Ypres: Tyne Cot

They are many soldier cemeteries in Flanders around Ypres. Tyne Cot is the largest Commonwealth Cemetery in the world, containing 11,896 burials to date. Of these,8,369 are unidentified. There is also memorial listing 35,000 more soldiers missing in action; Menin Gate was not large enough to hold the names of all the missing, so a second monument was errected here to accomodate the extra names.

Entrance to Tyne Cot Cemetery, Zonnebeke, Belgium

 

 As the majority of remains are unidentified, most headstones are like this.


Some bear the nationality or regiment of the soldier (where this could be established from personal effects, uniforms etc.)


Very few have names.

A new visitor centre has recently opened at Tyne Cot (largely funded by the Australian Government).

There is a small display containing letters, documents and artifacts that were found in the fields around Tyne Cot. A recorded voice can be heard as you walk toward the visitor centre; it reads out the name and age of all the dead.  

There are many other museums, displays and visitor centres throughout the area. Interstingly, most of them discuss the war from both the allied and German points of view. They are all very anti war, but generally not preachy - they don't need to be, the material speaks for itself.

The "In Flanders Field Museum" in Ypres presents the war from the point of view of the everyday life of soldiers. Certainly worth a visit, but harrowing. We didn't go down further down the road to the Passchedaele Museum, though.

There wasn't really anything left to be said.