Tyne Cot

[poliphilo]

Tyne Cot is the largest war cemetery in the Ypres salient. Also the largest Commonwealth war cemetery anywhere in the world. Its name (though this is disputed) originates in a soldierly joke about a captured German blockhouse looking exactly like a cottage on the river Tyne- back home in Blighty. Just down the road is the village of Passchendaele- now called Passendale- which was stomped into rubble in 1917. 

It is remarkable how the land has healed. The battlefields are farming land again. The villages- rebuilt so you could drive through and never guess what happened here- are just villages.  This is a very sleepy place.

Comments

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

I've got a great uncle over there somewhere, Geordie Wheatley, who died on July 1st 1916 aged 22. He was a Northumberland Fusilier and might have recognised the Tyne Cot. No known grave.

[pondhopper.livejournal.com]

I can't help but think of the poem...

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row...

These are very moving photos.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

He'll be listed on the wall then- or possibly at the Menin Gate. No-one from the Great War is entirely without a memorial.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I was reading somewhere recently that the Great War was the first war in which ordinary soldiers were honoured with individual graves.

[sovay]

That last shot of the stones and the cypresses is very striking.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I love cypresses.

[shanghai7.livejournal.com]

The name comes from a map reference. It was mostly North east English troops there first. Tyne Cot is only for 1917 and after, all dead unknown from 1914-16 or 17 are Menin Gate.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

There's a photo in the cemetery's visitor's centre which shows the battered remains of the German blockhouse with "Tyne Cot" written on it in large letters.