Cabaret Rouge is a cemetery that regular visitors to the battlefield know well. Although perhaps a tiny bit off some of the usual tracks, its scale (7661 graves) and beauty draw people towards it.
As the Commission’s website tells, the cemetery was commenced in March 1916 and gained its name from the café next door with its distinctive red bricks and tiles. The real expansion of the site came with the end of the war when over 7000 graves were concentrated from more than 100 small cemeteries. In concentration cemeteries it is usually easy to find the original plot(s) which often lack the uniformity of those systematically created through the activity of post-war battlefield clearance work. Cabaret Rouge is no exception, and the first burials can be found at Plots I-IV.
To contemplate the sweep and form of the cemetery from this position shows just how carefully the expansion was planned and developed. Originally, J.R. Truelove was the assigned architect, but his resignation from the Commission to return to private practice led to the appointment of Frank Higginson. One of the Commission’s finest servants, by this stage Higginson was Deputy Director of Works meaning the details of individual cemetery designs were not really his remit. However, having served with the Canadian forces during the war, Higginson was deeply attached to this site sitting in the shadow of the Notre Dame de Lorette and Vimy ridges. He clearly relished the chance to use his architectural skills in a place containing so many Canadian graves.
In my opinion, Cabaret Rouge is, along with Bedford House, the finest of the Commission’s concentration cemeteries on the Western Front. Like Bedford House, the plots create a quite remarkable geometric design, so different to the sobering regimentation of somewhere like Tyne Cot or Delville Wood (both Sir Herbert Baker). Its shape is something akin to an arrowhead, or even the flint of a stone-age hunter-gatherer. Working this out does not need an aerial photograph, or even the plan in the register, but can be realised by standing at the Cross of Sacrifice, which clearly forms the apex (or cutting edge).
Just as Von Berg did at Bedford House, Higginson created a country house garden of carriage drives and avenues, with the added feature of a circus enclosing the War Stone and forming the hub around which a number of plots revolve. From the circus leads the central, tree-lined drive rising along a gentle incline to the Cross of Sacrifice. To walk this way on a late spring or early summer day presents a riot of colour in the flowers trimming the long, but never intimidating, rows, and the sensation of colour becomes more intense as the plots narrow in the tight funnel at the top of the cemetery leading the eye to the Lombardy poplars and chestnut trees at the perimeter.
At the points where the arrowhead-flint begins its slow constriction, Higginson placed shelters opposite each other. Very simple affairs with an almost Charles Holden-like lack of detail, aside from the Tuscan columns supporting the lintel, they are beautiful in their modest restraint.
Far more complex for the eye and mind to contemplate is the entrance. How to explain it? A pavilion-cum-arch-cum tower is probably the best I can do. Its form implies a good number of inspirations. First, Higginson must have considered carefully the designs the Principal Architects were developing for the Commission: there’s a dash of the pavilions Baker used at Tyne Cot and the South African memorial at Delville Wood combined with a little of Blomfield’s chapel at St. Sever Cemetery in Rouen, as well as a hint at Lutyens’s increasing interest in intersecting arches. In my imagination, Higginson percolated all these influences in conversations with W.H. Cowlishaw, the man who did so much of the co-ordinating work, over cups of tea in St. Omer.
There is also something of the French Neo-Byzantine style that Louis-Marie Cardonnier used for the chapel and lantern tower at Notre Dame de Lorette, which makes a subtle and sensitive hint towards the French allies commemorated only a few miles away and so clearly visible from the cemetery. The final vision that flies through my mind every time I walk through the entrance is of the towers J.W. Simpson and Maxwell Ayrton designed for the old Wembley Stadium bringing a nip of the Art Deco to the whole thing.
And then before setting foot into the cemetery there is the plaque in the entrance commemorating Sir Frank and stating that his ashes are interred here and those of his widow scattered in the cemetery. It always reminds me of the inscription dedicated to Sir Christopher Wren’s memory at the crossing place in St. Paul’s Cathedral: ‘Lector si monumentum requiris circumspice’ (Reader, if you seek my monument, look around). Cabaret Rouge is Higginson’s tribute to his fallen comrades but also his own monument.
Visiting Cabaret Rouge never fails to inspire. Let’s go and explore it together.
