WWI Western Front Memorials

Over the last few days I’ve been passing a lot of WWI memorials and cemeteries. I visited most of the NZ related ones in Belgium and northern France, and here’s a post about it.

Firstly, if you’re interested in the history I really recommend reading the NZ History website, particularly about the Battle of the Somme, Passendale, and Messines.

I visited some important sites in NZ military history:

• the town of Passendale,
• Tyne Cot cemetery (the biggest commonwealth cemetery),
• Polygon Wood (where there’s a NZ memorial and a huge Australian one),
• Ypres/Ieper (where they’ve played the Last Post every night at 8pm since the end of WWI (except during Nazi occupation in WWII)),
• Messines Ridge (where there’s a NZ memorial as Kiwi’s captured the town),
• A Somme memorial to NZers just outside the town of Grevillers,
• A really nice memorial for NZers on a high point overlooking the town of Flers,
• The Catepillar Valley cemetery.

A lot of these cemeteries have NZers buried at them, and also have large lists of Kiwi soldiers who have no known grave.

The New Zealand monuments in particular have the words “FROM THE UTTERMOST ENDS OF THE EARTH”.

I find it hard to describe the emotions I felt in these places. I don’t know of any reasonably close relatives who died in these battles, but they were my countrymen. In peace these places are really quite beautiful- nice rolling farmland which would have reminded a lot of them of home.

But they wouldn’t have seen them like this. At the Tyne Cot visitor centre there was a comparison of aerial photographs of the area surrounding Passendale before and after the conflict. They were barely recognisable- the post-photo looked more like the moon with the craters and lack of vegetation.

And of course, something that surely goes through any young man when they visit these places is that the vast majority of people who died were my age or most probably younger. That waste of life is truely heartbreaking.

One way I tried to visualise the scale was by thinking of a man standing by each gravestone (although often each gravestone is for several men). I thought this was tough at the first cemetery I went to at Tyne Cot, but then I passed dozens of cemeteries and the numbers got really big it got pretty overwelming, especially by the time I reached Caterpillar Valley. The other tough thing was that the gravestones represent less than half of the actual Commonwealth casualties, let alone all the names on walls of people who have no graves, the French or the Germans.. Really staggering.

Anyway,

Here’s a map of the photos

View Larger Map

And the actual photos:

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