Photography was difficult here, the chambers you can see actually form a ring around the central monument. Ca. 11,000 dead here, most of them named with birth and death dates.
Not the normal run of the mill War Cemetery this Dave, but still a place of tranquil. It is very unexpecting on your first visit. Thanks for sharing the picture.
IS that one cross to remember them all? Or was the photo taken due to its unusual design (of the cross)
I suppose you have to visit these sites for yourself and witness firsthand the scale and numbers of the graves to comprehend the actual loss of life. as stalin said: "one death is a tragedy, one million, statistics."
As visited in 2018. The war dad from the Channel Islands and other areas of this region concentrated here, each vault holds the bones of the dead.
Also buried here Russian Hiwis If you are looking for a particular solder always check the location in the cemetery register, an impossible place to navigate without an exact location.
Each nation has its own pattern of military cemeteries. The soldiers whose bodies lie in the cemeteries fell for regimes which no longer exist and by international agreement had started the wars. It is rare to find the man's unit on a headstone for this reason. Some that do date from wartime cemeteries. German military cemeteries of the world wars are run by a charity not the Federal Republic of Germany, nor its predecessor states, the Weimar Republic. I don.t know whether the Nazi regime took direct control, but the gravestones for Jewish war dead disappeared. The Germans rent land from the host nation. The graves are far closer together than in US or British Cemetery and many in mass graves or with a single marker between four or even eight graves. There are more men buried in Mont-de Huisines than in the AMBC at Coleville. There may be scattered crosses in the cemetery - as at Langamarck(Belgium) The cemeteries are in countries where the Germans were uninvited guests, sometimes twice in a lifetime.There are some conditions on the land use. I have been told that some countries insist that the cemeteries have to be surrounded by a wall or hedge high enough to hide the view from local citizens. These is also a prohibition on erecting memorials that glorify the actions of the dead. However, many of the German cemeteries are entered through narrow almost stone age gateways (Langemarck, la Cambe, Caira, Recogne ) I have read that is because the gates represent the gates of Valhalla - the resting place of pagan German warriors who fell in battle. German senior officers were repatriated. The late professor Richard Holmes had a standing bet of a case of champagne for anyone who could find the grave of a German Colonel or above on the Western Front.