Tyne Cot

Tyne Cot Review

With 12,000 graves, Tyne Cot, a British cemetery near Passchendaele (as Passendale is written in old Flemish), is the largest and best known of more than 170 military cemeteries in the area. In its awe-inspiring austerity, it evokes the agony of anonymous and unknown losses. A significant majority of the graves here are for unidentified casualties, and a curving wall lists the names of nearly 35,000 Commonwealth soldiers killed after August 1917 whose bodies and graves vanished in the turmoil of war. A large cross stands atop one of the German pillbox bunkers for which the site was named; British troops trying to gain the ridge dubbed it a cot, or cottage.