[CroFlames]

A little tie-in with sports on this sombre day remembering WWI

http://www.tsn.ca/a-pilgrimage-every...-make-1.605731

This quote kind of brings it home:

But not until you come here and see the graves does it really hit home. We talk about the ultimate sacrifice too often as a turn of phrase, something that comes off our lips in a classroom or perhaps beside a cenotaph. But, for example, come to Tyne Cot Cemetery near Passchendaele, where the white markers stretch out for what seems like forever, section after section, row after row, plot by plot, and you understand what it really means.
There are 12,000 graves here, Canadians, British, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Indians and more. There are Victoria Cross winners buried here. There are two Canadian brothers, resting side by side. There are teenagers who lied about their ages to make this trip. Every grave tells a story.
Perhaps the saddest part is that we don’t know most of them. Roughly 70 per cent of all the tombstones carry no name. The bodies weren’t identifiable. “A soldier of the Great War,” they read. “Known unto God.”
At least those poor souls have a resting place. On a wall that gracefully rings the east side of Tyne Cot, another 30,000 names are etched into the granite, line by line, letter by letter. They were put there because their names wouldn’t fit on the Menin Gate Memorial, a few kilometres away in the town of Ypres, where 55,000 names fill every centimeter of space. These are the ones whose bodies were never found, who simply disappeared, perhaps blown apart or buried in the mud most of these battlefields turned into.