Tyne Cot Cemetery

This is the largest Commonwealth War Graves Commission

cemetery in the world. It is the final resting place of nearly

12,000 Commonwealth servicemen, more than 8,300 of whom

remain unidentified, and of four German soldiers. Those buried

here died from the earliest fighting around Ypres

in October

1914 to the final weeks of the war on the Western

Front

in 1918, but the majority fell during the Third Battle of

Ypres

in 1917.

Around the eastern boundary of the cemetery stands the Tyne

Cot Memorial. It bears the names of some 35,000 officers and

men of the forces of the United Kingdom and New Zealand,

nearly all of whom died between 16 August 1917 and the

Armistice. They are known as the missing: men whose bodies

were never recovered; whose graves had been unrecorded, lost

or destroyed by battle; or whose remains could not be identified

and who lie beneath a headstone bearing the inscription ‘Known

Unto God.’

Sir Herbert Baker, one of the Commission’s principal architects,

designed both the cemetery and the memorial, with sculptures

by Joseph Armitage and F.V. Blundstone. The memorial was

created to supplement the Menin Gate in Ieper, which was found

to have insufficient space to record the names of all the missing

of the Salient. Of the 205,000 Commonwealth servicemen of the

First World War commemorated in Belgium, more than 100,000

have no known grave

 

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