French Flanders: Richebourg Part Two – Rue-des-Berceaux Military Cemetery

Rue-des-Berceaux Military Cemetery was begun in January 1915, and when it closed in February 1917, only around one hundred & fifty men had been buried here. 

Inside the entrance, the ‘In Perpetuity’ tablet and cemetery register.  Do sign the visitor’s book, which you will also find in this cubby hole, should you visit.

And while you’re doing that, here’s a map*, with our current location marked as the pink oblong, at the closest point only three-quarters of a mile from the British front line trenches, here in blue, with the German trenches in red.  The trenches, once they had become fixed in late 1914, changed little in French Flanders over the following years, and the cemeteries, positioned as close to the front line as was feasible from a safety point of view, began to fill.

*this is a Brigade trench map from 1916, the wide margin on the right containing detailed printed notes on buildings, strong points & features beyond the German front line.  Click to enlarge.

The view on entry, however, shows far more than a hundred and fifty headstones.  The cemetery is effectively six long rows of graves split, roughly halfway, between Plot I directly in front of us, and Plot II at the far end.  The burials in Plot I are original, but those in Plot II are all concentrations, the men brought here from battlefield graves or smaller cemeteries after the war, so that today almost 470 men lie here.  You can check out the cemetery plan by clicking here.

Three Germans are buried in this cemetery, all three pictured here; incidentally, for those of you who like your Great War trivia, the North Staffs private to the left of the German headstone in Row B in the foreground is one of three unrelated Johnsons – all spelled the same way – buried in the row.

The German buried in Row B is unidentified,…

…but not the two at the start of Row A, both of whom are Battle of the Lys casualties (all three Germans must surely have been killed within days of each other), among the final burials made in the cemetery, and probably made by the Germans themselves, although it is possible that these men were originally buried nearby in one of the Edward Road Cemeteries (about which more later) before being moved here.

Leutnant Karl Schulz was a victim of the first day’s fighting on 9th April 1918, and Leutnant der Reserve Walter Meyer died on 12th April.

The earliest original burials are nine men buried further along Row A along the western boundary wall who died in the second week of January 1915.  Unfortunately, I have no close-ups; the two Grenadier Guards in the background of this shot are as close as I can show you, these men killed later in January 1915.  In the foreground in Row B, Corporal J. MacKenzie, Cameron Highlanders, was killed in action on 1st April 1915 aged 23.

Further along Row A, the graves of two Royal Berkshire Regiment officers, Captain William Joseph Cox (left), killed in action on 16th May 1915 aged 41, and on the right and pictured, Captain Gordon Belcher M.C., who died between 15th & 17th May 1915, the exact date unknown.

And a third here on the right, Lieutenant Charles Reginald Taffs, aged 26.  Taffs was killed in action at Festubert on 15th May 1915, and I think we can presume that the two captains in the previous shot were killed at Festubert too.  The British, Canadians & Indians suffered almost 17,000 casualties between 15th & 25th May 1915 during the largely unsuccessful attempt to pinch out the German salient at Festubert.  The headstones on the left in this shot are Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, also killed in May 1915.

The GRRF for Plot I Row A, with the two Germans at the top.  You can see the early Grenadier Guards casualties, the three Royal Berkshire officers’ names roughly halfway down, followed by the three Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders killed on 23rd May 1915 pictured in the previous shot, and then, after a single South Staffs casualty killed a few days earlier,…

…these ten men, all Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders also killed on 23rd May 1915, and all listed as having been originally buried under a single cross, who now share the same plot number of A22.

The Highlanders’ war diary explains all.  Forty men buried in this cemetery died between 15th May & 27th May 1915, all Battle of Festubert casualties, of which twenty seven are original burials here in Plot I.

July 1915 casualties in Row C, those behind in Row B from May 1915,…

…and April 1915 casualties further down Row C.  There are two lieutenant colonels, both commanding Indian battalions, and both killed on the same day, buried in this cemetery, one whose headstone I photographed, and one, seen here in Row B, partly obscured by the centre of the three headstones in the foreground, that I didn’t.

Lieutenant Colonel David Coley Young, commanding 1/4th Gurkha Rifles, was killed on 12th March 1915 while trying to save a wounded colleague during the Battle of Neuve Chapelle.  He was 45.

Casualties in Row D, these men killed on 9th & 10th May 1915,…

…and more May 1915 casualties in Row E, two men of the R.G.A. on the left, and two King’s Royal Rifle Corps officers on the right, including, far right,…

…Captain & Adjutant The Honourable Eric Edward Montague John Upton, twice Mentioned in Despatches (both after his death), killed in action on 9th May 1915, aged 30.

Most of the burials in Row F are from 1916,…

…these men killed in December 1916 (above & below),…

…and these men towards the start of the row in June 1916.

The first graves in the row are three Lancashire Fusiliers who died in May 1916…

…and whose graves are now in the left foreground as we pan across Plot I.  The three men buried closest to the camera at the start of Row E (and quite possibly the three unidentified men next in the row), and the first four men in Row D on the right,…

…one of whom is also unidentified,…

…are all men killed between 18th & 27th September 1918, and are the final burials made here during the war.

View looking towards the Cross, Rows D, E & F on our left, and Rows C, B & A on our right,…

…before we move on to the southern half of the cemetery and Plot II, all, remember, post-war concentration burials, which explains why the headstones are much closer together here than in Plot I.  As we are less than a mile from the front lines here, the process of interment was likely to be interrupted by German artillery unless carried out at night, in the dark, and I’d probably leave a bigger space between each grave, as has been done in Plot I, if I were in the burial party, too.  Row F, on the left,…

…is here obscured by Rows E & D, with Row C on the right,…

…and now on the left, with Row B in the centre, and Row A along the wall on the right. These graves have all been laid out as an extension of the original six rows in Plot I.

The nature of this end of the cemetery, is, however, very different from Plot I.  Here we have the first ten headstones of Row B in the foreground, and the first twenty two graves of Row A behind,…

…and what both photograph and these GRRFs tell you, if you combine the information they hold, is that only the very last man, furthest left, in Row A, and the penultimate headstone on the left in front in Row B, out of thirty two graves pictured, are men whose names are known.  In fact, of the one hundred and ten burials in Rows A & B, just that one man in Row A, and only three in Row B, are identified.  Which explains, if any of you noticed, why the two above GRRFs are not consecutive; there are no identified burials in Row A graves 33-55, nor in Row B graves 1-8, and thus no GRRF exists for those men.  One of the two identified men on the GRRF on the right…

…is Guardsman A. Pegg, Coldstream Guards, who died on 1st February 1916,…

…and whose picture had been left on his grave at the time of visiting.

I wonder whether those who left the picture know of his ultimate fate?  His name appears as the only identified soldier on this Burial Return Form, and, unusually, his specific cause of death has been noted.  He drowned on 1st February 1916, his body, you have to presume, not found for over a year, because he was eventually buried on 17th March 1917.  And reburied here in 1920.

And we know where he was found – I think it’s fair to assume that he would have originally been interred very close to where his body was discovered – which is where I have marked the dark orange square up in the top right hand corner of this map of the trenches from Christmas 1917.  Rue-des-Berceaux Military Cemetery is once again marked towards the bottom left as a pink oblong, and the other dots show small British cemeteries from which bodies were exhumed post-war and concentrated in Rue-des-Berceaux, the original cemeteries then closed down.  Closest to the current cemetery, the yellow dot shows the site of Albert Road Cemetery, in which at least twenty three British soldiers were once buried; a short distance to its right, the green dot is where Edward Road Cemetery No. 5, from where fourteen men were exhumed, was once sited, and further north on the same road is Edward Road Cemetery No. 1, where I can find the original grave sites of ten men (the CWGC website says twenty men were buried there); the orange dot further to the right is Edgware Road Military Cemetery, which originally contained twenty seven burials; and finally the blue dot in the top right corner, from where at least twenty soldiers were exhumed, although if this burial ground ever had a name, it is not marked on any of the old cemetery maps.  Because not all the Burial Return Forms are available, for reasons already explained, all these figures are minimums.

However, don’t be fooled into thinking that those cemeteries were the only places from which men were brought here post-war to be reburied.  With Rue-des-Berceaux Military Cemetery once again marked in pink and Neuve Chapelle in mauve, this compilation of maps shows the areas, shaded in orange, from which men were brought here either from the cemeteries we have just mentioned, from isolated graves, or from general battlefield clearance, which is a delicate way of saying that some of these men may well have lain on the battlefield for a number of years before they were finally found and buried.  The red section top left has been added just as a reminder that all this became German territory for a time in 1918.  It amuses me that for four years the British printed trench maps with little or no details of the area behind their lines, for obvious reasons, but once the Germans had occupied the area, well, everything & anything was printed; thus should you ever be researching British positions during the war, it may well be worth checking maps from the summer of 1918, because the positions now marked on the 1918 maps are nearly all British strongpoints and trenches turned by the Germans, and had quite likely, been there for a considerable time prior to 1918.

One day I might even create a map that shows where all the burials from a particular area were concentrated from, because our map still has an awful lot of squares that I have not shaded orange, all of which would have yielded corpses after the war, all of whom were subsequently buried somewhere, although not here at Rue-des-Berceaux.  Nor is there anything to say that these were the only men found in the orange squares; post-war, the exhumation squads would cover each area as many as six times, and there are almost certainly other cemeteries with men from these same squares buried within them.  The headstones we are about to see in Plot II are the men whose original burial sites are marked on the maps; the unidentified men pictured above in Row C are among a number of men, all unidentified, who were originally buried,…

…according to the relevant Burial Return Form,…

…some three miles south of here, beyond the Festubert battlefield, and not far from La Bassée, in the four squares shaded here.

Of a total of 156 burials in Plot II Rows A, B & C, just seven are identified,…

…three of which can be found in Row C, as this GRRF shows,…

…all three pictured here.  On the left, Private G. Seavers, King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, who died on 22nd October 1914 aged 32, is the earliest identified burial, by date, in the cemetery.  He was originally buried, on his own, in orange-shaded square S25, down in the bottom left of our map.  The other two identified men, after the unknown soldier, are Private J. S. Bridgewater, Worcestershire Regiment, who died on 14th March 1915 aged 29, and Guardsman J. Arnold, Grenadier Guards, who died on 24th December 1914; Guardsman Arnold was originally buried in square S27, to the right of where Private Seavers was buried, and Private Bridgwater was found somewhere near Neuve Chapelle (square M35, the same square in which Guardsman Pegg was discovered, but a little distance away).  Who knows the secrets of the exhumation squads?

Continuing along Row C, one of these men identified as a man of the Northamptonshire Regiment (there are more in Row B, as seen in the previous picture),…

…and one here, on the far right, known to be a soldier of the Devonshire Regiment, but still anonymous.

Unidentified men of The Black Watch at the end of both Rows A (left) & B (right).

Time we headed for the other, eastern side of the cemetery,…

…past the Cross of Sacrifice,…

…this view looking west across the end of Plot II, the headstones we have just seen now in the background, Rows F & E in the foreground.

While we’re here, just over the other side of the cemetery wall on the right,…

…I found a friend!  Handsome chap.

I presume that was what he was thinking……

Rows D, E & F contain one hundred and forty five burials,…

…of which seventy eight are unidentified,…

…and it won’t surprise you to hear that all the men exhumed from the small cemeteries marked on our earlier map are to be found in this half of Plot II.

Six identified men in Row F, five from early 1915 and one, far right, from December 1914, the men listed on the GRRF below, and all once buried in Edward Road Cemetery No. 1.  On the far left,…

…at the base of the headstone of Sapper J. French, Royal Engineers, who died on 31st January 1915, a Death Penny.

Replaced.  Some bastard will’ve nicked it by now……

Still in Row F, this is the grave of the second of the high-ranking officers I mentioned earlier.  Lieutenant Colonel Percy Clare Elliott-Lockhart D.S.O., Queen Victoria’s Own Corps of Guides (Frontier Force) (Lumsden’s) Infantry, pictured below, was killed in action commanding 59th Scinde Rifles (Frontier Force) at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle on 12th March 1915.

The Queen’s Own Corps of Guides, a combination of infantry & cavalry, was formed in 1846 by Lieutenant Harry D. Lumsden in Peshawar, and was the first military force to adopt khaki as a service dress.

Identified burials, Black Watch & Middlesex Regiment, from late 1914 & early 1915 in Row F in the foreground*, unidentified burials in Row E behind, and more identified men, including six men of the Highland Light Infantry, all June 1915 casualties once buried in Edward Road Cemetery No. 5, in Row D.

*these concentration burials do not have Burial Return Forms, which are presumably missing, and thus I cannot tell you their original burial sites, although I am fairly certain that these men were once buried in one of the smaller cemeteries already mentioned.

Also in Row F, this is the grave of Captain William Hardinge Colvin Edwards M.C., The Black Watch, killed in action on 9th May 1915 aged 21 and originally buried in Albert Road Cemetery.  According to the information left at his grave by person or persons unknown,…

…his father was once Chief Constable of the London Metropolitan Police, and was appointed Commandant General of Rhodesian Forces before the Great War.  I used to know a Rhodesian guy, back in the 1970s.  He had been in the Rhodesian Army, as you had to be back then, as a teenager.  I remember – how would you forget – he told me a story about being out among the villages in the bush ‘pacifying terrorists’, or whatever term was used back then, and at one point he spotted the face of a soldier mate of his through the window of a local bar.  Unfortunately on entering to say hello, his mate’s face, along with his head, was the only part of him there.  Horrible stuff.

Edwards’ name can be found on this list of some of the men exhumed from Albert Road Cemetery and now buried in Row F,…

…as are these three men at the start of the row,…

…and all the burials at the start of Row E,…

…all of which are 1915 casualties, most from the spring of the year.

Behind, in Row D, most of the burials at this end are once again unidentified.

Looking south towards the Cross from between Plot II Rows D & C (above) before we turn around…

…and begin our journey back to the cemetery entrance.  I began this post by saying that this cemetery was originally in use between January 1915 and February 1917, according to the CWGC, but it is worth pointing out that after June 1916 the burials made here were few and far between.

Two men were buried here on 1st September 1916, and eleven in December, four in January 1917 and just one in mid-February (seen closest to the camera above in Plot I Row F – three of the January 1917 casualties are also visible, all these men members of trench mortar batteries), the three Germans we saw earlier in April 1918, and six more identified British soldiers in September 1918, along with perhaps four unidentified.  Quite why the cemetery is deemed to have closed in February 1917 as opposed to September 1918 or even June 1916, I have no idea.  There’s probably some document somewhere……

Along the northern boundary, on the far right of this shot, there are three special memorials,…

…remembering a private of the Lincolnshire Regiment who died on 20th November 1915, and two King’s Liverpool Regiment privates who died in October 1915.  All three headstones are inscribed with, ‘Killed in Action and buried at the time in Edgware Road Cemetery, Neuve Chapelle, whose grave was destroyed in later battles’,…

…although originally the text was to be slightly different, as this GRRF shows.

Only the headstone on the right has the usual ‘Their glory shall not be blotted out’ associated with Kipling Memorials, as special memorials headstones such as these were referred to, the other two bearing personal inscriptions, which is quite unusual.  For some reason, if you look closely at the two King’s Liverpool Regiment casualties, killed a couple of days apart, you will see noticeable differences between the two headstones; not only have different typefaces been used, but the regimental emblem differs wildly from one to the other.

On the left, the King’s Liverpool Regiment emblem – the White Horse of Hanover, actually – as used between 1898 & 1921, and on the right, the emblem that replaced it.  Neither of which resembles the running horse with the flowing tail we have just seen on Private Woodward’s headstone.  It’s the wrong horse, Gromit.

Looking across the whole cemetery from in front of the special memorials…

…before we take our leave.

Next post, we shall visit the other cemetery associated with Richebourg St. Vaast, and a fascinating place it is too.