Just a small section of Tyne Cot Cemetery, with its multiple ranks of headstones standing testament to the horrific battles and suffering here. The sight of so many graves brings a realisation of what the First World War meant, and the scale it was fought on.
Tyne Cot Cemetery is the resting place of nearly 12,000 soldiers of the Commonwealth Forces who lost their lives in World War 1.... the largest number of graves of any Commonwealth cemetery, for either world war, in the world.
The name "Tyne Cot" is said to come from the Northumberland Fusiliers seeing a resemblance between the German concrete pill boxes, which still stand in the middle of the cemetery, and typical Tyneside cottages ... Tyne Cots. The cemetery was established around a captured German blockhouse or pill-box used as an advanced dressing station.
The stone wall surrounding the cemetery makes up the Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing. On completion of the Menin Gate memorial to the missing in Ypres, it was discovered to be too small to contain all the names as originally planned. A cut-off point of 15 August 1917 was chosen and the names of the UK missing after this date were inscribed on the Tyne Cot memorial wall instead. The memorial contains the names of 33,783 soldiers of the UK forces, plus a further 1,176 New Zealanders. New Zealand declined to have all its missing soldiers names listed on the main memorials, choosing instead to have names listed near the appropriate battles. However Tyne Cot was chosen as one of these locations.