Si monumentum quaeris, circumspice

During the Great War, the British buried their dead near to where they died. Once the war was over, bereaved relatives began to make the difficult and harrowing journey to visit the graves. This book, published in 1925 by the Ypres League, served as a guide book for pilgrims visiting those who had died in the five great battles of the Ypres Salient.

Those who could afford to visit the cemeteries in the years following the war were few and far between. The compiler of the guide book, Lieut.Gen. Sir William Pulteney, was only too well aware of this and opened his account of the war cemeteries with the following words.

I write for those whose men, dead in battle, now rest there, where they gave their lives. I write for those who may never be able to go to France or Belgium. I have just seen the first finished cemetery, and it is the most perfect, the noblest, the most classically beautiful memorial that any loving heart or any proud nation could desire to their heroes fallen in a foreign land.
Your own man has a wonderful grave, the nation has a wonderful monument.
Picture this strangely stirring place. A lawn enclosed of close- clipped turf, banded across with line on line of flowers, and linked by these bands of flowers, uncrowded, at stately intervals, standing in soldierly ranks the white headstones. Every one is set apart in flowers, every one casts its shade upon a gracious space of green.
It is the simplest place, it is the grandest place I ever saw. It is filled with an atmosphere that leaves you very humble, that gives you wonderful thoughts.

The small ornament at the bottom of the photograph is a tie-pin in the fashion of a bayonet and inscribed, simply, Ypres. It was brought back as a memento by one of my relatives who did manage make that difficult journey to Flanders.

The location map shows the Tyne Cot Cemetery at Passchendaele near Ypres where 11,956 Commonwealth soldiers are buried or commemorated, 8,369 of the burials are unidentified. The names of a further 35,000 missing soldiers who died in the Ypres Salient after August 15 1917 and whose bodies were never found are inscribed on the boundary wall of the cemetery. The names of the missing 55,000 who died before that date are inscribed on the Menin Gate Memorial.