The Queen's Royal Surrey Regiment and its forebears (in common with most of the British Army) served all around the world from the seventeenth century onwards, and the practice of erecting monuments to notable actions and memorials to the soldiers who died fighting in them, often at the sites of the actions, grew from those times onwards. In Britain, particularly from the time of the Napoleonic Wars onwards, memorials were placed in churches and chapels, and monuments in public places. Public war memorials became very much more widespread after the First World War, a process repeated after World War II. There are many thousands of War Graves, providing memorials to individual soldiers. From the First World War onwards, the majority of these are overseas in cemeteries established and maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, near the scenes of the fighting, but British churchyards and cemeteries contain a good number, generally singly or in small groups.