LEST WE FORGET
The fragile wooden crosses seen in Cheltenham’s WWI Battlefield Crosses Museum are each more than a hundred years old. Visiting the museum and spending time close to these crosses allows us to come within a heartbeat of the young soldiers that they commemorate.
After lifting and burying their friends and comrades in shallow, temporary graves, those who knew them made these crude wooden memorials and thrust them into the earth and mud. Almost certainly, they would have then stood before these crosses, bowed their heads, and spoken a prayer.
The tragic drama of that moment now echoes down the generations in this modest museum – amplified by the thought that those who buried their comrades might well themselves have also fallen within days or months.
For those unable to visit this unique museum, this website presents the stories of the soldiers commemorated by the crosses and explains how those crosses have been conserved and the museum was created to put them on permanent exhibition.
