John McCrae

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
in Flanders' fields.

We found John McCrae's grave eventually (see 'Clever Marketing' 8th Nov. 2009) shortly before Christmas. Yes, he is buried in Wimereux Communal Cemetery but there are now more cemeteries in Wimereux and you need to follow signs for the Cimetière Sud. Here, past the funerary monuments to local worthies, are buried some 2,800 soldiers of the First World War including some 170 Germans.

The McCrae Monument (inscribed with the lines above) is easy to find, his actual grave not so. Some unhelpful person has removed the second volume of the register (L - Z), and the reference I had found on the Internet was either completely wrong or totally misleading. Eventually we tracked down his gravestone by the logic of searching by approximate date of burial (January 1918). The poor man obviously does not receive many visitors and I wish I had brought along a poppy cross to add to the rather dishevelled maple leaf flag and other offerings on view.

The gravestones here lie flat on the ground unlike the customary upright stones usually seen in Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries. The reason is that the stones are likely to topple over here because the sandy ground provides insufficient support. Having recently marvelled at the incredibly tall Burj Khalifa built on desert sand in Dubai (at 828 metres by far the world's tallest building), I'm a little bit confused.