London, July 15 (DPA) The sight of uniformed British soldiers sobbing with grief over the loss of comrades in Afghanistan has brought home to Britons the heavy human price they are paying for the government's military involvement in a far-away country.

The small town of Wootton Bassett, in the southern county of Wiltshire, has come to symbolise the growing public shock over the rising death toll in the conflict. Almost every week, soldiers and local residents line its streets to salute the rows of black hearses filing past, carrying the coffins of the war dead draped in Union Jacks.

It is a role Wootton Bassett has inherited by accident, not by choice. The town of 11,000 simply lies on the route between RAF Lyneham, the air force base where the bodies arrive, and the hospital where the post-mortem examinations take place.

Last week, when the death toll accelerated to surpass the total number of British victims in the Iraq war, the mourning crowds grew larger than ever.They paid their respects to the five hearses which passed; this week there will be eight.

Even as the coffins of those who fell in Helmand province were paraded through the town, mobile phone text messages related that more soldiers had died.

'In a sense this was not planned, it just happened,' said the town's vicar. 'Once the bells start to toll, hundreds, if not thousands, gather and the silence is almost deafening.'

'We feel we've got to do this. We should not be out there in Afghanistan, but what can we do?' asked Shirley Smith, one of the residents along the route.

Mayor Steve Bucknell says the repatriation route has passed through Wootton Bassett for geographical reasons for the past eight years, but the crowds have never been as large and as solemn as this. Flowers are now regularly left at the memorial for the dead of World War II to remember the victims of Britain's modern-day conflicts.

But as the government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown defends its Afghan strategy, insisting that the defeat of the Taliban is vital to keep terrorism 'off the streets of Britain', the people are beginning to question Britain's role in the conflict and, above all, the absence of a clear 'exit strategy'.

'It's tough going and it's tough going because the Taliban have rightly identified Helmand as their vital ground. If they lose there then they lose everywhere and they are throwing everything into it,' said Jock Stirrup, Britain's chief of defence staff.