The cemetery holds 11,956 burials, of whom 8,373 are unidentified. The white stones run in long curving ranks down the gentle slope toward Ypres, four kilometres away across what was the salient. Most of the men buried here were brought in after the war from the surrounding battlefield by parties of soldiers and locals who walked the ground for years, recovering what could be recovered. The unidentified graves carry the inscription Rudyard Kipling chose, after his own son went missing at Loos: A Soldier of the Great War, Known Unto God. Kipling was on the Imperial War Graves Commission when those words were agreed. He had walked battlefields looking for John, who was never found. Sir Herbert Baker designed the cemetery; Joseph Armitage and Ferdinand Victor Blundstone carved the sculpture.

Behind the burials, a long curving wall of Portland stone closes off the eastern end of the cemetery. It carries 33,783 names of British forces and 1,176 New Zealanders, soldiers killed in the salient after 15 August 1917 whose bodies were never recovered or never identified. The cut-off date of 15 August was arbitrary: too many names for one memorial. Men missing before that date are listed at the Menin Gate in Ypres. Tyne Cot took the rest. The New Zealanders chose not to put their missing on the main British memorials at all, but to list them at separate sites near the battles where they fell. The Tyne Cot New Zealand panel is the exception. It is built into the centre of the wall, forming a curved apse, and the inscription on it reads: Here are recorded the names of officers and men of New Zealand who fell in the Battle of Broodseinde and the First Battle of Passchendaele October 1917 and whose graves are known only unto God.

Among the headstones is the grave of Private James Peter Robertson of the 27th Canadian Battalion, who was 34 years old when he was killed on 6 November 1917 during the final attack on Passchendaele village. He had been born in Scotland and grown up in Manitoba and worked on the railways in Alberta. During the attack his platoon was held up by a German machine-gun firing from a strongpoint behind uncut wire. He charged it alone, killed four of the crew, captured the gun, and turned it on the rest, breaking the position. He went back into no-man's-land twice under heavy fire to carry in wounded men, and was killed bringing the second one home. The Victoria Cross was awarded posthumously. His mother received it from King George V.

Among the missing whose names are on the wall: Lieutenant-Colonel Philip Bent, who at the age of 26 was commanding the 9th Leicesters at Polygon Wood when his line broke; he gathered survivors of three units and led a counterattack shouting 'Come on, the Tigers!' and was killed at the front of it. Corporal William Clamp of the Yorkshires, killed taking a pillbox. Lance Corporal Ernest Seaman of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, killed silencing two German machine-guns. All three received the Victoria Cross. Beside them, Lieutenant Allan Steel, an English first-class cricketer; Lieutenant David Westacott, a Welsh rugby international who had played eight times for Wales; Lieutenant Denis Buxton, son of the Earl Buxton, then Governor-General of South Africa. The wall does not distinguish between them. They share an inscription, and a wall, and a ridge they did not live to see retaken.

On a low rise at the back of the cemetery, behind the New Zealand apse, are four German graves. They are not separated from the rest; they are in the same lines, between the same hedges, under the same trees. Three of the four are unknown. The fourth, the only named German soldier here, is buried beside another unknown comrade under a single marker. The cemetery was built around the German pillboxes its dead had attacked. It is administered by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, but it has always held men from both sides of the wire, because they were already there when the gardeners arrived. The grass is cut now. The roses bloom in summer. The ridge falls away west toward Ypres, and you can see, on a clear day, the towers of the Cloth Hall and the spire of Saint Martin's against the sky.