Packhorse Farm Shrine Cemetery

This is one of those Flanders cemeteries that not only has few visitors, but my guess is that many of you have never heard of it. 

And why would you?  It’s in the middle of nowhere, was only used for a matter of months,…

…less than three, in fact, and there are only 59 burials here,…

…all but five of them split evenly between just two battalions.  Once inside,…

…with a little imagination, it’s not too hard to picture this little cemetery back in the autumn of 1915, long before the headstones had been erected and the Cross and walls had even been considered, when just a few rows of already, perhaps, neglected, rickety, crosses marked these men’s graves down here in the valley amongst a sea of dried mud, shell-holes and gas-yellowed, barren trees, beneath the gaze of the German machine-gunners up on the ridge in the background.

The burials are split into two distinct sections, with three rows, D to F, at this end, although only the shadows of some of the headstones in the final row are visible in these first shots,…

…and three rows, Rows A to C, at the far end of the cemetery.  The cemetery plan, thanks as ever to the CWGC, can be found here.

This time we have a different church just beyond the horizon, two miles away, than we have seen in the previous few posts, and one that you might recognise, if I give you a closer look,…

…as the rebuilt, in 1926, church at Wytschaete, seen here in 2023, not so far off a hundred years later, with the village war memorial in the foreground.

Back in the cemetery, the Cross of Sacrifice, in the northern corner of the cemetery,…

…features the ‘In Perpetuity’ tablets inlaid into the brick structure beneath, along with a handy seat that I seem to remember taking advantage of.  Note there is no sign of a Visitor’s Book, nor Cemetery Register, to be seen here, nor at the cemetery entrance, the cemetery being deemed too small for either.  Before we continue, a reminder, should you need it, that, if you start clicking on the pictures, war diary extracts & documents (there are quite a few) presented herein, all should increase in size nicely (basically, click to enlarge).

Returning to the view away to the north east beyond the headstones of Row A, the German front line once followed the contours of the horizon, looking down on the British front line positions below them, but the Germans could also see a couple of miles into the British rear area – the burials in this cemetery would have been made at night* for this very reason.  The highest point on the horizon marks the site of the explosion at Spanbroekmolen, one of the nineteen huge mines that, quite literally, blew the Germans off their positions on the Messines Ridge on the morning of 7th June 1917.

*I would be interested to know whether camouflage netting, such as we have seen down in French Flanders, was used in the Douve valley, but even if it was, I would be surprised if it was in use as early as 1915.  Panoramic photographs of the valley itself are difficult to come by and don’t appear to show any signs, but that’s the whole point of camouflage, isn’t it?  The point is, if netting was being used, then it’s possible that burials could have been made during daylight, but I somehow doubt it.

Of the twenty nine burials in Rows A, B & C, twenty seven are men of the 1/5th Bn. Lincolnshire Regiment, whose first introduction to the trenches in this sector came on 9th April 1915,…

…and this page from the battalion war diary lists the state of the various trenches they took over on that day.  The comments on trench E1L, near the bottom of the page, make chilling reading; ‘the worst trench of them all. Dead bodies are even half exposed in the parados’.

And for those of you who may be unsure, here’s a cross-section of a typical drawing-board trench, the enemy is off to the left, the parapet is marked in green, and at the back of the trench, the parados is marked in blue.

The 1/5th Lincolns would then spend the next three months or so rotating, usually with the 1/4th Leicesters, in and out of the trenches hereabouts, although it would be a single day during that period that would see them suffer their biggest casualties.  Ten of the men buried here in Row A were killed on 20th May 1915, and a further three at the start of Row C,…

…and the war diary tells us exactly what happened.  The Lincolns had most recently relieved the 1/4th Leicesters on 19th May 1915, spending the rest of the day ‘cleaning up trenches & clearing drains of same.’  The following day, ‘E1L was blown up by a mine at 3 pm. Weeks of hard work wrecked in a second. Casualties among garrison & rescue party amounted to 11 K, 22 W, 4 missing (believed killed).’

Among those killed were two brothers, Private Ernest Arthur Proctor, pictured in the inset sitting alongside his younger brother James.  Ernest’s grave is the furthest right in Row A directly below the brothers’ photo, and James’ (mainly obscured) headstone is the first in Row C, third from the front on the far left.

There are no relevant maps in the Lincoln’s war diary, but a look in the Leicester’s diary reveals a number of excellent hand-drawn maps, including the one from which I have taken the above extract.  It shows Packhorse Farm in the bottom left corner, Pond Farm a little further east, and R.E. Farm still further east, all three of which today are host to CWGC cemeteries, and five hundred yards or so north of R.E. Farm you’ll spot the ‘E’ trenches, with E1L clearly marked.

22nd May: ‘Rebuilding parapet in E1L. Parts of two bodies were recovered, one being identified as belonging to Pte Robinson’.

And Private Robinson, or at least whatever was identified as Private Robinson, is buried here, on the left, with, alongside him, the penultimate burial in Row A, and one of only two non-Lincolns in the first three rows, Sapper E. Knapper, Royal Engineers, who died on 22nd May 1915.

The final burial in Row A, closest to the camera, is another Lincolnshire man, Company Serjeant Major S. B. Wright, who was killed on 27th May 1915,…

…and whose death is also noted in the war diary.

Row B, the Royal Army Medical Corps private buried at this end the other non-Lincoln burial in the first three rows (note Wulvergem church on the horizon to the right).  The other seven casualties in the row…

…are casualties from April and early May 1915, and those behind in Row C are from later in May, with three June burials at the far end of the row.  Private James Emerson Proctor’s headstone is clearer in this shot, furthest left in the second row.  And then, after a respectable gap,…

…the 1/4th Bn. Leicestershire Regiment burials begin, because Rows D, E & F are almost entirely burials from just this one battalion.  These first graves in both Rows D & E are the earliest burials from April 1915,…

…all ten burials in Row D in the foreground being Leicester casualties.

The men buried at this end of the row all died in May 1915, the sergeant buried closest to the camera one of three men killed on 10th May,…

…as noted in the Leicester’s war diary (the column on the right lists the casualties).

A second man killed that day is buried beneath the central headstone seen here in Row E in the foreground – there are burials from April, May & June in the row – and behind, in Row F,…

…the officer killed on 10th May, Second Lieutenant A. C. Clarke, lies beneath the headstone at the start of the row.

Looking north west across the Leicester’s plot from the cemetery’s southern corner, Mont Kemmel on the left horizon.

As we pan right, the farm about six hundred yards away on the far right was known as Spy Farm in 1915, and it was from there that a major British communication trench called Regent Street began, the men entering the trench under the cover of the ruined farm buildings.  The low brown building to its right that appears to be part of the same group of structures is actually another farm slightly further away once called Pom Pom Farm, and all are marked on our earlier map.  Anyway, while we’re here, just over the cemetery boundary on our right,…

…here’s a waterlogged shell crater if ever I saw one,…

..except that it absolutely isn’t, because you will find this small pool on all the maps in this series of posts, and it was most certainly here prior to the Great War.

Back in Row F, the first five Leicester burials in the row are all from May 1915; the sixth headstone, closest to the camera, marks the grave of Second Lieutenant Frederick Maxwell Waite, killed on 7th June 1915,…

…after being wounded on the evening of the 6th ‘when standing at S. end of E1L thro’ head (over eye) facing NW.’  Trench E1L again.  This combined war diary extract tells us that he died the following day on the way to Lindenhoek Dressing Station.

The final two graves in Row F are this Leicester private,…

…the only man killed when two high explosive shells were ‘dropped into F2……the second of which resulted in 9 casualties’ (you will find Trench F2 at the very top of the earlier map),…

…and, the final burial at the end of Row F, adjacent to the cemetery entrance, a Durham Light Infantry private killed on 17th June 1915.

These typed pages are the North Midland Division’s orders for taking over the trenches from the 5th Division, and give an idea of the huge logistical operations that were going on, every single day of the war, behind the lines of the British sector of the Western Front.  The North Midland Division, at this time, consisted of the Leicesters, Lincolns, North & South Staffs, and the Notts & Derby Regiment (Sherwood Foresters).  Note, close to the bottom of the centre page, ‘ISSUED by Cyclist Orderly at 7-30 p.m. to’, followed by a list of ten recipients, the stamp at the bottom confirming that this copy has been successfully received by recipient number five, the 4th Leicesters.

The first three pages are all dated 2nd April 1915, and the remainder, those that are dated, are from 4th April.

And if you take over trenches, you will soon need to be relieved, also necessitating more pages of orders,…

…which you can take a look at too, should you wish, the earliest of these documents, on the left, dated 12th April 1915.  Rotation in and out of the trenches was frequent, at least in the British Army, and took place, if feasible, over a twenty four hour period, ensuring that front-line trenches were never manned solely by troops inexperienced in the trench layout in a particular sector.

What these pages show is that there was a continual rotation between the 4th Leicesters & the 5th Lincolns, and indeed the 5th Leicesters & the 4th Lincolns, in this particular sector.

In fact, between the earliest of these documents and the final one,…

…12th April to 11th May, a mere month,…

…no less than fourteen reliefs take place before the final one detailed here where, on these two pages, ‘The North Midland Division has received orders temporarily to extend its present front Northwards……’, and ‘On the night of the 10/11 May the Lincoln and Leicester Infantry Brigade will take over from the Notts and Derby Infantry Brigade……The Lincoln and Leicester Brigade will then have three Battalions in the trenches.’

Not that everything always went smoothly, as Major T. T. Gresson, commanding 1/4th Bn. Leicesters, reveals here in his account of the events of 10th* & 11th May 1915.

*three Leicesters killed this day we have, of course, visited earlier.

Captain Henry Haylock is buried here at the end of Row E beneath the headstone on the left directly beneath his picture; if I had taken a photo from the other side, you’d have been the first to see it!

The war diary also includes this plan of a bivouac occupied by the 1/4th Leicesters in May 1915 (left), which, after a little searching (note that north on the plan is off to the left), proved to be within the orange square marked on the map on the right, between Mont Kemmel & Dranoutre,…

…which is itself within the area shaded mauve on this June 1916 map showing the wider area, the cemetery again marked in pink in square 33 (note the pond, already marked on this map).  Spanbroekmolen and the German front lines are marked in red on the western edge of the Messines Ridge on the far right, with the British front line marked as the dotted blue line, and the green area is, of course, Mont Kemmel.  There is an orange dot down in the right hand corner, and if you happened to be standing at that spot on 13th December 1914 gazing up the slope towards the village of Messines away to your east,…

…this would have been the view you would have seen, albeit briefly, before a diligent German sentry shot you.

Over the course of 18th & 19th June 1915 the Leicesters would leave this sector of the line for the final time, as would the Lincolns just a few days later, both making their way five miles north east to Sanctuary Wood where a seemingly impressed Lincolns’ diarist noted ‘Trenches form part of the famous YPRES salient’.

And Packhorse Farm Shrine Cemetery would be left unattended until at least the summer of 1917, and quite likely until 1918 or later.

There is yet one more cemetery in the valley of the River Douve that is new to us that we have yet to visit on this short tour, before, like the Leicesters & Lincolns, we leave the valley for the final time and, in our case, head west for pastures new.

In the meantime, if you have nothing better to do, and as we have mentioned the Spanbroekmolen mine, and seen its site up on the ridge a number of times these past few posts, you might like to take a closer look at what 91,000 lbs of ammonal can do to the landscape, and to the men who, in their eagerness to get to grips with the enemy who had tormented them from atop the ridge for over two years, simply got too close, too soon. Click here.