By Alice Johnsen.

Tyne Cot Cemetery lies about 10km outside Ypres. First appearances are of a relatively normal beautifully kept place of burial and remembrance, but on further inspection the utter vastness, the unfathomable number of names begins to
sink in.

We must never stop remembering, however hard, even if it is only once every November
PHOTO: SJTUK/ Pixabay and Uschi Dugulin/Pixabay

But even then it is hard to grasp how every name on a gravestone or column represents ‘someone’. A son, husband, brother or father. Particularly haunting stones read ‘Believed to be in this cemetery’ and ‘Four Australian Soldiers of the Great War’ suggesting unthinkable reasons for a shared grave and with that, a loss of individual value and self.
The name ‘Tyne Cot’ is believed to have come from the Northumberland Fusiliers who likened the German concrete pill boxes on that site to a typical Tyneside worker’s cottage. The site of the cemetery was, during the First World War, of strategic importance to both the German and Allied Armies. Many of the men buried there died at Passchendaele.
King George V visited the cemetery in 1922 when its design and creation was near completion and it was his idea to turn the German pill box, located centrally in the cemetery, into a site for a memorial cross.
He said of Tyne Cot: “We can truly say that the whole circuit of the Earth is girdled with the graves of our dead. In the course of my pilgrimage, I have many times asked myself whether there can be more potent advocates of peace upon Earth through the years to come, than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to the desolation of war.”
Back in Ypres, in the Flanders Field Museum, I read about how the decade before the First World War was considered a second ‘Belle Epoque’ , a time of great cultural, artistic, social, scientific and technological advances. A golden age in comparison to what lay ahead.
Did we learn from our predecessors 100 years ago? Did we learn enough? Are we still being driven by humanity’s inclination to favour self and greed over compassion?
On Remembrance Day this year, my thoughts will return to Tyne Cot. We must never stop remembering, however hard, and even if it is only once every November. Naively, I suspect, I believe in the essential value of remembering someone over 100 years later, even if I don’t know anything about a person other than they lived and died there, on the battlefields of Belgium.
We must never forget.
n Alice Johnsen is a life coach based near Sherborne; phone 07961 080513; alicejohnsen.co.uk