section_path: Legacy and memory/Memorials
section_name: Memorials
paragraph_text: Memorials
  
  Memorials were built in thousands of villages and towns. Close to battlefields, those buried in improvised burial grounds were gradually moved to formal graveyards under the care of organisations such as the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the American Battle Monuments Commission, the German War Graves Commission, and Le Souvenir français. Many of these graveyards also have monuments to the missing or unidentified dead, such as the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing and the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme.
  
  In 1915, John McCrae, a Canadian army doctor, wrote the poem In Flanders Fields as a salute to those who perished in the war. It is still recited today, especially on Remembrance Day and Memorial Day.
  
  National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri, is a memorial dedicated to all Americans who served in World War I. The Liberty Memorial was dedicated on 1 November 1921.
  
  The British government budgeted substantial resources to the commemoration of the war during the period 2014 to 2018. The lead body is the Imperial War Museum. On 3 August 2014, French President François Hollande and German President Joachim Gauck together marked the centenary of Germany's declaration of war on France by laying the first stone of a memorial in Vieil Armand, known in German as Hartmannswillerkopf, for French and German soldiers killed in the war. As part of commemorations for the centenary of the 1918 Armistice, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited the site of the signing of the Armistice of Compiègne and unveiled a plaque to reconciliation.