It is a date that marks the start of events that would go on to change the course of millions of lives – tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of the day Britain declared war on Germany and the First World War began.
While tomorrow will see the bulk of commemorative events, including the centrepiece of remembrance with the dimming of lights all over Britain, events also are ongoing throughout the weekend.
Yesterday, Birmingham's Chamberlain Square saw 5,000 ice sculptures left to melt in the sun, in memory of those who lost their lives.
Devised by Brazilian artist Nele Azevedo, the Minimum Monument exhibition was visiting the UK for the first time at the invitation of the city's Hippodrome arts venue.
Today, Germany's President Joachim Gauck will join his French counterpart, François Hollande, at a ceremony at Hartmannswillerkopf, a peak in the southern Vosges mountains on the edge of the Rhine Valley, to mark the anniversary of Germany's declaration of war on France.
The two presidents will lay the foundation stone for a new Franco-German Great War memorial and exhibition centre.
In Britain, services of remembrance will be held in churches across the country today.
The centrepiece of tomorrow's events will see tens of thousands of Britons taking part in the government-backed Lights Out campaign which will see homes, offices and public buildings dim their lights between 10pm and 11pm in memory of the start of the conflict – leaving a single candle or other light source lit. It was 11pm on 4 August 1914 when the declaration of war was made.
In pictures: A history of the First World War in 100 moments
In pictures: A history of the First World War in 100 moments
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Supporting troops of the 1st Australian Division walking on a duckboard track near Hooge, in the Ypres Sector
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Final moments: The Archduke of Austria Franz Ferdinand with his wife Sophie in Sarajevo minutes before his shooting
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Arresting Princip’s fellow conspirator Nedeljko Cabrinovic after a failed attempt to kill the Archduke on the same day
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Crowds in central London cheer Britain’s declaration of war on Germany
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The innocents: New recruits, with bicycles, training with the British Army in 1914
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1914: A lone soldier with a bicycle stands amid the remains of a German motor convoy which lines a country lane after an attack by French field guns in the battle of the Aisne in France
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Troubled waters: The Cambridge eight included John Andrew Ritson (fourth from cox)
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John Andrew Ritson (left)
Museum of London, Christina Broom
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Dennis Ivor Day
Musuem of London; Christina Broom
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German infantry advance through Belgium in August 1914
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Civilians near the Austrian lines in Serbia are strung up – probably as a reprisal for guerrilla resistance to the invaders
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Captured soldiers of the Russian 2nd Army after their defeat at the Battle of Tannenberg
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Wounded and exhausted British and Belgian soldiers retreating after the Battle of Mons
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Crowds gather outside a recruitment office
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French General Joseph Joffre (second right), Commander- in-Chief of the French Armies, and General Michel Joseph Maunoury (right) on the front during the First Battle of the Marne. Six hundred scarlet taxis were requisitioned, at a cost of Fr70,102, to ferry reservist troops to the Battle of the Marne in 1914
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A French firing squad escorts a deserter to his execution in November 1914
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One of the trenches from which deserters tried to escape
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German soldiers in Wirballen, a border town between the German Reich and Russia
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Carl Hans Lody, who spied in Britain
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Up to 12 million letters a week were sent to the front line via the wooden sorting office hastily set up in Regent’s Park in 1914
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Survivors from SMS ‘Gneisenau’ in the sea off the Falkland Islands, with HMS ‘Inflexible’ in the background, 8 December 1914
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The ruins of the cloth hall and cathedral in Ypres during WWI
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Margot Asquith, the Countess of Oxford and Asquith and the wife of Britain’s wartime leader
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Russian artillery positions outside Przemysl, during the six-month siege of the heavily fortified Austro-Hungarian city, part of present-day Poland
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German infantrymen attack through a cloud of poison gas. By the end of the war, both sides had employed various kinds of gas
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A pile of skulls from the Armenian village of Sheyxalan
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Cunard liner RMS Lusitania, after secret Whitehall misgivings about the official account of one of the most controversial and tragic episodes of the First World War were revealed in newly-released government documents. Almost 70 years after the Cunard liner RMS Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland, some officials expressed concern that the truth was still being covered up
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The RMS Lusitania sailed from New York on 1 May 1915 on her last voyage; the liner was sunk off southern Ireland on 7 May
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French troops line up for inspection on a trench on the Western Front
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German military prisoners, at Southend-on-Sea, on their way to Knockaloe
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The railway line running the length of the access road into Knockaloe, the biggest camp in the British Isles
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Survivors of the sinking in Cobh, Co Cork
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2nd Lieutenant John Kipling is thought to have been killed in The Chalk Pit, in Loos, France, on 27 September 1915
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Laid to rest: Edith Cavell circa 1905
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Her funeral cortege in London in May 1919
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George Samson is celebrated on a cigarette card of the time
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Flora Sandes, who rose from private to sergeant-major in the Serbian army, playing chess with her Serbian comrades. After the war ended, she was promoted to lieutenant
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Italian light infantry of the 1st Alpini Regiment on Monte Nero, during the Isonzo campaigns
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As Italian as mozzarella cheese: Giuseppe Ungaretti
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French troops under shellfire during the Battle of Verdun
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Chandeliers and bed rest
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The Pavilion was meant as a seaside home for the Prince Regent
Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove
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Fun and games were vital
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Patients get some sea air
Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove
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The medical staff
Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove
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Britain saw the Easter Rising as a stab in the back and the rebels, pictured here being led to captivity, as traitors. Subsequent executions made them into national heroes
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A steamer hit by a torpedo during the First World War
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The Ottoman army besieged the British forces for 147 days until they surrendered on 29 April 1916
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General Sir Charles Townshend
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The tear-stained letter
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Siegfried Sassoon as a second lieutenant in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. His bravery won him the Military Cross in July 1916, but he later turned against the war
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The sinking of the ‘Queen Mary’
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Admiral John Jellicoe, commander of the British fleet
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German destroyers off the English coast
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One of the architects of the revolt: Sharif Hussain, religious leader of Mecca
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One of the architects of the revolt: Sir Henry McMahon, British minister in Cairo
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Emilio Lussu, who fought in the battle with the Italian Army, on the side of the allies, against the Austrians, who sided with Germany
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Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener, whose face appeared on the recruitment poster ‘Your Country Needs You’
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Conscientious objectors at a protest on Dartmoor in 1917
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Objectors were forced to cultivate the soil although many were said to have spent much of their time "strolling on the moors, reading, smoking and talking"
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British conscientious objectors leaving Dartmoor Prison under a gateway inscribed with the words "Parcere subjectis" ("Spare the conquered")
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Going over the top during the Battle of the Somme in 1916
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Canadian troops prepare for the charge
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Remains of the German airship shot down over Cuffley
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Captain William Leefe Robinson received the VC for his courage
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A British Mark 1 tank on the Western Front
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A British soldier covers a dead German on the firestep of a trench near the Somme
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Carnage on the road to Romania’s Turnu Rosu Pass. A German NCO stands beside an Italian-made cannon and the body of what may have been a gun crew member
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Edward Thomas, a Second-Lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery, at home on leave in early 1917
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Edward’s wife Helen with two of their three children, Merfyn and Bronwen
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May Bradford writing a letter for an injured soldier in a French hospital
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Composer and poet Ivor Gurney (left) and the artist Paul Nash
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Filling shells at the Vickers munitions factory, Barrow-in-Furness. Strikers’ grievances included the use of female labour
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The moment that ushered in the American century: President Woodrow Wilson asks Congress to ratify a declaration of war against Imperial Germany
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Supporters greet Lenin on his arrival at Finland Station, Petrograd, on 16 April 1917, after a week-long journey by sealed train from Switzerland
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War effort: Women war workers at Cross Farm, Shackleton, Surrey, in 1917
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French ‘poilus’ at Chemin des Dames, where the bloody Nivelle Offensive of 1917 pushed many into mutiny
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An early colour photograph of the crater left by the biggest of the blasts beneath German positions near Messines on 14 June 1917
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British sappers laying the mines
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The remains of a German trench
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Ernst Jünger’s German platoon overcame the enemy forces with his ‘mastery of the situation and iron command’
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Siegfried Sassoon was sent to Craiglockhart Hospital to be treated for ‘shell shock’ following his protest
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Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970), whose 1929 novel, ‘All Quiet On The Western Front’, was based on his wartime experiences. Here he is seen with Carl Laemmle of Universal Pictures (left)
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The conscription of reserve soldiers in Greece to fight on the Salonika front in 1916. The Greek city was ravaged by a fire the following year, which devastated the area and left thousands homeless
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Allied troops marching down the Boulevard de la Victoire in Salonika in 1916, the year before the great fire which devastated the Greek city
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Women leaving a munitions factory on Eiswerder Island in Spandau, near Berlin, at the end of their shift, in around 1917. They are crossing the bridge over the river Havel
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Female workers of the Spandau factory getting their dinner during the midday break
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Wet weather plagued the Third Battle of Ypres, which included the battles of Langemarck and Passchendaele. Perhaps 70,000 Allied soldiers died between 31 July and 10 November
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A British stretcher party
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German prisoners on a duckboard track at Yser Canal, Belgium, on the opening day of the battle
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3rd September 1917: Veterans of the American Civil War at the opening of the Eagle Hut
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US Ambassador Page greeting veterans of the American Civil War at the opening of the Eagle Hut
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22nd December 1917: Christmas preparations at the Eagle Hut
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Albin Köbis, who was shot as one of the ringleaders of the German naval mutiny in 1917
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Stokers of the SMS Prinzregent Luitpold in 1913
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Allied troops in what is now Zambia, in vain pursuit of the forces of the elusive German general Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck
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Genius in the art of bush warfare: German general Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck
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German women and children queue for food rations
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Crowds at Petrograd’s Winter Palace during the October Revolution. (Russia still used the Julian calendar, in which the West’s 7 November equated to 25 October)
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The Mayor of Jerusalem (with walking-stick) had tried to surrender the city to them
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Allenby walks into Jerusalem: Sergeants James Sedgwick and Frederick Hurcomb of 2/19th Battalion, London Regiment, outside the city two days earlier
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Artist John Nash not only painted the ordeals of Britain’s front line troops: he experienced them first-hand
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A British housewife with her grocery items after the introduction of rationing. The government feared hunger might lead to revolution
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Edmund Morel as an MP after his release
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A suffragist rally in Hyde Park
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A newly enfranchised woman votes for the first time in 1918
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Masked doctors and nurses treat flu patients lying on cots and in outdoor tents at a hospital camp during the influenza epidemic of 1918
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The immense long-range naval gun which was used to bombard Paris from behind the German lines in Picardy
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The immense naval gun was manned by 80 German sailors. It launched its shells from behind the German lines
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Walter Tull, left, Britain’s first black Army officer, in a photograph handed down to his great-nephew Edward Finlayson
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Tull was singled out for his "gallantry and coolness" following a daring raid across the frozen river Piave in January 1918
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The German air ace Baron Manfred von Richthofen
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Baron Manfred von Richthofen's 'flying circus'
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Dogs at the British War Dog School in Essex
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Tweed, far left, with his handler Private Reid
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A dog courier runs through barbed wire and mines to deliver a message
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Piete Kuhr, pictured in 1915
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Vera Brittain became a nurse during the war
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The aftermath of the explosion at the munitions plant in Chilwell
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Remains of a soldier on the Western Front, where millions were killed or wounded, or went missing
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From left, Marshal Joffre, President Henri Poincaré, King George V, General Foch, and Field-Marshal Haig
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Captured German officers receiving orders from a French officer
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American troops advance on a German position on the Saint Mihiel salient, north-eastern France, in 1918
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American soldiers of the 18th Infantry Machine Gun Battalion advance through the ruins of St Baussant on their way to the St. Mihiel Front
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A group of captured Germans being marched through St Mihiel Salient
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Wilfred Owen in uniform as a 2nd Lieutenant. The poet was teaching in France when the war began
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The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, circa 1920. The poet describes to his wife the rising tide of popular unrest in Munich
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The interior of the railway carriage in which the Armistice ending the First World War was signed
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The Allied delegation was led by France’s Marshal Ferdinand Foch (front row, second right)
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The Royal Family appear on the balcony
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People celebrate in the streets in 1918
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Crowds in London celebrate the end of hostilities on 11 November 1918
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Crowds in London celebrate the end of hostilities in 1918
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Among the buildings taking part in the campaign will be the Houses of Parliament, the Eden Project, the headquarters of the Football Association, the Imperial War Museums in London and Salford, and British embassies around the world.
Among hundreds of local events, Westminster Abbey will be hosting a candlelit vigil at 10pm, including the gradual extinguishing of candles, with the final light, on the tomb of the unknown warrior, being put out at 11pm. Similar events will be held in Northern Ireland and Wales.
In the morning, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will travel to Liege, Belgium, to attend a ceremony of commemoration at the Mémorial Interallié de Cointe hosted by the Government of Belgium.
Guests will travel to the St Symphorien Military Cemetery in Mons for a UK commemorative event in the evening. It is believed that an equal number of British and German soldiers, and the first and last Commonwealth casualties of the war, are buried at this site.
The Prince of Wales will attend a service of commemoration at Glasgow Cathedral tomorrow, along with Commonwealth heads of state, Alex Salmond and David Cameron.