Aeroplane Cemetery Ieper

[shinglma]

On a visit to the salient last weekend I visited the above cemetery for the first time. My companions noticed the strange arrangement of a row of headstones which veer slightly off from the otherwise straight row. the graves in question are roughly in the centre of the cemetery and include the following soldiers of the Black Watch:-

S/8650 Lance Cpl A McIntyre d 28/09/1918

S/41750 Pte GA Potter d 28/09/1918

S/13755 Pte R Birrell d 28/09/1918

S/43417 Cpl WB Miller d 28/09/1918

Any reason why these graves might not be in line with the others? When looking down the row they quite clearly 'fork' from the others.

[Terry Denham]

These graves probably date from early in the war when the cemetery was first used. The majority of the burials come from later concentrations and the rows from these are usually very straight.

The policy was to leave original battlefield burials in position if possible when cemeteries were 'tidied up' after the war.

[Tom Morgan]

To add to what Terry has said - where a cemetery has original wartime burials plus later post-war additions, the area of the original graves will often have been designated as "Plot 1" of the cemetery. These Plot 1 graves will often be (as Shinglma has noted and as Terry has explained) out of alignment with the later burials (and often not even lined up with each other.)

In the case of Aeroplane cemetery, this rule-of-thumb gets a bit blurred because some of the burials brought in after the armistice are actually in Plot 1!! The soldiers Shinglma names died quite late in the war but are buried in Plot 1 and I daresay they were among those brought in after the war. I wonder if the majority of soldiers in the row were also killed on the same day as these four, presumably in the same action? Or perhaps they were all brought in from the same small burial-place? If so there could have been a deliberate decision to bury them together in a row of their own.

Tom