French Flanders: Armentières, Nieppe & Steenwerck Part Eight – Steenwerck German Military Cemetery

As we head towards Steenwerck, our next stop finds us at the German Cemetery named after the commune.

And after the previous two lengthy posts, you can have a bit of a breather during this one.

Cemetery entrance (above & photos below).

The cemetery register (above & below) can be found just inside the entrance.

Twenty seven year old Leutnant Christian Schneehagen,…

…one of 2,048 German soldiers whose remains now lie here.

The cemetery was created in April 1918 during the German Georgette offensive,…

…and it must have been a peaceful place in the years after the war,…

…although not so much today, as the traffic on the motorway linking Lille with Dunkirk thunders past only a few yards to the north.

The central sandstone pillar was added between the wars.

More graves were added during the late spring and summer of 1918, and as the Germans began their retreat in August.

The metal crosses bear anything between one and four names, and, surprisingly in a cemetery of over 2,000 graves, just three are unidentified.

Yet more burials were moved here by the French authorities after the war, either from small groups of German burials or from individual battlefield graves in the area.

The Germans buried a considerable number of British soldiers here during 1918, and after the war 116 bodies were moved from here to Le Grand Beaumart British Cemetery, to the west of Steenwerck.

In April 1918, the Germans buried eight British soldiers, from four different regiments, incidentally, in this cemetery. Their graves were later lost, which often means destroyed by shellfire, but one wonders whether, on this occasion, the graves were simply lost after the German retreat. Perhaps they are all still here, buried together, somewhere in the cemetery. There is a Duhallow Block at Le Grand Beaumart British Cemetery that remembers them.