During the First World War, Margaret Holden joined the "Friends' Emergency Committee for the Assistance of Germans, Austrians and Hungarians in distress" which helped refugees of those countries stranded in London by the conflict. Charles Holden served with the Red Cross's London Ambulance Column as a stretcher-bearer transferring wounded troops from London's stations to its hospitals. Holden also served on the fire watch at St Paul's Cathedral between 1915 and 1917.
On 3 October 1917, Holden was appointed a temporary lieutenant with the army's Directorate of Graves Registration and Enquiries. He travelled to the Western Front for the first time later that month and began planning new cemeteries and expanding existing ones.
Charles described what he saw: “The country is one vast wilderness, blasted out of recognition where once villages & orchards & fertile land, now tossed about & churned in hopeless disorder with never a landmark as far as the eye can reach & dotted about in the scrub and untidiness of it all are to be seen here & there singly & in groups little white crosses marking the place where men have fallen and been buried.”
In September 1918, Charles transferred to the Imperial War Graves Commission (now called the Commonwealth War Graves Commission) with the rank of Major. From 1918 until 1928 he worked on 69 Commission cemeteries, initially, managing the drawing office and working as the senior design architect under the three principal architects in France and Belgium - Edwin Lutyens, Reginald Blomfield and Herbert Baker
In 1920, he was promoted to be the fourth principal architect. His work for the Commission included memorials to the New Zealand missing dead at Messines Ridge British Cemetery, and the Buttes New British Cemetery at Zonnebeke.
In 1922, Holden designed the War Memorial Gateway for Clifton College, Bristol, using a combination of limestone and gritstone to match the Gothic style of the school's buildings.
Portrait of Charles Holden by his friend the artist Francis Edgar Dodd.
