Tyne Cot Cemetery - Belgium

 Pretty but so sad. 

Tyne Cot Cemetery is the burial ground for the dead of World War I in the Ypres Salient on the Western Front. With its 11,956 graves, it is the largest cemetery for Commonwealth forces in the world, for any war.  It is is located 9 Kms north-east of Ieper town centre, Belgium. 

This cemetery is one of the 27 cemeteries and monuments of the First World War (Western Front)  inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 2023. 

The card was sent by Gerda.

 

 2009 Steve Douglas

 Tyne Cot it is a silent witness to the bloody Battle of Passchendaele. During the British offensive of 1917, almost 600,000 victims fell in 100 days for a territorial gain of only eight kilometres.

‘Tyne Cot’ was originally a German defence position on the first line in Flanders. In October 1917, the Australian troops established an aid station there that soon grew into a small cemetery with 340 graves for the soldiers who had succumbed to their injuries on the spot. After the war – between 1919 and 1921 – the British ‘Exhumation Companies’ collected 12,000 dead from the surrounding battlefields. Of these, only 3,800 bodies could be identified.

The cemetery was designed by Sir Herbert Baker and inaugurated in 1927. - in: https://passchendaele.be