Sticpewich, Babb and Simpson, whose stories formed the basis of chapter 2, made their respective journeys in the immediate aftermath of the war. The first major pilgrimage to a POW site in South-East Asia did not take place until a decade later, and as late as 1967 a cemetery on Ambon was still incomplete. This is in contrast to the surge of commemorative work that followed the Great War. Throughout the 1920s more than a thousand cemeteries were established across the Western Front alone, a mammoth building task Kipling likened to the pyramids of Egypt. All told, these cities of the dead contained the bodies of more than a million men. The Australian military casualties of World War II were half those of World War I, the fields in which they were buried had not been ravaged by four years of largely static carnage, and there were far fewer ‘missing’ men.