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We've had fun finding the sites that make Yahoo! UK & Ireland one of the best places to find UK or Irish sites, so we thought we'd share a few with you. If you have any suggestions, please send us a note about them. Also send any general thoughts or comments about Picks of the Week or even suggest sites you'd like us to consider for the next issue. Click here if you only want to view the list of sites.

Last week’s solemn Remembrance Day services reminded us of a recent trip we took around some of the more notable First World War battlefields. In particular we recalled the sobering experience of standing with one’s back to the huge Tyne Cot military cemetery, looking over the gentle slope that was once called Passchendaele. More than half a million British and German troops died on that four mile stretch, during the five month long Third Battle of Ypres in 1917. And after 80 years, the scars of that titanic conflict remain: Farmers regularly plough up bones and bullets, while at the nearby Menin Gate a trumpeter still sounds The Last Post every evening, the notes echoing mournfully over a landscape peppered with war graves.

Responsibility for maintaining the cemeteries and memorials for the 1.7 million British and Commonwealth soldiers who died rests with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which was established by Royal Charter in 1917. Its site explains the Commission’s functions and how it carries them out, with sections devoted to the architecture of its monuments and how it has striven to make the cemeteries less bleak. But the major feature of the site is the Debt of Honour register, a searchable database containing the personal and service history of every fatality, together with details of where they are commemorated.

More personal memories are available on a number of sites devoted to the conflict. Among the best of these are Trenches on the Web (a previous Pick) which was recently restructured, and Tom Morgan’s Hellfire Corner, which takes its name from a crossroads just outside Ypres. The presence of a railway line next to the junction -- which had to be crossed on the way to the front -- meant it was accurately marked on German military maps and thus formed the focus of a lethal concentration of artillery fire. An eclectic selection of anecdotal articles throw light on some of the less well documented features of the war, such as the five Victoria Cross medals won by former pupils of Bromsgrove School, and why the trio of campaign medals minted for survivors are known as Pip, Squeak and Wilfred. There is also a transcription of the personal diary of an Australian soldier. This last document poignantly conveys the long periods of boredom behind the lines and shows how they were punctuated with short bursts of stark terror on the battlefield.

The extraordinary stresses of this brutal war broke the minds of many, yet others were driven to feats of extreme heroism by the same pressures. Between 1914 and 1918 a total of 634 soldiers won the Victoria Cross, accounting for almost half of all the medals awarded since the VC’s inception in 1854. Mike Chapman’s Victoria Cross Reference details the circumstances behind each of the 1354 citations. There is an index section, which allows you to access recipients by a host of different criteria including name, unit, rank and nationality. Other sections detail little-known facts about the medal (for example: it has been estimated that the chance of surviving a Victoria Cross act is 1 in 10), useful reference material and information about other decorations.

Trawling through the index section of the Victoria Cross Reference will eventually bring you to the name of Noel Godfrey Chevasse of the Royal Army Medical Corps, one of only three men in history to win the VC twice. On both occasions he risked his life to save others wounded in the fighting and, during the second action, was himself fatally wounded in the stomach. The Captain Chevasse web page reveals that he was the most decorated soldier of the war earning, in addition, a Military Cross. The page gives a detailed biography and also uncovers the bizarre co-incidences that link him to the only other double VC winners. The first -- Captain Charles Hazlitt Upham -- was distantly related by marriage, while the second -- Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Martin-Leake -- commanded the Casualty Clearing Station that Captain Chevasse was taken to after he was wounded.

Mike Roden, on his excellent Aftermath site, points out that: "A war can never be said to be completely over until there is nobody left who took part in it", and looks at the diverse fates that awaited those who came home. For many civilian life resumed with little more than a suit of clothes, a couple of medals and a small cash payment. They were left to make their way in a country as desperate to remember the horrors of the trenches as they were to forget. Mike has collected short stories, personal testimonies and news clippings and paints a vivid picture of their experience. This is juxtaposed with pieces showing how those who stayed behind sought to come to terms with the trauma through pilgrimages and poetry.

Perhaps the most famous poem about the war was written by Canadian John McCrea who died of pneumonia while on active service in 1918: "In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses, row on row". The Lost Poets of the Great War examines McCrea’s work and lists some of the critical and poetic responses to it. There are also sections devoted to other poets who were killed, including Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg, Rupert Brooke and Wilfrid Owen.

As Laurence Binyon wrote in 1914, in tribute to all those who would give their lives in the war:

They shall not grow old, as we who are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Sites featured in Picks of the Week

• Commonwealth War Graves Commission - responsible for keeping the memories alive.
  
• Hellfire Corner - the view from the trenches.
  
• Victoria Cross Reference - the stories behind Britain's highest military award.
  
• Captain Chevasse - the most decorated soldier of World War One.
  
• Aftermath - what happened when the boys came home.
  
• The Lost Poets of the Great War - capturing the conflict in verse.
  

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