Wulverghem-Lindenhoek Road Military Cemetery

The leaves are turning in Flanders Fields. 

The area between Mont Kemmel (in green, top left corner) and the front line trenches (German in red, the British front line marked as a dotted blue line), a distance of about two and a half miles, is a relatively unexplored area, devoid of the pilgrims who flock to the Ypres battlefields further to the north & east.  Even the many who visit the Pool of Peace at Spanbroekmolen (square 30), and who doubtless gaze at the view across the valley to the west, and who may even take the Kemmel road from Wytschaete (off the map top right) to visit Mont Kemmel itself, are unlikely, unless they have a specific reason, to find themselves exploring the fields further south.  These fields contain a number of CWGC cemeteries, several of which (those marked in pink) we have visited before, and a few (in orange) that we haven’t, but are about to.  We begin at the orange dot in square 4 on this June 1916 map, which marks the position of Wulverghem-Lindenhoek Road Military Cemetery.

It’s another beautiful late-autumn day, cold and clear, as we arrive at the cemetery,…

…where the raised ground beyond the northern boundary wall alongside the road…

…presents a rather unusual facade,…

…with the base of the Stone of Remembrance…

…a continuation of the cemetery wall.

Beyond the Stone, the cemetery can be accessed up these steps,…

…a quick peek inside the entrance building (if there wasn’t a tree in the way, I’d tell you that that’s Mont Kemmel on the horizon to the right – it seems I have anyway.)…

…revealing the ‘In Perpetuity’ tablets inlaid into the interior wall,…

…after which this is the view on entry.  Today, just over a thousand men are buried here, around a third of whom are unidentified.  The cemetery plan, courtesy of the CWGC, can be found here.

And what is immediately evident is that we have a cemetery of two distinct sections, the headstones in the background placed in blocks, while those in the foreground are widely, and more irregularly, spaced, a fairly sure sign that we have both original and concentrated graves here.

Which is exactly the way it is.  At the time of the Armistice, the cemetery consisted of these five rows of burials, now designated as Plot I, with the plots in the background,…

…of which there are four, all being men who were brought in after the war from nearby battlefield graves, or from smaller burial grounds around Messines, Wulvergem & Neuve Eglise.

And there were plenty of them, as emphasised by this contemporary map showing all of the British cemeteries, each individually numbered, that dotted the landscape to the north & south of the Douve at the war’s end.  Our current position is marked by the dark orange dot, and the five blue circles have no relevance whatsoever at this point, and will be explained later on.

Of the 159 burials in Plot I, all are either British or Canadian, all but five are identified, and the majority – three-quarters – were killed in 1915.  Nonetheless, there are original burials from all five years of the war to be found in the plot, including two burials from December 1914, the first burials made in the cemetery, which in its early days was known as Wulverghem Dressing Station Cemetery.

These two long rows of headstones in Plot I contain almost eighty burials, those in Row D in the foreground almost all British, and those in Row E behind almost exclusively Canadian, most of whom are casualties from the latter months of 1915.

The final few burials in both rows, those seen closest to the camera here, are British casualties from the autumn of 1918 but are still original burials, interred here at the time of their deaths.

Stone of Remembrance with the remaining rows of Plot I beyond.  Following the road eastward would take us, after a few hundred yards, through Wulvergem,…

…the church visible dead centre of the picture (we have visited the churchyard before),…

…and on to Messines (now Mesen), around two and a half miles away to the east, over on the far right of this trench map extract from June 1916, the German trench system marked in red.  As you can see, the German front line, on higher ground and overlooking the British, was not so far away, less than a mile at its closest, and what is also evident from this map are the three major streams* running behind the British front line, all presenting not only fairly obvious logistical problems, but also guaranteeing the conducting of operations in an icy wasteland during the winter months, and often in a flooded swamp at other times.

*the Douve, crossing the bottom of the map on its five-mile journey past Wulvergem and Messines on its way to Warneton and the River Lys; its unnamed tributary that runs north east just to the north of Wulverghem-Lindenhoek Road Military Cemetery (and still runs through the gardens of the two houses in the previous photo); and the Stuiverbeek, running roughly parallel to the British front line, about half a mile to its rear.

Two East Surrey men killed in July (left) & August 1915 in Plot I Row B, with two more July 1915 East Surrey casualties directly behind in Row C.

Cheshire Regiment serjeant in Row A in the right foreground, with four more Cheshire men in Row B behind, all five February 1915 casualties; the other headstone, on the far right in Row B, is a single Suffolk private killed in early March 1915.

The two central headstones in the previous shot are seen again here, with the church at Neuve Eglise across the valley on the horizon.

Looking roughly south towards the Cross of Sacrifice, the grave in the foreground in Row A that of an East Surrey Regiment serjeant killed in January 1915.  The headstone on the left marks the grave of a Norfolk Regiment private who died on 7th December 1914 and is the earliest original burial in the cemetery.

Of the 162 burials in Plot A, only five are unidentified, three of whom are buried here together in Row B,…

…the three headstones seen again here, the second group on the far right in the second row, the first four burials in the row York & Lancaster Regiment men killed in March 1915.  The burials at the start of Row A in the right foreground…

…are more men of the 1st Bn. Norfolk Regiment who died early in 1915, the first man in the row given a date of death of 1st February 1915,…

…next to him another unidentified soldier (now on the far left, and whom I shall return to, briefly, later), followed by four more Norfolk casualties, their dates of death, according to their headstones, from left to right; 31st, 30th, 28th & 30th January 1915, and further along the row…

…there are four more Norfolk men, all casualties from mid-February 1915, their dates of death, from left, as follows; 16th, 16th, 14th & 18th February.

At which point we’ll take a look at the fairly succinct 1st Bn. Norfolk’s war diary for January (above) & February (below) 1915,…

…and see whether we can match the casualties we have seen buried here with those mentioned in the diary.  And should you ever find yourselves doing exactly this, you do need to check the appropriate memorial to the missing (in this case the Menin Gate) as well before starting, which, in this case,…

… reveals a total of nine men of the 1st Bn. who died in early 1915 and who have no known graves, four in January, and five in February.  And you also need to check if there are any men buried in any other nearby cemeteries, which reveals six named 1st Bn. men buried in Dranouter Churchyard, including the two officers, Davis & Otter, who are mentioned in the war diary.  So, if we then look at the 1st Bn. Norfolk Regiment casualties buried in both burial grounds, those listed on the Menin Gate, and those mentioned in the war diary in table form,…

Identified Burials in Wulverghem-Lindenhoek Cemetery	Identified Burials in Dranouter Churchyard	Number of Names on the Menin Gate Memorial	Number of Killed listed in War Diary
TOTAL (BOTH BURIAL GROUNDS): 18		TOTAL: 9	TOTAL: 15
		8th January - 2	8th January - 2
		15th January - 1	15th January - 1
28th January - 1			28th January - 1
29th January - 1
30th January - 1	30th January - 1		30th January - 1
31st January - 2		31st January - 1	31st January - 2 (changed to 3)
1st February - 1
14th February - 1	14th February - Lieutenant Davis		14th February - Lieutenant Davis
	15th February - Captain Otter		15th February - Captain Otter
16th February - 2
		17th February - 1
18th February - 1	18th February - 1		13th-18th February - 2 officers (above) & 5 men
19th February - 1
		24th February - 2
25th February - 1		25th February - 2
	26th February - 2

…this is what it looks like, and you can see where there are exact matches, which is always marvellous, and where there are not, which is often expected, and which is why, if you extrapolate all this across wider areas of Great War research, I am always a bit of a cynic when people tell me they know the exact time, place and means of great grandad’s demise.  Anyway, make of this what you will – and I have my own explanations for some of the discrepancies, number one being that the war diary is a transcript of some sort and hardly inspires confidence with its accuracy – but it does show the minefield encountered when you get down to the details.

A final thought on the unidentified soldier buried beneath the second headstone in Row A (above, both photos).  The men buried on either side of him, both 1st Bn. Norfolk men, are given dates of death of 1st February (left photo), and 31st January (right photo).  If you look back at the list of 1st Bn. Norfolk men whose names appear on the Menin Gate because their bodies were lost, you will find just one name, Private Herbert Gotsall, who died within two weeks, either side, of these dates, and the fact that he too died on 31st January 1915, according to the CWGC, well, my guess is that this unknown soldier is most likely him.  Not scientific, I accept, but logical, surely?

Returning to our exploration of Plot I, these headstones in Row C include a handful of 1917 burials,…

…five of these six graves men killed on 5th June 1917, the exception being the subaltern on the far left who died on the following day, 6th June.  Despite this, he still shares the same grave reference of I. C. 5 (Coll.) as the three men buried alongside him.  On 7th June 1917, of course, the Battle of Messines would begin with the explosion of nineteen huge mines beneath the German front lines up on the ridge, after which the front lines would move a distance east, at least until the spring of 1918, and accounts for the scarcity of burials in cemeteries such as this between June 1917 & April 1918.

Canadian burials from November 1915 at the start of Row D, with many more in the row behind; thirty five of the forty two men buried in Row E are Canadian, most, as mentioned earlier, killed in 1915.

View from the cemetery’s eastern corner looking west.

Cross of Sacrifice, Wulvergem church beyond.

Each of the four remaining plots contains two hundred and ten burials split into seven rows with thirty burials in each, the rows themselves with small gaps following the tenth and twentieth headstones, as can be seen here as we look west, Plot II closest to the camera.

All but one of the burials in the first part of Plot II Row A are unidentified,…

…and as we continue along the row only the first and last of these next ten headstones are identified, the unidentified including two South Africans (second and third from left).

The row ends with nine identified men, including, fourth from left, the only identified South African casualty buried in this cemetery, Private A. J. Lilley (Tilley on the Burial Return form below), South African Infantry, who died on 11th April 1918,…

…the one unidentified man another South African soldier ‘Known Unto God’.  Of the 840 men now buried in Plots II, III, IV & V, 349 are unidentified.

Panoramic view of Plot II, closest to the camera, and Plot III, in the distance to the right.

As we continue past the Cross of Sacrifice…

…down the edge of Plot II,…

…this shot shows the seventh and final row of the plot, Row G, on the right, and, after the gap, the seven rows of Plot IV on the left.

Plot IV, Rows G & F (above left), & Rows E & D (above right).

Looking north from the southern corner of the cemetery, Row G, the final row of the plot, in the foreground.  Strangely, the edge of the headstone closest to us, on which you would expect to find the plot number and row letter, is blank, which is not the case if you look at Row F, on the right, or any of the other rows, for that matter.

I think that the reason may be that there was once, until not so long ago (modern GRRF above left, dated 2003), at least one special memorial ‘behind Plot 4’ (GRRF above right) that is now to be found at the end of Plot I Row A (inset above left),…

…and which I would bet was once here, at the end of the row, where the grass still doesn’t seem to want to grow.

Dappled shadows on white headstones, blue sky above green grass, vast explosions lifting the Messines Ridge in the background many years ago now,…

…Plot V Row G, both photos.

View looking roughly north east across Plot V from the cemetery’s western corner.

Plot V, right foreground, & Plot IV, left background.  The CWGC website names five of the long-gone cemeteries from where men were exhumed and reburied here – Auckland Cemetery (57), Cornwall Cemetery (412), Frenchman’s Farm (634), Neuve-Eglise North Cemetery (1148), Neuve-Eglise Railway Siding Cemetery (322) – the numbers corresponding to those on the earlier map showing all the old cemeteries, these the five cemeteries marked by those blue circles I mentioned at the time.  However, the bodies of only ninety six British & New Zealand soldiers in total were exhumed from these five cemeteries, far short of the more than eight hundred concentration burials now to be found in Plots II to V.

Plot III Rows C & D (above), and B & A (below).

The cemetery also contains around fifty men killed in the defence of Kemmel during the German offensive in the spring of 1918, and over one hundred and fifty men who died during the final Allied advance in September & October 1918.

Actually, let’s zoom in a little and look at the background of this picture, towards the Messines Ridge on the horizon in the centre, although it’s not really much of a ridge at all, as you can see.

Yet it dominated the land we are standing on for the best part of three years, just like its contours on this 1914 map suggest it should (Wytschaete, at the north of the ridge, in purple & Messines, at the south, in blue, with our current position marked as the orange dot in square 4).

Unsurprisingly, the temptation to flood the lowlands of the valley of the Douve with gas proved irresistible to the Germans on the Messines Ridge from time to time.  One such instance took place in the spring of 1916, when, just after midnight on 30th April, clouds of greenish-yellow gas, a mixture of chlorine & phosgene, descended on the British lines down here in the valley.  The British had received warnings of a likely gas attack, not least because British artillery had already exploded a number of gas cylinders behind the German lines, the release of their coloured contents spotted by British artillery observers, and because German deserters had told them that a gas attack was imminent.  Despite suffering over 550 casualties from the gas, improvements in gas masks and anti-gas procedures since the days of Second Ypres and the later chlorine & phosgene gas attacks at Wieltje in December 1915 allowed the British to successfully fight off the German raiding parties, whose primary task had been to find and destroy the entrances to the mines that they were convinced, rightly, were being slowly but surely excavated beneath No Man’s Land as the British targeted the Messines Ridge.  The above map, published in 1932, shows the northern & southern limits (highlighted in blue) of the huge cloud of gas released on 30th April 1916, our position once again marked with an orange dot; a similar event on 17th June the same year produced similar numbers of casualties with a similar result.

Looking north east, the first two rows of Plot III on our right, the remaining rows all in Plot I, and in the distance, the Messines Ridge.

Panning left, I spy Baldrick and a short row of headstones along the cemetery wall on the far left, but before we visit them,…

…if we take a look at the front row of Plot III, eight of the first ten soldiers in Row A died on 7th June 1917 on the opening day of the Battle of Messines,…

…including these four men of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment on the far right of the previous picture,…

…as did a number in the two remaining sections of the row (above & below).

In total sixty four British casualties of the Battle of Messines are now buried among the concentration burials in this cemetery, fifty two of whom died on 7th June 1917, the first day of the battle, alongside forty seven New Zealand soldiers who also died the same day.

Back to the headstones along the wall, whose raison d’être is explained by the presence of a Duhallow Block,…

…’To the memory of these seven soldiers of the British Empire killed in action in 1915 and buried at the time in Cornwall Cemetery Messines and Frenchman’s Farm Wulverghem whose graves were destroyed in later battles’.  Both burial grounds are among the five mentioned earlier and marked by blue circles way back on the map of old cemeteries.

Original GRRFs for the seven men, those listed on the form on the right…

…the five men now remembered to the right of the Duhallow Block.

Back at the Stone of Remembrance,…

…as ever it’s time to move on,…

…our next stop almost due north of here, just six hundred yards away across the fields.  Incidentally, should you decide, following my little tour, that you are so enamoured with the place that you are already booking your Eurostar tickets and packing your bags, be aware that there are restoration works going on to the cemetery boundary wall alongside the road until March 2025, which might make Plot I Row A, where the majority of the Norfolk burials can be found, difficult to access.  Otherwise, I hope 2025 is the best 2025 it can be for all of us.  Thanks for your continued support, good people.