No not "The Wall" in Washington D.C.
I was listening to the BBC World service last night and there was a segment on Remembrance Day and how people remember. The last part was about the daily ceremony at the Menin Gate in Ypres, Belgium.
Its large Hall of Memory contains names on stone panels of 54,896 Commonwealth soldiers who died in the Salient but whose bodies have never been identified or found. On completion of the memorial, it was discovered to be too small to contain all the names as originally planned. An arbitrary cut-off point of 15 August 1917 was chosen and the names of 34,984 UK missing after this date were inscribed on the Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing instead. The Menin Gate Memorial does not list the names of the missing of New Zealand and Newfoundland soldiers, who are instead honoured on separate memorials.
That's 89,880 who were missing.
Summation
Battles of Ypres, Three costly battles in World War I in western Flanders. In the first battle (Oct. 12–Nov. 11, 1914), the Germans were stopped on their march to the sea, but the Allied forces were then surrounded on three sides. The second battle (April 22–May 25, 1915) marked the Germans’ first use of poison gas as a weapon. In the third and longest battle (July 31–Nov. 6, 1917), also called the Battle of Passchendaele, the British were initially successful in breaking through the left wing of the German lines. The seasonal rains soon turned the Flanders countryside into an impassable swamp, but Gen. Douglas Haig persisted in his offensive. On November 6 Haig’s troops, including the Canadian Corps, occupied the ruins of Passchendaele, barely five miles from the start of the offensive. Total Allied and German casualties exceeded 850,000, including the deaths of 325,000 British soldiers.
Following the Menin Gate Memorial opening in 1927, the citizens of Ypres wanted to express their gratitude towards those who had given their lives for Belgium's freedom. As such, every evening at 20:00, buglers from the local fire brigade close the road which passes under the memorial and sound the "Last Post". Except for the occupation by the Germans in World War II when the daily ceremony was conducted at Brookwood Military Cemetery, in Surrey, England, this ceremony has been carried on uninterrupted since 2 July 1928. On the evening that Polish forces liberated Ypres in the Second World War, the ceremony was resumed at the Menin Gate despite the fact that heavy fighting was still taking place in other parts of the town.
Every freaking day!
That my friends is dedication.