Ypres Lille Gate : World War One british cemeteries original signs

Ypres Lille Gate Imperial War Commission indicators leading to british military cemeteries of WW1 outside the city

Browse the collection : Ypres cityscape

On the inner wall of the gateway leading to the southern Ypres Salient, there are five of the original Imperial War Graves Commission signs for 13 British military cemeteries. These signs date back to the first formal signposting by the Commission when pilgrims began to travel to visit the battlefields after the Great War. The Imperial War Graves Commission is now called the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. It is the agency responsible for the maintenance and care of war graves of British Forces and former Colonial and Dominion Forces buried throughout the world.

(Great War)

Ypres and its surrounding salient became a major focus point of the war during the race to the sea in 1914, where it was briefly occupied by the Germans, only to be quickly won back and held thereafter by the allies.

(The cultural experience)

Devastated by four years of shellfire and fighting, for the British the Ypres battlefield, guarding the Channel ports, was the key to the Western Front. The Germans held a natural amphitheatre of high ground, curved like the blade of a sickle with the handle formed by the Messines ridge to the south. This was the ‘Salient’ in which the British were surrounded on three sides, always observed and subjected to lethal shelling.

(Simon Jones)