SOLDIERS' GRAVES.

Taranaki Daily News, 7 May 1920, Page 5

SOLDIERS' GRAVES.

ALL TO BE TREATED ALIKE. By Telegraph.— Press Association. London, March 5. In connection with the war graves deep feeling has been aroused all over the country, and expressed in the House of Commons, through the decision not to permit individual memorials, in many eloquent speeches- It was mentioned that there would be 4000 of these cemeteries and it would take ten years hefore the work of erecting uniform pattern tombstones was completed. The support of the House in this regard was largely won by a powerful speech by Mr. Burdett Coutts urging that there should not he left among the relatives any sense of differentiation in the treatment of the dead. The speaker said poor people were too generous "to begrudge individual memorials, but the House would act for the nation in mourning, co that the woman in the tenements should not be left with any sense of unequal treatment, although it might not be expressed- Her man had made the greatest sacrifice and died the same death for the same cause, so why should he not have the same beautiful monument. Finally Mr. Burdett Coutts won the House by urging that the wishes of dead officers, who would not have had a difference, imposed a, solemn mandate upon the country. He read a letter from Mr. Rudyard Kipling saying that the Kiplings had not any grave to go to as their boy was missing at Loos, where the battered ground gave not the slightest trace.