Monthly Archives: Sep 2019

BARD COTTAGE CEMETERY

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Bard Cottage Cemetery

For much of the First World war, the village of Boezinge directly faced the German line across the Yser canal. Bard Cottage was a house a little set back from the line, close to a bridge called Bard’s Causeway. The cemetery was made nearby in a sheltered position under a high bank. Burials were made between June 1915 and October 1918 and they reflect the presence of the 49th (West Riding), the 38th (Welsh) and other infantry divisions in the northern sectors of the Ypres Salient, as well as the advance of artillery to the area in the autumn of 1917.

Grave of Lance Corporal Charles H. Smith, South Staffordshire Regiment

Among the graves is that of Lance Corporal Charles H. Smith, South Staffordshire Regiment. He died on 16th August 1917, aged 29, and came from Altrincham near Manchester.

Margaret Nolan, Co. Kilkenny, searching for the graves at Bard Cottage Cemetery

There are now 1,639 Commonwealth casualties of the First World War buried or commemorated in this cemetery. Of these burials, 39 are unidentified but special memorials commemorate three casualties known to be buried among them. The cemetery was designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield.

DRIVER P. MCKENNA

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Grave of Driver P. McKenna from Kilkenny

Driver P. McKenna service number 77374 was from Kilkenny, where his father Michael lived, according to the CWGC records. He served with D Battery 121st Brigade of the Royal Field Artillery.

CWGC memorial book at Bard Cottage cemetery

He died on August 19th 1917, aged 34. He is buried at Bard Cottage cemetery at Boezinge north of Ieper.

Bard Cottage Cemetery

ARTILLERY WOOD CEMETERY

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Artillery Wood Military Cemetery

Artillery Wood Military Cemetery at Boezinge near Ieper is the final resting place of the poet Lance Corporal Francis Ledwidgand the Welsh bard Hedd Wyn.

Artillery Wood Military Cemetery

he cemetery was established in 1917 after fighting in the immediate area – the Battle of Picked Ridge – had moved away and was used for burials until March 1918.

At the point of the armistice there were some 141 graves in the cemetery. Concentration from the battlefields and three smaller cemeteries (Boesinghe Chateau Grounds, Brissein House and Captain’s Farm) enlarged this to the present 1307.

Artillery Wood Military Cemetery

Artillery Wood Military Cemetery

Artillery Wood Military Cemetery

LANGEMARK GERMAN CEMETERY

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Not far from Ieper and just north of Langemark village on Klerkenstraat is the sombre Langemark German Cemetery. There are relatively few German cemeteries on the Western Front battlefields. As they had invaded, the land that France and Belgium was prepared to grant them was limited, in comparison to their British allies.

Although this cemetery is much smaller in area than Tyne Cot, in fact it contains many more burials because they are effectively in the form of several mass graves, although there are headstones (which are laid flat to the ground) as well. There are also occasional clusters of small crosses, but these are not grave markers.

Langemark German Cemetery

On entering the cemetery itself there is an inscription on a flat stone with a sculpted wreath. This records that 44,061 men are buried here. Ahead is the mass grave of nearly 25,000 men. The names of those known to be buried here are recorded on eighty-six upright bronze panels beyond this entrance.

Just to the left of this central inscription, on the edge of the first of the upright bronze panels is a plaque commemorating two British soldiers: Privates Albert Carlill (Loyal North Lancs) and Leonard Lockley (Seaforth Highlanders). Both died late in 1918. Carlill died as a prisoner of war aged 19, just a week before the end of the war.

Plaque to the two British soldiers buried at Langemark

The “Deutscher Soldatenfriedhof” (German Soldier’s Cemetery) in Langemark is particularly poignant because of its strength and simplicity. Over 44,000 Germans are buried behind the monumental gate made of pink Weserberg sandstone and almost 25,000 of these are buried in a mass grave. More than 3,000 student volunteers of the 22nd up to and including the 27th Reserve Corps found their last resting place here. They were killed in battle in October and November 1914 during repeated attacks in the First Battle of Ypres. The name of “Studentenfriedhof” (Student Cemetery) was given to the cemetery because of the large number of students among these volunteers.

toegangspoort Duitse begraafplaats_gecomprimeerd

At the entrance there is a heavy building reminding one of a bunker. It was erected in red Weser/Vesder sandstone and was meant to make the transition from everyday life to the cemetery itself and in that way create some distance.
There are three rooms in the entrance building: the central passage and two side rooms.
On the oak panels of the “room of honour” to the right, are inscribed the known names of 6,313 soldiers killed in battle who were buried in the original (lower part of the) cemetery. Fencing the cemetery, there is a low wide wall made of the same stone as the entrance building. Pollard willows grow on street side (as a guard of honour) and the right part of the former poppy field is surrounded by a wide ditch symbolising the flooding of the Yser front.

Poppy memorial outside Langemark German Cemetery

PTE THOMAS CARTHY

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Grave of Pte Thomas Carthy

Private Thomas Carthy was from Clonmel, Co. Tipperary. He was the husband of Mary Carthy of 34 River Street. He was killed on May 24th 1915 aged 47.

CWGC details of Pte Carthy

Private Carthy served with the Second Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment. He is buried in Poelkapelle Military Cemetery near Ieper. Another Irish grave I came across there was that of 7335 Rifleman Francis Dunne of the Royal Irish Rifles. He died on 16th June 1915 aged 29. The CWGC details do not reveal where he came from.

Grave of Rifleman F. Dunne

POELKAPELLE CEMETERY

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Poelkapelle Military Cemetery

Poelkapelle cemetery is the third largest Commonwealth Graves Commission cemetery in the Westhoek area near Ieper in Belgium.

New Zealand soldiers are buried at Poelkapelle

Among the soldiers buried there are some from New Zealand.

The great majority of the graves in this cemetery date from the last five months of 1917, and in particular October, but certain plots contain many graves of 1914 and 1915.

There are now 7,479 Commonwealth servicemen of the First World War buried or commemorated in Poelkapelle British Cemetery. Of the burials, 6230 are unidentified but special memorials commemorate eight casualties known or believed to be buried among them.

Other special memorials commemorate 24 servicemen buried by the Germans in other burial grounds in the area whose graves could not be located. There is also one burial dating from the Second World War.

The cemetery was designed by Charles Holden. Among those buried in the cemetery is Private John Condon of the Royal Irish Regiment, who at 14 is thought to be the youngest battle casualty of the First World War commemorated by the Commonwealth Graves Commission.

PTE JOHN CONDON

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Grave of Private John Condon

The youngest soldier to be killed in the Great War of 1914-18 was 2622 Private John Condon, of the 2nd Battalion Royal Irish Regiment and came from Waterford in Ireland. Like a quarter of a million other boy soldiers from all over Ireland and Great Britain, John was underage. He arrived at the Western Front in March 1915 and two short months later he was dead. Killed in a German Gas attack at a place called Mouse Trap Farm near Ypres, Belgium on the 24th of May, a day they say when a greenish yellow mist crept from the German lines with deadly poison. John’s grave is in Poelkapelle Military Cemetery (CWGC) and is now reputedly the most visited grave on the entire Western Front for obvious reasons. There, amongst thousands of white headstones, there is usually an array of poppies, flags and wooden crosses around the final resting place of young John Condon and a gravestone that says it all. 6322 Private John Condon 24th May 1915 Age 14.

CWGC memorial book at the cemetery

FRANCIS LEDWIDGE

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Francis Ledwidge (museum picture)

Visited the grave of Lance Corporal Francis Ledwidge, the poet from Slane, Co. Meath.

Visiting the grave of Lance Cpl Francis Ledwidge

The cottage outside Slane where Ledwidge lived is now a museum

Francis Ledwidge was fatally wounded in 1917 at Boezinge near Ieper in Flanders. We also saw his grave nearby. Ledwidge was also known as a poet and came from Slane, Co. Meath.

Grave of Lance Corporal Francis Ledwidge

Ledwidge seems to have fitted into Army life well, and rapidly achieved promotion to Lance Corporal. In 1915, he saw action at Suvla Bay in the Dardanelles, where he suffered severe rheumatism. Having survived huge losses sustained by his company in the Battle of Gallilopoli, he became ill after a back injury on a tough mountain journey in Serbia (December 1915), a locale which inspired a number of poems.

Ledwidge was dismayed by the news of the Easter Rising, and was court-martialled and demoted for overstaying his home leave and being drunk in uniform (May 1916). He gained and lost stripes over a period in Derry (he was a corporal when the introduction to his first book was written), and then, returned to the front, received back his lance corporal’s stripe one last time in January 1917 when posted to the Western Front joining the 1st Battalion, Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, part of the 29th Division.

A memorial with an Irish flag marks the spot where Ledwidge died

On 31 July 1917, a group from Ledwidge’s battalion of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers were road-laying in preparation for an assault during the Third Battle of Ypres, near the village of Boezinge, northwest of Ieper. While Ledwidge was drinking tea in a mud hole with his comrades, a shell exploded alongside, killing the poet and five others. A chaplain who knew him, Father Devas, arrived soon after, and recorded “Ledwidge killed, blown to bits.”

The poems Ledwidge wrote on active service revealed his pride at being a soldier, as he believed, in the service of Ireland. He wondered whether he would find a soldier’s death. The dead were buried at Carrefour de Rose, and later re-interred in the nearby Artillery Wood Cemetery (CWGC), Boezinge, (where the Welsh poet, Hedd Wyn, killed on the same day, is also buried). A stone tablet commemorates him in the Island of Ireland Peace Park, Messines (Mesen) in Belgium.

PRIVATE ROBERT HAMILTON

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Name of Hamilton R. (Private) on panel 141 at Tyne Cot memorial. Our group visited the CWGC cemetery on July 25th 2019.

Pointing to the name of Pte Robert Hamilton

The panel with names of soldiers from the Royal Irish Fusiliers

Our group at the Tyne Cot Memorial following a short prayer service led by Canon Andrea Wills (Foxford)

Placing a cross at the Tyne Cot Memorial in memory of Pte Robert Hamilton of Ballinode

Private Robert Hamilton enlisted in Monaghan town in the Royal Irish Fusiliers (the ‘Faugh-a-Ballaghs’) when a recruitment party came to town in March 1915. He fought at the Battle of the Somme in July 1916 and was invalided at some stage so he would have returned home to Kilmore East. He left Ballinode on Easter Saturday at the end of March 1918 and returned to his unit on the western front in France, only to be killed in action three weeks later.

Private Robert Hamilton picture from The Northern Standard April 1918
There is also a plaque in his memory in St Dympna’s Church of Ireland church, Ballinode which has provided the springboard for a talk I gave to Tydavnet Historical Society on Friday 21st November 2014 in Ballinode. The talk would not have been possible without the research and interest shown by Marie McKenna and two distant Hamilton relations Ruby Heasty and Heather Stirratt and I acknowledge their assistance.

Plaque in St Dympna’s Church of Ireland Church, Ballinode, Co. Monaghan

ROYAL IRISH FUSILIERS

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Royal Irish Fusiliers on panel 140

Panels 140 and 141 at Tyne Cot cemetery contains the names of members of the Royal Irish Fusiliers killed in World War One. They died mainly around the time of the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917.

Royal Irish Fusiliers on panel 141

Their remains were never recovered so they had no known graves and their names were listed here. Among them (and featured separately in my blog) is that of Private Hugh Dalzell from Belfast (bottom right of panel 140).

Dalzell H. (Private) on bottom right row panel 140 with memorial cross left by me.

On the next panel 141 there is the name of Private Robert Hamilton from Ballinode, Co. Monaghan (born in Clabby, Co. Fermanagh).

Hamilton R. (Private) is listed on panel 141

Bottom section of panel 140

Names of Privates from the Royal Irish Fusiliers on panel 140 right hand side