Tyne Cot, copyright CWGC

Tyne Cot Memorial, near Ypres, Belgium. Unveiled 20 June 1927. After the Armistice of 11 November 1918, Tyne Cot was formally established as a military cemetery under the auspices of the Imperial (now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission (CWGC), with Herbert Baker commissioned as designer and architect. Tyne Cot, or ‘Tyne Cottage’, was the name given by the Northumberland Fusiliers to a German pill box complex near Passchendaele in the Ypres salient, eventually captured by British and Empire forces October 1917. The largest pill box became a dressing station for casualties, and the 343 who died from their injuries were buried nearby. After the war’s end, the authorities decided to consolidate all the graves in the region, and the remains of thousands of soldiers were brought to Tyne Cot for re-interment from the battlefields of Passchendaele and Langemarck, and from nine other small burial grounds. There are now 11,961 British and Commonwealth servicemen of the First World War buried or commemorated at Tyne Cot. 8,373 of the burials are unidentified and these graves bear the moving words: ‘A SOLDIER OF THE GREAT WAR/KNOWN UNTO GOD.’ This is largest of the Commission’s cemeteries reflecting the bitter fighting which took place around Ypres from October 1914 to October 1918. The cemetery’s curved north-eastern perimeter wall is the Memorial to the Missing where the names of 34,959 men who have no known grave are inscribed. Reginald Blomfeld’s Cross of Sacrifice with its embedded reversed bronze sword – found in most CWCG cemeteries – was erected on the original large German pillbox/dressing station at the suggestion of George V (the Queen’s grandfather) when he visited the cemetery in 1922 while it was being created.