The Byfleet Wooden Crosses

St Mary's Church Byleet

If battlefield crosses are your thing, you might find this of interest:

St. Mary’s Church Byfleet

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Ypres Town Cemetery Extension

Ypres Town Cemetery Extension was begun in October 1914 and initially used until April 1915.  More burials were added in 1918 and after the Armistice 367 graves were brought in from smaller cemeteries and from the battlefields to the north and east of the city.  There are now 598 First World War burials or commemorations in the Extension, of which 137 are unidentified.  There are also special memorials to 16 servicemen known or believed to be buried here, visible along the wall in the background of the above photograph. Continue reading

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Ypres Town Cemetery

A few minutes walk east of the Menin Gate, outside the ancient city walls, is Ypres (Ieper) Town Cemetery.  Within the cemetery, interred in several different plots among the Belgian civilian graves, are 145 British casualties from the First World War, all but one being killed between October 1914 and May 1915.  There are Dragoons and Hussars buried here, there is the son of a Baron, and of an Earl, there’s a Lord, even a Prince.  Men of the small but highly professional pre-war British Army, men whose numbers would be decimated in their dogged and ultimately successful efforts to prevent the Germans from breaking through the Allied lines during the first two battles of Ypres.

The British Army, however, would never be the same again.  Continue reading

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Grangegorman Military Cemetery – Part One

Last year I found myself in Dublin for a few days, and while the missus was meeting up with friends one afternoon, I took the opportunity to visit a cemetery that I had wanted to see for quite some time.  If you ask most people in Dublin how to get to Grangegorman Military Cemetery they won’t be able to tell you (I’d heard this so I tried, and they couldn’t), but if you head up the eastern edge of Phoenix Park, past the Garda headquarters and the McKee Barracks, you’ll find the cemetery soon enough.  It contains many First World War burials, British soldiers evacuated from the trenches to hospitals in Ireland who subsequently died of their injuries, as well as casualties of the Easter Rising in 1916 and the War of Independence between 1919 and 1921.  Continue reading

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Menin Road South Military Cemetery

A wet afternoon, just a few hundred yards east of the Menin Gate, finds us at Menin Road South Military Cemetery.  Continue reading

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Zillebeke Churchyard

Zillebeke Churchyard

The churchyard at Zillebeke contains 30 CWGC headstones, two of which are special memorials, and, most unusually, two private memorials, a total of 32 burials in all.  Six of these men are unidentified, and of the remaining 26, six are Canadians killed in 1916.  The majority of the 20 British burials were made in December 1914, nearly all are officers, and many of their names reflect the aristocratic nature of the British officer class in the early days of the First World War.  Continue reading

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Hill 60 Part Three – Larch Wood (Railway Cutting) Cemetery

Larch Wood

The third and final part of our visit to Hill 60 takes us to Larch Wood (Railway Cutting) Cemetery, some four hundred yards west of the hill, and the final resting place of many men who were killed in the almost continuous fighting that took place there.  Continue reading

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