Invisible in one of the thickest fogs ever seen and supported by a bombardment of immense power, on 21 March 1918 German troops began an advance that soon swamped the British lines. A day of great triumph for the Germans and utter chaos for the British, the opening of the ‘Kaiser’s Battle’ is another of those Great War dates that captures the imagination. The single greatest memorial to the casualties of that great battle can be found at Pozières in the ninety-nine stone panels commemorating the British missing which enclose the cemetery on the Albert-Bapaume road.
At the other end of the scale is Lagnicourt Hedge Cemetery. It is a very small cemetery containing seventy-eight graves, of which sixty-three are Commonwealth casualties and fifteen German. Identifying the architect of a cemetery as small as this is tricky as the site’s size didn’t allow for much in the way of signature expressions; but if forced, I’d say it was W.H. Cowlishaw. It is the smallness, the seeming ordinariness, that makes Lagnicourt Hedge such a perfect vignette of that stupefying March day.
The cemetery consists of two plots. Plot I was commenced by the 7 Somerset Light Infantry in June 1917 and was in use until November of that year (and was used again by the Guards Division in September 1918). It was the Germans who added Plot II after they overran the village in the opening hours of their offensive. The difference between the two plots is immediately obvious, for in contrast to the original, Plot II is a long string of graves flush against the cemetery wall rather than the three neat rows now anchored by the Cross of Sacrifice. Plot II is in two portions, the first contains four British soldiers, and then comes the longer section containing fifteen German graves. All the bodies in this row were buried in a single long pit by the Germans in the immediate aftermath of their advance.
In 1921 and 1922 Directorate of Graves Registration and Enquiries Unit and Imperial War Graves Commission exhumation teams investigated the grave pit and discovered the remains of twenty soldiers. Fifteen of them were German, five of whom were identified, and five British, but the individual identities of the British soldiers could not be determined. Painstaking research and cross-referencing work commenced, and four were then identified.
Also buried in this cemetery is one other casualty from that first day of spring 1918. At the end of Row A in Plot I the grave of Second Lieutenant E.F.S. Hayter, Royal Field Artillery, can be found. Close examination of his grave and its precise position hints at the fact that his remains were only interred in the cemetery in 1969, long after the other burials. At the end of the war Hayter’s grave proved untraceable, but assisted by very careful enquiries by his father, searches for the grave continued. Following a stream of unsuccessful excavations in the area, Hayter’s father decided to purchase the ground where his son fell and erect a memorial on the site. Then an amazing discovery occurred. While the contractor was preparing the foundations for the memorial, he discovered remains which were quickly identified as those of Second Lieutenant Hayter. No one had searched this spot fully because the evidence suggested that the body had been taken from the site and buried in the near vicinity. Seeing as the ground had been purchased for a memorial, the IWGC now allowed the Hayter family to transform it from a commemorative site to an actual grave topped by the memorial obelisk they had commissioned.
As the family gifted funds for the maintenance of the site, Second Lieutenant Hayter’s memorial remained, but it became increasingly difficult to preserve. In 1969 the trust established to care for the memorial agreed that Hayter’s remains should be exhumed and moved to Lagnicourt Hedge Cemetery.
Lagnicourt Hedge Cemetery maybe tiny, it may even seem insignificant and a rather typical ‘off-the-peg’ piece of IWGC architecture. However, as with all the cemeteries, great or small, a bit of close examination reveals a myriad of stories, moments of great human drama and tragedy.
Come with me to the Hirondelle valley and let’s visit Lagnicourt together.
