What a good idea. Are you going to organise it?
The next place after Perth Cemetery was Tyne Cot, which is one of those places which is utterly impossible to comprehend. The huge numbers of graves, many of which were just "A soldier of the Great War" or "Known unto God", plus the wall at the back with yet more thousands of names of unfound casualties.
Being the biggest of its type, there is a massive car park and a Visitor Centre with photographs, audio visual displays, artefacts belonging to soldiers, some found in the area after the war, others donated by families and including letters, medals, pieces of uniform etc.
As I walked down the path from the car park, I was aware of a quiet voice, which seemed to be coming from absolutely nowhere. It was a woman's voice, almost monotonous and it just went on and on and on.....
.....until, when I got into the Visitor Centre, I found that one of the displays was an ever changing screen, with photographs of servicemen who had died. As each one came up, the quiet, sad voice gave his name and his age and then moved on to the next, never stopping, never changing tone. I was, for some time, rooted to the spot as dozens of young men appeared and disappeared. I'm not sure over what period of time but it gave the name of a soldier who had died on every day of the week and month and I suspect, if I had stayed longer, for the whole of 1917 at least.
An old woman, on another screen, talked about how her childhood had been stolen from her when she and the other six and seven year olds were confronted with a truck load of gas victims and were made to go around them trying to get them to drink milk. "What childhood", she said, " I was never a child." ( I think it was here that I saw this film - it might have been in Poperinge, I have lost track, a little, of some of the museums - but what does it matter, the message was what was important )
There were short pieces of film showing horses literally drowning in the mud, whilst men tried to pull them free. And of men in the trenches, alive, injured and dead. Men trying to push and pull huge pieces of artillery and watching helplessly as tanks became completely bogged down.
This wasn't an easy place to be and I was relieved when at the end of the photographic displays, there was a much more recent and uplifting one, of some of the last veterans, including Harry Patch, visiting the centre a few years ago.
I have lots of photographs of the actual cemetery to follow.
