i8o
THE YPRES TIMES
decided to collect the remains of these gallant airmen and of men who had died early
in the war fighting on the Menin road, east of Ypres, or who had died as prisoners behind
the German lines, or as combatants in the final advance to victory. It was decided to
re-inter such bodies in Concentration Cemeteries.
Such a cemetery is the New British cemetery at Harlebeke, near Courtrai. This
is some twenty miles east of Ypres, and somewhat inaccessible for relations of soldiers
who are buried there. The pictures which we now print, may therefore be of special
interest to many who have relatives buried in it, and who are unable to make the journey.
The pictures represent, firstly, Harlebeke New British cemetery as it was in July, 1924,
HARLEBEKE NEW BRITISH CEMETERY IN 1924.
when the bodies were being collected and re-interred, when the original crosses marked
the graves, and when the footmarks of visitors showed plainly upon the sandy loam
and secondly, the cemetery as it was in 1929, when the crosses had gone, headstones been
erected, the grass grown green and everything been completed.
The cemetery is on the by-road leading from Harlebeke to Deerlyck, and lies back
towards the railway embankment (telephone poles show clearly in some of the photo
graphs) and is flanked on either side by cornfields. The arrangement of the entrance
gates, the Cross of Sacrifice, the Stone of Remembrance, and the long central path
of flagstones seems to give the cemetery a special dignity and character in spite of the
fact that it is comparatively small.
The concentration of graves, about one thousand and eighty in all, was made from
the surrounding battlefields of 1914-1918, and in 1924-1925 from German cemeteries or
plots in Belgium, in all from some forty different places. In the cemetery are, amongst
others, the graves of some two hundred Guardsmen who fell gallantly when withstanding
the German onslaught at Gheluwe in 1914 of many Royal Engineers who gave their
