War cemeteries

The dead were first buried where they fell. In December 1915 the Austro-Hungarian War Ministry set up a war graves department, whose Kraków branch in 1916–1918 exhumed and identified the dead of the fighting of 1914–1915, including Gorlice and Limanowa, and built more than 400 cemeteries in Western Galicia. In most of them soldiers of both sides lie side by side: Austrians, Hungarians, Germans, Poles, Czechs, Russians and others. Their designers included the Slovak Dušan Jurkovič, author of about 35 of them, Jan Szczepkowski, Hans Mayr and Heinrich Scholz.

In the west Fabian Ware, head of a British Red Cross unit, began recording graves in 1914, and in March 1915 his work became the army's Graves Registration Commission. On 21 May 1917 the Imperial War Graves Commission was established, today the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Following Frederic Kenyon's report of November 1918, bodies were not brought home, and all the dead, regardless of rank, received identical headstones.