Many Australians have visited war cemeteries all over the world: ranks of white gravestones telling a striking story of scale and loss.

These places are central to our national history through annual ceremonies at Villers-Bretonneux, at Gallipoli and elsewhere.

But few know the story of how those cemeteries came to be - the story of Fabian Ware, a reserved, middle-aged British officer who looked out of his Red Cross ambulance on the Western Front a hundred years ago and had an idea.

Ware was a "product of Victorian England", a firm believer in Empire and Britain's colonial might, says Andrew Fetherston, archivist at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which Ware founded in 1917.

In the early 1900s he was in South Africa in the aftermath of the Boer War, working to set up new schools.

Fetherston speculates that Ware saw the lack of commemoration of the victims of the recent war and it played on his mind over the next decade.

Ware came back to Britain to edit the Morning Post newspaper, then when the Great War began he volunteered to command a Red Cross mobile unit on the Western Front.

Their primary role was to ferry wounded men back from the frontline to dressing stations and hospitals, Fetherston says.

Each day they would drive past more and more makeshift graves and improvised cemeteries, as the death toll from the grinding, industrial conflict mounted.

Ware worried this was a disservice to the dead - and to their families.

"He thinks, someone needs to record this information," Fetherston said. "We don't want a situation like that 10, 15 years earlier, where there were just unmarked graves in the South African veldt where no one knows where they are."

Ware asked his men to start recording the location of graves and the identity of those buried there. Other Red Cross units joined in the work.

Fetherston says Ware went about his task determinedly, with an English stiff upper lip hiding his feelings. In his field notes "there's no great sense of despair, it's very much 'this is what needs to be done and I'm going to go and do it'."

In 1915 he started thinking about the next step.

"He knows it's not enough to record the information, there's something that has to be done once the war ends," Fetherston said. "He doesn't want it to be how it was in previous conflicts, (when it was) just the officers remembered and everyone else forgotten."

Ware also was determined that it must be a Commonwealth remembrance, a reflection of the sacrifices of every country around the world.

So he recruited his influential political, military and government contacts. In May 1917 Britain created what is now known as the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, charged with registering graves and planning cemeteries and memorials to be built after the war.

"In Ware's original vision these places are meant to be visited, where the relatives of the deceased could go and know their loved ones are being looked after," Fetherston says. "But Ware relatively quickly realised they do play a wider purpose. He wrote that these cemeteries should serve as a reminder that we shouldn't rush into conflict.

"He wasn't a pacifist in any way but he saw the cemeteries as a way people could remember what the cost of war was, what the failure of diplomacy was."

Ware was active in the CWGC as its vice-chairman for the rest of his working life, until after World War II, as it planned and built war cemeteries across the world (and became possibly the biggest gardening organisation on the planet).

Victoria Wallace is the current head of the CWGC. She says they want to use the centenary of the war and the CWGC to ensure that the next generation can commemorate the 1.7 million people buried in CWGC cemeteries around the world.

The architectural legacy of the cemeteries is part of their importance, Wallace says. On top of that is the impact of the individual names and headstones that inspire curiosity and awe.

"It is the human cost of war that is shown - the names, the epitaphs and the ages that break your heart," says Wallace. "It gives the dead a personality beyond being among the ranks of the fallen.

"It's not part of our official remit to pursue peace, but you'd have to be a very strange person to go to the battlefields and not draw the most extreme lesson about the human cost, the loss and sacrifice, the scale of what took place on those terrible battlefields. You'd have to have a heart of stone not to come away thinking 'this should not happen again'."

The CWGC looks after the records of the dead, as well as the cemeteries. Along with places such as the Australian War Memorial and the Imperial War Museum, the CWGC is keen to use digital technology to allow people to share information about the war dead.

It is developing a new website that will gather new stories and pictures of the dead, crowdsourced from the soldiers' families - and it will showcase some of the war cemeteries that are practically inaccessible, such as Basra in Iraq. They also have pilot mobile app projects on the way.

However the cemeteries will remain a haven for remembrance, Wallace says.

"We've just done some very interesting visitor research ??? in cemeteries people want to be contemplative.

"They want to know where they can get information before or after their visit. But when they're in the cemeteries themselves, they want it to be an emotional experience. They want to put their heads up, not down to a screen. They want to look around and to think."

An exhibition on the history of the Commission opens in May in Brookwood, Surrey, in Britain, and is expected to tour to Australia later in the year.