French Flanders: Neuve Chapelle Part Three – Neuve-Chapelle British Cemetery

There’s a track down the left edge of this cornfield, and beyond, some trees on the horizon that we’ve seen before, if from the other side. 

This is the same cornfield that we found ourselves in last post, when we were three hundred yards the other side of the trees,…

…and at the end of the track,…

…this is Neuve Chapelle British Cemetery, once known as Moggs Hole Cemetery, apparently,…

…wherein lie the bodies of fifty five British soldiers, all of whom died between March & November 1915.

Cross of Sacrifice,…

…and on the left, six special memorials lining the cemetery’s southern boundary, and we shall be taking a closer look at them later,…

…but we’ll begin on this side, because we might as well visit each row in turn in this little cemetery,…

…and Row A – there is just one plot here, as the cemetery plan shows – consists of the single headstone closest to the camera,…

…that of an unidentified soldier, one of eight unknown men buried here.

The Duhallow Block…

…remembers four officers of The Rifle Brigade who were killed in action during the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, according to their headstones on 12th March 1915, and originally buried elsewhere,…

…and a private of the Worcesters, on the far right, who died in June 1915, the bodies of all five later lost.

The inscription on the Duhallow Block reads, ‘To the memory of these soldiers of the British Empire killed in action in 1915 and buried at the time in Neuve Chapelle Churchyard whose graves were destroyed in later battles’.

The relevant GRRFs for the five special memorials (there’s an amendment on the form on the right dated 9/7/85, which is an intriguingly late date for an amendment), and as we saw last post, there are discrepancies between the dates on the headstones and the dates on the GRRFs; one wonders whether the red amendment of 12th March (on the right) has been assumed to apply to all four officers, which is not how I read it.

Row B consists of the eight headstones seen here on the left,…

…the four at the end from July & August,…

…and those at the start of the row casualties from June & July 1915.  Behind,…

…Row C, the longest row,…

…begins with two privates of the Manchester Regiment killed on 25th July 1915, next to two of four unidentified men in the row,…

…another to be found at this end, alongside a Black Watch private who died on 10th March 1915, one of just three men buried here killed on the opening day of the Battle of Neuve Chapelle although, unlike Neuve-Chapelle Farm Cemetery, this cemetery cannot be called a Battle of Neuve Chapelle cemetery.  Only five men actually buried (as opposed to remembered) here were killed during the battle, and of those, two of the graves have been lost, the men’s names now to be found on two of the special memorials we saw briefly earlier, and will see again later.

Once the battle had ended, the new British front line ran along the eastern outskirts of Neuve Chapelle, and there it remained for much of the war, as this map extract from June 1916 shows.  The cemetery, marked in pink, about half a mile behind the front line (broken blue line), was a convenient place to bury men for the remainder of 1915, but thereafter it became too dangerous a place to use, hence the plethora of cemeteries we have already visited further back behind the lines.

Row D contains ten burials, these men, the final four in the row,…

…and this man, out of shot to the left of the previous picture, all Sherwood Foresters killed in June 1915.

At the other end of the row, the first four burials are all men of the Royal Berkshire Regiment, the private on the left another of the 10th March casualties, and the three men in the centre killed on 15th March, according to their headstones, although once again we have discrepancies between these dates and those on the GRRF (below).  Other than a single man buried here on 30th March 1915, there were no further burials until June, the cemetery then used every now and then until the final burial in November 1915.  On the right of this shot, a seventeen year-old Manchester Regiment private killed in July 1915.

Row E, on the right, contains just four graves, three identified, and one of which, furthest from the camera (no close-up I’m afraid) is a private of the East Lancashire Regiment killed on 12th March.

Row F contains seven graves, six of whom are Manchester Regiment men killed in September and October 1915,…

…the seventh, the central headstone, another of the unidentified men buried here,…

…and apart from a Sherwood Forester who died in June, the other four men in Row G at the back of the cemetery are also Manchester Regiment privates who died in September or October; the man on the far right is the penultimate burial to be made here, on 31st October 1915.  A look through the 1st Bn. Manchester Regiment war diary shows that these men were all part of the daily wear and tear during the battalion’s tenure of the line to the south of Neuve Chapelle in the autumn of 1915, although I did spot an intriguing entry that I’ll show you at the end of the post.

Looking back down the cemetery, the houses of Neuve Chapelle on the horizon,…

…the spire of Neuve Chapelle church visible beyond the Cross of Sacrifice,…

…and along the southern boundary wall, the row of special memorial headstones we saw on entering the cemetery.

It’s interesting to note that only four of the headstones have ‘Known to be buried in this cemetery’ inscribed upon them, the other two having ‘Buried elsewhere in this cemetery’ instead.  I usually assume that ‘Known’ means ‘buried as an unidentified man beneath a CWGC headstone’, so ‘Buried elsewhere’ probably means ‘buried within the cemetery boundaries, but no one knows where’.

The Lincolnshire Regiment private at this end of the row died on 18th November 1915, and as we know that his body is somewhere in the cemetery, he qualifies as the final burial made here.

More interesting, perhaps, are the dates of death of the two officers of the 2nd Bn. Royal Berkshire Regiment killed on 10th March, whose memorials begin the row.

Captain Thomas Rupert Aldworth, aged 32, who was the 2nd Bn. adjutant, and Lieutenant Alfred Hewgill Saunders, aged 22, both died on 10th March,…

…as this page from the 2nd Bn. Royal Berkshire war diary* confirms.

*we saw earlier extracts from the battalion’s war diary when visiting Fauquissart Military Cemetery a short time ago.

Cross of Sacrifice,…

…and one of two seats, one on either side…

…of the cemetery entrance.

Back outside the cemetery walls, and back in the cornfield.

Seven feet tall, I would guess, in the summertime the corn hides what was once a field of pain and death.

And it’s still a bit spooky, let me tell you.

These two pages from the 1st Bn. Manchester Regiment war diary raised an eyebrow when I read them.  Relieved by the Connaught Rangers on 12th October 1915, the battalion went into billets the following day, and remained there until 27th October when they would in turn relieve the Connaughts.

However, there’s an entry at the top of this page, in the middle of their rest period, that reads,’5230 L/C Williams died from result of being stabbed’.  That doesn’t sound so good in the middle of a period out of the line, now does it?  Lance Corporal Williams is buried in St. Vaast Post Military Cemetery, where I will show you around at some not-too-distant point.  I wonder what happened.

We’ll finish with the 1915 map I showed you last post, Neuve Chapelle Farm Cemetery in green, Neuve Chapelle British Cemetery in mauve, and the war memorial in the centre of the village, our next stop, now added in light blue.