About four miles to the west of Nieuport (now Nieuwpoort) along the channel coast, Coxyde (now Koksijde) war memorial remembers the fallen, civilian and military, of both World Wars.
‘To Our Dead’.
So what are we doing in Koksijde, you may well ask? During their tenure of the line in this sector during the latter half of 1917, one of the places the British used to bury their dead was a French burial ground a few hundred yards down the road from this memorial. The French graves have long since been removed, but the cemetery in the dunes is still the resting place of more than 1500 British soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Great War, as well as 155 from the Second World War.
Next post we shall visit them.