The Road to Passchendaele Part Four – New Irish Farm Cemetery

Posted on June 16, 2011 by Magicfingers

So, we started this mini-tour at La Belle Alliance Cemetery, with its 60 British burials; we then visited Divisional Collecting Post Cemetery & Extension, where just over 750 men are buried; now we arrive at New Irish Farm Cemetery, where 4716 men are buried or commemorated.  This place contains only a few hundred fewer graves than at Bedford House (a big place, as you will know, if you have accompanied Baldrick and myself on our tour of the cemeteries to the south of Zillebeke), yet concentrated in a much smaller area.  Not much space here, but lots of flowers.

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The Road to Passchendaele Part Three – Divisional Collecting Post Cemetery & Extension

Posted on June 14, 2011 by Magicfingers

Divisional Collecting Post Cemetery & Extension, as seen from the grass path leading to La Belle Alliance Cemetery.

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La Belle Alliance Cemetery

Posted on June 2, 2011 by Magicfingers

About a mile and a half north, and slightly east, of Ypres (yes Baldrick, I know… Ieper), CWGC signposts point the way to the three cemeteries we shall be visiting on this mini-tour.  Although all three are sited on land held by the British throughout the war, for much of the time they were not so very far behind the front lines, as the accompanying trench map from April 1917 (see the Trench Maps section) clearly shows.

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Zantvoorde British Cemetery (Part One) & the Ten Brielen Bunker

Posted on May 29, 2011 by Magicfingers

Zantvoorde British Cemetery is unusual, at least compared to the other cemeteries we have so far visited, in that it didn’t exist until after the war.  Unsurprising really, bearing in mind that the Germans took the village of Zantvoorde (now Zandvoorde) at the end of October 1914 and held it for nearly four years, until the end of September 1918.  After the Armistice, bodies recovered from the surrounding battlefields (and perhaps further afield) and from nearby German cemeteries were brought here to be re-interred, which explains why the majority of the men who now lie here are unidentified.  Of a total of 1583 burials, 1135 have no known name.

View looking west along the cemetery wall towards the village of Zandvoorde and Zandvoorde Church in the background.

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Xth Corps Burial Instructions

Posted on May 28, 2011 by Magicfingers

Interesting, desperately tragic, yet entirely pertinent to the content of this website, these instructions for the recovery and burial of the dead were circulated by Xth Corps prior to the British attack on the Messines ridge on June 7th 1917.

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A Tour of Zillebeke Part Nine – Spoilbank Cemetery

Posted on May 24, 2011 by Magicfingers

And so we arrive at the final destination of the first part of our Zillebeke tour, Spoilbank Cemetery, named after the banks of spoil heaped nearby when the cutting for the now disused Ypres-Comines canal was originally dug.  520 men, one fifth of them unidentified, are buried here, the majority from between February 1915 and March 1918, although further burials were brought in from the surrounding battlefield after the war.

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A Tour of Zillebeke Part Eight – Chester Farm Military Cemetery

Posted on May 22, 2011 by Magicfingers

On leaving the Bluff we need only travel half a mile or so west to reach the final two cemeteries on our tour. Only a few hundred yards apart, these cemeteries contain more than 900 British burials, mainly from between early 1915 and late 1917 (although Spoilbank Cemetery was in use until 1918). The most northern of them, and our first stop, is Chester Farm Military Cemetery.

Although a handful of burials were made here in March 1915, it was the East Surreys and the Manchester Regiment who began using the cemetery on a, sadly, more regular basis in April 1915. It continued in use until November 1917.

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