Pond Farm Cemetery

Another beautiful Flanders day, and a CWGC signpost.  Looks promising. 

And an information board showing the view looking east up to the crest of the ridge.  Compare the top half of this panoramic photo, the trees surrounding the Spanbroekmolen crater the highest point in the picture,…

…with this one taken from a few hundred yards further west.

Actually, the first time I visited Pond Farm, I didn’t.  And there was no information board at that time, either.  Many moons back now, at the end of a long day in Flanders Fields, Baldrick & I found ourselves in the region of Pond Farm Cemetery, without any prior knowledge of its exact whereabouts, which is some way from the road, as you’ll see in a minute,…

…and necessitates two signs, this one somewhat wonky,

…and even then we’d still got a fair way to go, because we aren’t going to be tramping across the field, are we?

So you know what we did?

With a turn to our right and a final look at the Kemmelberg a mile and a half away to the north west, we packed up and went home.  So near, and yet so far.

Some years later, and once again, as you’ve already seen, the sign on the roadside points us this way, although it would be a tad strange if it didn’t,…

…at the end of which we have a no-longer-wonky sign pointing between the farm buildings.

Did I say two signs?

Here’s a third.  And to the immediate left of the gate,…

…well, the whole Pond Farm thing would be a misnomer otherwise, would it not?  Its resident guardian did come over to say hello (inset), or at least that’s what I thought it was doing, but no, benign though it may look here, it was a fiery old bugger who really wasn’t having interlopers.  We moved on.

We are about six hundred yards north of our previous stop at Wulverghem-Lindenhoek Road Military Cemetery as we continue our walk around the perimeter of the field,…

…and eventually,…

…we arrive at the cemetery entrance.  The trek across the fields to the cemetery ensures that this is one of the less visited cemeteries in Flanders; I would imagine that most visitors have a specific, personal, reason for visiting.  But not Baldrick and me.  We’re here to document the last resting place of the almost three hundred British soldiers buried here, whoever they may be.

‘Please close the gate’.  Is that to stop things going in, or perhaps sneaking out, late at night, I wonder?  Note the three headstones along the wall beyond the gate; we shall return to them much later in the post.

Just inside the cemetery entrance…

…the ‘In Perpetuity’ tablets can be found inlaid into the wall,…

…and here’s the view on entry, looking from south west (left) to north west, Mont Kemmel on the horizon beyond the Cross of Sacrifice.  The three burials closest to the camera in the final row, Row Q…

…are three machine gunners killed on 6th June 1917, the day before the explosion of the nineteen huge British mines – the two craters left by the closest of which, at Kruisstraat, are less than a mile due east of here, closer than the site of the Spanbroekmolen mine up on the Messines Ridge we saw earlier – that would herald the start of the Battle of Messines.

The next row, Row P,…

…now seen here on the right, consists mainly, apart from at the far end, of more men killed in the first week of June 1917,….

…but as the headstone inscriptions all face away from us,…

…it would seem sensible to stroll down to the far end of the cemetery and take a closer look on the way back.  This shot looks across Row G (right) & Row F (centre – also closest to the camera in the previous shot looking back towards the Cross) towards the Kemmelberg on the horizon,…

…and here we see the first five rows, with Row E on the right.

View from the cemetery’s southern corner looking due north.  The building we have seen in previous shots, now on the far left…

…contains a seat and a map, on the wall, of the British sector of the Western Front.

The first burials in the cemetery were made in early July 1916 when six men of The Buffs (East Kent Regiment) were buried here, four in what is now Row A (foreground),…

…the headstones furthest left, third from left, third from right and furthest right, along with a couple in Row B behind.

The Rifle Brigade then buried seven men here between 7th & 12th July 1916, two in Row A (far left, and second from right), four in Row B and one in Row C.  There would be no further burials for the next two months until 7th September, after which the majority of the casualties buried here until early December 1916 were from the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers or the Royal Irish Rifles.

Looking back along Row A from close to the cemetery’s western corner, and if you take the opportunity to have a look at the cemetery plan at this point, you will see that fourteen of the seventeen rows in the cemetery (there is but one plot) are split by a grass corridor, with just a handful of burials in each row, such as the five above in Row A, to the corridor’s west.  All of these burials barring one, just over fifty in total, are later than most of those across the corridor, the majority from July or September 1917,…

…such as this R.F.A. bombardier in Row A, the centre headstone in the previous picture, who died on 22nd September 1917, and whose headstone tells us that he originally volunteered in March 1915,…

…and these two Manchester Regiment privates at the start of the row, both killed in the last week of September 1917.

September & July 1917 burials at the start of both Row B (foreground) and Row C behind.  Panning right,…

…here’s the continuation of Row B in shadow as we look across the cemetery in a north easterly direction.

October 1916 burials in Row D in the foreground.  However, if we zoom in on the headstones in Row E…

…these four Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers are among forty nine men of the regiment buried in this cemetery, the majority killed between September & November 1916, and all from the 9th, 10th or 11th Battalions.  It so happens that the four men buried here, from far right, Privates J. Allen, J. Love, W. Dane & W. Draper, are 9th, 1oth & two 11th Bn. men respectively, and as they all died within twenty four hours of each other, it seems as good an excuse as any to take a look at the war diaries of each battalion to see what was happening at the time.

Private Allen, 9th Bn., died on 19th November 1916, and the war diary, in the final lines of this page, describes an evening bombardment of the support line in which one officer and one man were killed, along with nine others wounded.

The 10th Bn. war diary combines a week into a paragraph (17th-23rd November), remarking, ‘..we had one man killed during the tour by a trench mortar’.  Private J. Love died on 19th November 1916, just like Private Allen, most likely killed by the same bombardment.

The 11th Bn. war diary mentions both Privates Draper & Dane by name, and again puts the blame on German trench mortars.

View looking back down the cemetery with Row F in the foreground,…

…before we continue our tour with these two casualties from July 1917 in Row G, as are the burials in Row H immediately behind.

York & Lancaster Regiment casualties from July 1917 in Row J,…

…the row continuing across the corridor with these Royal Munster Fusiliers killed in February 1917 as we now look west, the tree obscuring the site of the crater left by the Spanbrokmoelen mine up on the Messines Ridge.

Two men of the Royal Irish Regiment and an officer of the Royal Munster Fusiliers in Row J.  On the horizon, in the centre of the picture, the rebuilt church at Messines, and on the far right, the Irish Peace Tower within the Island of Ireland Peace Park.

York & Lancaster Regiment casualties from July 1917 in Row L,…

…the same row seen here again in the foreground.

Personal memorial in Row M.  Whether this conforms with what is actually allowed to be placed in a CWGC cemetery, I am not entirely sure.

Rifleman Horner is one of two men of the 8th Bn. Royal Irish Rifles who died on 5th April 1917 buried at the end of Row M,…

…and in a way it’s even sadder when you look at the war diary and all it says is ‘In the trenches. Quiet day. Weather bad.’

Five German casualties are buried in this cemetery,…

…two leutnants, both killed at the end of April 1918, along with a third man buried beneath this headstone at the start of Row N, and behind in Row O,…

…two men who died on 20th May 1917.

Southwesterly view down the cemetery’s western boundary from behind the first of the German headstones,…

…and a panoramic view from roughly the same spot.

Cross of Sacrifice and Mont Kemmel.

The penultimate row, Row P,…

…begins with two men of the Bedfordshire Regiment who died on 23rd July 1917, and two unidentified Cheshire Regiment men killed on 4th September 1918 who share the same headstone on the right.

According to the GRRF, both unidentified men belonged to the 1st/7th Bn.,…

… and the fact that the only two 1st/7th Bn. men listed on the Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing who were killed at any time close to that date are the two highlighted men listed above who are both given a date of death just twenty four hours earlier, strongly suggests, in a very similar way to the unidentified Norfolk soldier we likely identified last post, that we do probably know the identities of these two men.  That seems fairly straightforward, does it not?  We are only twenty four hours out, and what’s twenty four hours when it comes to the catastrophe of the Western Front?  We shall see.

The next three men are also 1/7th Cheshire casualties, although only the headstones of the first two, both privates, are engraved with the Cheshire emblem.  The third headstone features the emblem of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, although Second Lieutenant B. L. Brandon was attached to the 1/7th Cheshires at the time of his death.  Including the two unidentified soldiers & Second Lieutenant Brandon, there are ten men of the 1/7th Cheshires, all of whom died on either 3rd or 4th September 1918, buried in this cemetery; the five in Row P all share the same grave reference number of P3, from which you can draw your own conclusions.  The Gordon Highlander on the far right of this photograph was attached to the 21st Trench Mortar Battery, and was killed in action on 22nd September 1918.

There seems to me to be something fitting about a Flemish barn with a shattered roof overlooking a Great War cemetery.

View looking roughly west, Row O closest to the camera.

The grave of Lance Serjeant William Joseph Johnston, 13th Bn. Royal Irish Rifles, killed on 3rd June 1917 in the days preceding the Battle of Messines, aged 22 (we’ll look at the single grave behind towards the end of the post),…

…one of a number of men buried in Row P from different Royal Irish Rifles battalions who died in the days leading up to the battle.

The 13th Bn. R.I.R. war diary tells us that the battalion carried out a ‘successful raid’ on 3rd June, although not without casualties, William Johnston being the first man mentioned by name.

Another man who died in the week preceding the Battle of Messines and whose name also appears on the GRRF, is Rifleman John Hanna, 12th Bn. Royal Irish Rifles, who was killed on 2nd June 1917 aged just 19.  Hanna and four of his comrades died on the same day,…

…victims of the early morning German artillery bombardment on the dugout in Regent Street, or the sporadic shelling of the support trenches later in the day, as this extract from the 12th Bn. Royal Irish Rifles war diary tells us.

This almost reminds me, towards the end, of all those letters received by wives and sweethearts from junior officers which included the words ‘rest assured he died instantly and felt no pain’, or similar.  In this case, however, it may well have been true.

With Hanna’s headstone closest to the camera in the right foreground, this view once again looks directly at the Kemmelberg, less than two miles away to the north west.

The grave we saw earlier behind that of Lance Serjeant Johnston is that of Captain Edward Aubrey Persse, Royal Field Artillery, who was killed in action on 14th October 1918 aged 37, and is the final burial to be made here.  Fourteen identified British soldiers in total were buried here in September & October 1918 during the final Allied advance,…

…three of whom are now remembered by these special memorial headstones along the cemetery’s south eastern boundary wall that, you may remember, I suggested you take note of on entry.  All three are 1st/7th Cheshires, all three headstones bear the inscription ‘Known to be buried in this cemetery’,…

…and two are given dates of death of 3rd September 1918, the third man another who died the following day.  Wait a minute!   3rd September is the same date as the two men listed on the Menin Gate that we thought might well be buried beneath the headstone of those two unknown soldiers in Row P that we saw earlier.  Well that’s all rather annoying, isn’t it, because if we are disregarding that twenty four hour difference, then who’s now to say that it isn’t Cope & Trueman rather than Newman & Barker, the names on the Menin Gate, buried beneath the headstone?  Or, in fact, any combination of the four.  Or maybe, now that two has become four, none of them.  Or just one of them.  Because the third special memorial, that of Private E. Brown,…

…is given a date of death of 4th September (left), the same date as our two unknown soldiers (right), and as he is ‘Known to be buried in this cemetery’, he is certainly the most likely candidate for one of our unknown men, is he not?  And, sadly, who knows the identity of the other soldier?  Which is why, however much you may want to match research with facts via the shoehorn method, don’t ever do it!  As a postscript, all the other burials in Row P, from P5 to P20, are casualties from either June or July 1917, and although they do include one more unknown man, it seems most unlikely that he has anything to do with our Cheshire casualties from more than a year later.

I suppose it would be remiss, after all that, not to see if we can find out what actually happened on 3rd & 4th September 1918, although a quick check in the 1st/7th Cheshires war diary initially proved somewhat enigmatic, ‘See special narrative of operations attached’, which always makes me nervous, because attachments can become unattached, and unattached attachments tend not to be digitized, for the very reason that they have become unattached and subsequently lost, and sometimes, one fears, a very long time ago.

But not, thankfully, in this case, and so we’ll finish this cemetery tour with a look at what did happen during those days.

Click to enlarge, as ever.

Final view before we leave.

That’s quite a view of the Kemmelberg to see every day, although I presume that, should you be the owner of Pond Farm, and you walk this way many times each day, you don’t actually notice it any more.  Familiarity, and all that.

Just in case you have never bothered to inspect the back of a modern regulation CWGC signpost, you now don’t have to bother.

On heading north from Wulvergem, the first sign you are going to encounter, should you find yourself searching for Pond Farm Cemetery, is this one, still a mile from the cemetery entrance.  And next to the sign,…

…I don’t suppose we shall ever know who Bertie was, nor when this metal cross was made, but my guess would be a long time ago.  The date on the cross says 1917, and I suspect that this old cross was placed here by a local farmer, quite likely having once marked a battlefield grave, maybe turned up by the plough many years later, or maybe found in an old barn……but do feel free to make up your own story.  Mine involves an officer’s dog……

I mentioned it was late in the day on our first visit,…

…so as the sun sets on Pond Farm Cemetery, it’s time for us to head elsewhere.