: ‘In loving memory of Sergeant E.W. Bates, died of wounds on 7 August 1916, erected by his loving brother. RIP.’ The date and unit show that Sergeant Bates had been mortally wounded some days earlier, at Pozieres, on the Somme. His eventual grave in the Comissions cemetry beside that village obliterated would be inscribed more impersonally. I tried to find Sergeant Bates on the website recently set up by the National Archives, which gives online access to the service files of every Australian who served in World War I. I couldn’t get through. Server Too Busy, I was told. I wonder what that shows about the potential audience for this book