The First Cemeteries
In 1921 the Commission built three experimental cemeteries.
Forceville in France was considered the most successful. Garden
designer Gertrude Jekyll advised on the planting and the architects
created a walled cemetery with uniform headstones in a garden
setting. Blomfield's Cross of Sacrifice and Lutyens' Stone of
Remembrance were the formal features. After some adjustments,
Forceville became the template for the Commission's building
programme. Over the course of the decade over 2400 cemeteries
were constructed in France and Belgium, while work progressed in
Italy, Egypt, Palestine, Macedonia, Mesopotamia (Iraq) and on the
Gallipoli Peninsula. The pace of building was extraordinary
and the energy brought by the individual architects gave character
and often great beauty to the cemeteries they built.
Memorials to the Missing
"He is not missing, he is here." Field
Marshal Lord Plumer at the unveiling of the Menin Gate Memorial,
July 1927
The memorials to the Missing gave the individual architects
scope to try to express the enormity of the human sacrifice
made. The first to be commissioned and completed was
Blomfield's magnificent memorial in Ypres, The Menin Gate Memorial,
which commemorates the names of more than 55,000 men on 1200
panels. Other memorials followed: Tyne Cot in Belgium designed by
Sir Herbert Baker; the Helles Memorial on Gallipoli designed by Sir
John Burnet; the Thiepval Memorial on the Somme is the work of Sir
Edwin Lutyens while the Missing in Salonika are commemorated at
Lake Doiran on a monument by Sir Robert Lorimer. Later
individual member states erected memorials to their own country's
dead: the Canadians at Vimy Ridge, the Australians at Villers
Bretonneux and the South Africans at Delville Wood.