National WWI Museum and Memorial

Graves and Monuments

A place to return

Some graves were improvised, marked by whatever was nearby. Some became permanent – an ocean away, tended by a nation. Some came home. Each became a sacred space.

Acts of care between one battle and the next.

Soldiers built temporary cemeteries themselves – gravel mounds, wooden crosses, rough fences. Careful, deliberate dignities, doing what they could with what they had. After the war, American families chose whether their loved ones would be returned home or reburied in permanent American cemeteries overseas.

Black and white photograph of heavily pebbled ground with sticks stuck into the ground and rope between them, making a fence. Inside the fenced off area are ribbons stuck into the ground so that they stand up, acting as grave markers.

Standing beside memory.

Pilgrimages to overseas graves transformed distant burial sites into deeply personal spaces of mourning and reflection.

Black and white photograph of a woman in a dress, coat, hat, and glasses, standing beside of white cross acting as a grave marker, in a field of white crosses. In front of the cross lies a floral wreath, two small American flags stuck in the ground, and one small French flag stuck in the ground.

Carved from the ground they stood on.

Chalk, wood, and stone from the battlefield itself were shaped into markers and memorials, binding memory to the landscape of war.

Black and white photograph with four men in uniform. Two are kneeling, one on either side of ten different small grave markers with crosses on top of them. Two men are standing in the center. Behind them is a building and trees. Each of the men has tools and unfinished markers in their hands.