Europe is marking Armistice Day with ceremonies and moments of silence as France opens an international memorial on a former battlefield.
Crowds watch a remembrance day ceremony at the near completed ceramic poppy art installation by artist Paul Cummins entitled 'Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red' in the dry moat of the Tower of London in London, November 11, 2014.
This year's events have special significance because 2014 is the centenary of the start of World War I. Tuesday is the 96th anniversary of the armistice that ended the war on November 11, 1918.
French President Francois Hollande laid a wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier under Paris' Arc de Triomphe. Later, he will head to northern France to inaugurate an international war memorial at Notre-Dame-de-Lorette in the presence of German, British and Belgian officials. The Ring of Memory carries the names of 600,000 soldiers who died in the region during the war. Names are listed alphabetically without their nationalities.
In Britain, thousands gathered at the Tower of London, where a blood-red sea of ceramic poppies has spilled into the moat as part of an art installation paying tribute to soldiers killed in the fighting.
The finished installation was made up of 888,246 ceramic poppies, with the final poppy being placed on Armistice Day today. Each poppy represents a British and Commonwealth military fatality from World War I.
A remembrance ceremony also took place in Belgium in the medieval town of Ypres, where the buglers of the Last Post under the Menin Gate played their haunting tribute to the dead. The gate's vaulted ceiling lists the names of more than 54,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers who lost their lives during World War I and have no known grave.
NDO
