Military History | Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery — Almost All of Them Have Names

The wounded arrived by train. Lijssenthoek was a hamlet on the Poperinge–Hazebrouck railway, thirteen and a half kilometres west of the Menenpoort at Ieper (Ypres), on what the Commonwealth War Graves Commission calls the main communication line between the Allied bases in the rear and the Ypres battlefields. From the spring of 1915 the French 15e Hôpital d'évacuation buried its dead in a field beside Remi Quaghebeur's farm; Commonwealth casualty clearing stations took the ground over that June. By 1917 four of them worked here at once, with something near four thousand beds, sidings for the ambulance trains, wards, operating rooms and a chapel. Between April and August 1918 the clearing stations fell back before the German advance and field ambulances took their places. That history is why this cemetery is not like the ground east of it. Men reached Lijssenthoek alive, carrying their identity discs and their papers, and were admitted, treated and, when they died, buried under their own names on a known date. The Commission's register gives 9,901 Commonwealth burials here, twenty-four of them unidentified. In all, the Flemish heritage register counts 10,785 First World War dead, with French, German, American and Chinese Labour Corps graves among them; published totals differ by a few dozen either way. The memorials to the missing east of here exist for the men that record could not reach. Reginald Blomfield laid the cemetery out. The graves run through thirty-five plots, the rows marked by low stone posts — one reads 30 D — and ranks of French crosses stand behind the British headstones. A visitor centre opened beside the gate in September 2012, built on research by the town of Poperinge with Talbot House, In Flanders Fields, the Passchendaele Memorial Museum and the Commission. Its exhibition runs the war as a daily calendar: a date, and who died at Lijssenthoek on it. 📸 Cover: Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery, Marc Ryckaert (MJJR), 26 September 2016, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.