Aristocrats Go to War: Uncovering the Zillebeke Cemetery

by Jerry Murland

  ‘The body of Zillebeke church had almost disappeared, and so had the steeple, the ruined tower alone remained … In the porch of the church, the only habitable place, lived a French guard of a corporal and four men, though for what reason they were there nobody knew. Inside the church lay the remnants of a 10th century font, and several broken plaster saints. The Church yard had several enormous shell holes in it, which had uprooted the monuments, smashed open the vaults and laid bare the coffins and the dead. These vaults were half full of rainwater, and in many cases the zinc or tin coffins were floating about, with their occupants exposed or bobbing over the sides … I was very glad to see that the graves of Bernard Gordon Lennox, Congleton and Stocks of the Grenadiers, and Peterson [sic] of my regiment were untouched, though their names, which had been written in pencil on wooden crosses were in danger of being washed out by the rain and bad weather.’

  By 1917 a network of front line fortifications with connecting communication trenches had been created in the Zillebeke sector. Communication trenches theoretically allowed movement to and from the firing-line to be conducted in comparative safety; one of these trenches ran right through the churchyard itself and was regularly used by the poet and writer Edmund Blunden during his service at Zillebeke as an officer with the Royal Sussex Regiment. He recalled:

  ‘The [Zillebeke] Church tower was not yet altogether down, but had lost its architectural distinctions in one’s quick movement over the road under German observation; one’s eyes managed to register nevertheless a number of wooden crosses.’

  Two of these wooden crosses would probably have marked the graves of John Lee Steere and Alexis de Gunzburg. At the end of hostilities they were replaced by the only two private memorials in the churchyard, erected and paid for by the respective families. They are unusual in that they break the CWGC’s ‘equality in death’ principle that the Commission was founded on, to ‘avoid class distinctions that would conflict with the feeling of brotherhood that had developed between all ranks serving at the front.’ However, once the CWGC began its work, graves were marked in the uniform manner which is commonplace today in the silent cities of white headstones that populate the battlefields of the Great War.

  Inside the church are two more permanent memorials to British officers, the more obvious is an elaborate stained glass window commissioned by Mrs Evelyn St George in memory of her son Second Lieutenant Howard Avenel Bligh St George who was killed on 15 November 1914. The window, designed and created by Reginald Bell, is one of a number of memorials commissioned by Evelyn St George in memory of her son. The Zillebeke window depicts the warrior knight St George killing the dragon and framed by the coats of arms of the nobility related to the St George family. The second memorial is less obvious but serves as a daily reminder every time the church bells ring out. After the war, when the reconstruction of the church and village began, the de Gunzburg family paid for the manufacture and installation of two bells that first rang out on the eve of the village fair in August 1924. Made by Slegers-Canard Tellin of Luxembourg, the larger of the two bells is called ‘Catharina’ and weighs 744kg, while the second bell, weighing 397kg, and appropriately named ‘Alexis’, carries the inscription ‘Given by Baroness Henriette de Gunzburg to remember her son, the soldier Baron Alexis George de Gunzburg who fell in Zillebeke in the year 1914.’

  Three French soldiers have their names commemorated inside the church and interestingly one of them, Petrus Joseph Chambourd, was also killed at Hooge. Was he brought to the churchyard by his regiment and buried with his two comrades-in-arms as I suspect Alfred Schuster was? Initially, there were a number of French graves in the churchyard which were later removed to the nearby main French National Cemetery at St Charles-de-Potyze. Their removal accounts for the open space in the eastern corner of the cemetery.

  There are of course nine other identified burials in the churchyard that took place after November 1914 and it is not my intention to relegate their sacrifice in any way. However, as they did not take part in the First Battle of Ypres and, apart from Arthur de Courcy Scott, were not regular soldiers, they fall outside the scope of this book. Nevertheless, they did give their lives and for that alone they should not be forgotten. A brief biography of each of them can be found in Appendix 1.

  With the exception of Arthur de Courcy Scott, Neill Thompson and William Stewart, the remaining six were all soldiers who fought with the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF). Three of them emigrated to Canada from various parts of Great Britain, two were Canadian nationals and one was an American by birth. Thousands of young men in Canada rushed to join up in 1914, many of whom had only recently arrived as immigrants to begin new lives and make their fortunes in what was seen as a country of new opportunity. The enormous exodus of young men from Great Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century continued into the first decade of the twentieth century with many of them returning post-1914 as part of Commonwealth expeditionary forces. Some though, like my great uncle Archibald Goode, decided to return home and join local regiments, others cut all emotional ties with the motherland and were happy to fight as Canadians.

  Table 2: The register of 1915 and 1916 burials at Zillebeke Churchyard.

  Whereas the Australian Imperial Force was not slow in ensuring its part in the Great War was commemorated on every battlefield on which it fought, Canada’s considerable contribution to the war effort was characterized more by the modesty and selflessness that mark the Canadian character. Canada supplied more than 600,000 soldiers to the war effort, while industrial and agricultural production, for war purposes, was also considerably increased. The first seventeen battalions of the CEF had sailed for England by 3 October 1914 and by the end of the war there were 260 Canadian battalions in existence. In the end, more than 60,000 Canadians lost their lives in the Great War.

  The war of mobility that characterized much of 1914 had come to an end by Christmas of that year. The two sides entrenched themselves as they had done on the Aisne in September and shell fire became a feature of the daily routine of death. Artillery from both sides regularly targeted crossroads, assembly points, working parties and other strategic areas to harass opposing forces and disrupt movement. It was this random lottery of death that claimed the lives of Neill Thompson and William Stewart in December 1915 when their respective working parties were shelled. A shell also killed John Sime and William Croft while they were walking through Zillebeke with their platoon early on 7 June 1916. An hour and a half later a shell, possibly from the same German battery, killed Walter Davison at the ration dump behind the Maple Copse trenches.

  The reconstruction of the new church in Zillebeke began in 1923, and apart from one or two improvements suggested by the Ypres architect, Georges Lernould, it is an exact replica of the old building. Prior to 1923 the church shared a temporary wooden building with the village school on Stationsstraat. Almost exactly a year after the first stone was laid the new church was ready to receive its congregation, which since 1919 had gradually returned to begin the task of reconstruction. This was not without its hazards. The deadly legacy of the war years was responsible for killing four Belgian workmen and seriously injuring four others at Zillebeke in September 1921 when workmen levelling the ground detonated an unexploded shell. The iron harvest of unexploded shells is still a feature of the Ypres battlefields today. Shells in various stages of decay are recovered annually from the fields in Flanders and they are just as dangerous today as they were after the war when there were far more of them.

  Just as the war-ravaged landscapes were being reconstructed and revitalized, so were the myriad battlefield cemeteries that bore testament to the titanic struggle that had reduced a once peaceful countryside of farms, villages and fields to a muddy and desolate wilderness. In 1919 the Ypres area contained hundreds of small soldiers’ cemeteries that were found in clusters where men had fallen in battle. Others were on the sites of casualty clearing and advanced dressing stations and there were, inevitably, the remains of many
of the dead still lying unburied on the old battlefields.

  As the task of reconstruction gathered pace so did the more gruesome undertaking of taking care of the dead. Most of the larger cemeteries such as Zandvoorde British Cemetery were left in place but many of the dead from smaller burial grounds were exhumed and gathered into larger cemeteries nearby. Of course, in 1914 there were no established war cemeteries in the Ypres area and quite naturally many of those who fell in battle were buried by their comrades in local churchyards. Zillebeke churchyard is one of those sites that became the collecting ground for those killed in the fighting around Klein Zillebeke and Zwarteleen. It is a sad fact, however, that less than twenty per cent of the 10,500 who were killed in the First Battle of Ypres have known graves; the remainder were either never recovered from the battlefield or were unidentified when they were found. These are the men who have their names commemorated on permanent memorials to the missing such as the Menin Gate.

  The Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC) was established by Royal Charter in May 1917. Its founder was Major General Sir Fabian Arthur Goulstone Ware. During the Great War he commanded a Red Cross ambulance unit and as the war continued he became more and more concerned about the fate of the graves after the war. With the help of Edward Prince of Wales, in 1917 he submitted a memorandum on the subject to the Imperial War Conference. The Prince of Wales became the Commission’s first president and Ware its Vice-Chairman, a role that he held until his retirement in 1948.

  From the beginning the IWGC – which later became the CWGC – set out to create memorials and cemeteries that would stand the test of time and, through their design, become a fitting memorial to the dead and missing. By employing the most eminent architects of the day, Sir Edwin Lutyens, Sir Frederick Kenyon, Sir Herbert Baker and Sir Reginald Blomfield, to oversee the architecture and layout of the cemeteries and memorials, the Commission ensured future generations would be able to ‘gaze in wonder at them and remember.’ However, progress was not without its difficulties and the decision not to repatriate remains and to veto private memorials produced a storm of opposition. The debate continued into 1920 with the IWGC finally winning the argument that fellowship in death crossed ‘all boundaries of race, creed or wealth’. By this time though the two private memorials to John Lee Steere and Alexis de Gunzburg at Zillebeke had already been put in place and it was sensibly decided not to replace them when the cemetery was designed in 1920.

  The War Graves Commission section of Zillebeke churchyard was designed by William Harrison Cowlishaw under the direction of Frederick Kenyon. Cowlishaw also designed the Prowse Point, Rifle House and Devonshire Cemeteries in the Ypres area. CWGC cemeteries generally adhere to a standard design that takes the form of a walled cemetery in a garden setting with the precisely positioned Cross of Sacrifice as the focal point. A Cross of Sacrifice is usually only found in cemeteries with more than fifty burials and thus is absent from Zillebeke churchyard.2

  So what of the other unidentified graves in the churchyard? Sir Morgan Crofton’s diary suggests that they could be the men of 7 Cavalry Brigade who were killed on 6 November. In addition to Dawnay, O’Neill and Petersen, 2/Life Guards’ war diary for 6 November 1914 records thirty-eight rank and file killed, wounded and missing, while the 1st Life Guards (1/Life Guards) recorded one officer, Regy Wyndham, and four men killed. In the same action the Royal Horse Guards lost their commanding officer, Gordon Wilson, and Alexis de Gunzburg, together with three other ranks killed. It is highly likely that a number of these men were buried in the churchyard alongside their officers.

  In June 1915 twelve men of the Canadian 24th Infantry Battalion were killed by a single shell while walking past the church on their way to the front line trenches. The official history of the battalion tells us the dead were buried in the churchyard but today only two of them have marked graves, the remainder were either so badly injured that they were not able to be identified with any degree of certainty or had their graves later destroyed beyond recognition by shell fire. While the churchyard itself was never a battleground, it must have been a dangerous place to loiter in, particularly when it was under direct German observation.

  A striking reminder of this was brought to my notice while I was at the Coldstream Guards regimental archives at Wellington Barracks. Having located the personal file of Captain Richard Long Dawson I was intrigued by the contents of a bulky package that had been sent to the regiment in 1991 by Colonel Richard Crichton, himself a decorated former officer of the regiment. Richard Crichton was a cousin of Richard Dawson and had presented the regiment with the original metal nameplate that had been fixed to Dawson’s cross after his burial in the churchyard. Although accompanying paperwork from the regiment indicated that the nameplate was intended as an exhibit in the Guards Museum along with a photograph of Dawson’s temporary grave at Zillebeke, it has remained buried in the archives ever since. The nameplate has a rather eye-catching feature in the form of a jagged bullet hole, which is evidence enough to account for the apprehension Edmund Blunden felt when crossing the road by the church in 1917.

  Chapter 2

  Reform and Reorganization

  Hanging in the aisle next to the St Edmund’s Chapel in the Cathedral at Gloucester are the regimental colours of the 28th and 61st Regiments of Foot who fought for sovereign and country from 1694 through to Waterloo and the Crimea. Later, when they were reorganized as the 1st and 2nd Battalions of the Gloucestershire Regiment, they fought in India during the Mutiny and in South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. The regiment has more battle honours on its colours than any other in the British Army, battle honours that recall the regiment’s long and proud service from the time they were first raised as Gibson’s Regiment of Foot to the famous last stand on the Imjin River during the Korean War of 1950. But perhaps more interestingly, for the military historian, those same battle honours highlight the significant watersheds in the development and restructuring of the British Army from the relative amateurism of the late eighteenth century to the professionalism of the 1914 Regular Army represented by the officers and men recorded in the cemetery register at the Zillebeke churchyard.

  As the end of the eighteenth century drew to a close the British Army was in a poor state. It was by and large, albeit with some exceptions, incompetently led by the aristocracy with the rank and file said to be drawn from the worst of society; a body of men who would later be described by Wellington as the ‘scum of the earth’. However, it must be said that this so-called rabble that Wellington led to a final victory on the field of Waterloo, fought its way up and down the Spanish peninsular for six long years and proved to be a highly effective fighting force in both victory and retreat.

  In Wellington’s army entry to the commissioned ranks of the Guards, cavalry and line infantry regiments had little to do with the ability to lead and command men. In almost every case a commission was bought and thereafter promotion carried a price tag which in most cases, providing one had enough cash and influence, enabled command to be bought without any previous experience of the battlefield. King George I had established a tariff of prices for commissions in 1721 and while these varied from regiment to regiment, in practice they were usually exceeded by as much as twice the regulation price. A lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards could expect to pay anything from £1,700 for his commission in 1798 while a lieutenant colonel could be looking at a starting figure of £5,400. Even then there could be a further delay before a vacancy in the regiment of choice became available.

  This of course contrasted hugely with promotion through ability that was commonplace in the Royal Navy. Fortunately for all concerned Britain’s navy did not achieve its formidable reputation through incompetence. On His Majesty’s ships of war midshipmen had to pass stringent examinations and demonstrate practical skills before promotion to lieutenant could be secured. Senior naval officers were generally highly skilled sailors who had learnt their trade the hard way serving on the decks of the fleet. However, t
he winds of change were beginning to blow in the army and the first tentative steps in moving away from an assortment of amateurs towards a more professional officer corps were taken in 1849 when it became compulsory for all candidates for a commission, regardless of whether they bought them or not, to pass an examination. Although a small step, it heralded sixty years of reform that saw the army transformed from its status as a gentleman’s club to a twentieth century professional fighting force.

  In 1854 the Crimean War broke out and over the next few years the scandal of official ineptitude and consequent hardship and suffering caused nationwide concern at the state of the army and its leadership. Britain’s soldiers have frequently suffered from the ineptitude of their commanders, however, on this occasion the military leadership excelled itself in setting new standards of incompetence. Unfortunately any immediate post-war reform beyond the formation of the Medical Staff Corps was short-circuited by the Indian Mutiny of 1857 which set army reform back by years. In the fifteen or so months it took to restore order after a widespread and bloody uprising, the army redeemed itself in the eyes of the general public and to an extent had its reputation restored.

  While 1857 did see a Select Committee established to report on the purchase of commissions, incredibly it wasn’t until fourteen years later that Edward Cardwell, the Secretary of State for War, finally addressed the issue with his Army Regulation Bill which he introduced to a sceptical Parliament in February 1871. The Bill was quite simple in its direction: it abolished purchase and ensured all potential officers for the army would now have to pass an examination overseen by the civil service commissioners. Promotion, albeit now inexorably slower, would depend on seniority and ability. Much to the chagrin of the Conservative peers and a vocal opposition group led by no less than the Duke of Cambridge, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army himself, the Bill was skilfully manoeuvred into legislation by Gladstone and Cardwell, who bypassed the Upper House by invoking the powers of Royal Warrant and in so doing guaranteed Cardwell a permanent place in British legislative history. Unfortunately the Commander-in-Chief would continue to be resistant to any change until he was sidelined and forced to resign in 1895.