Old Front Line
WW1 Podcast with Paul Reed
Battlefield Vlog: Etaples Military Cemetery
In this latest Battlefield Vlog we visit Etaples Military Cemetery on the French coast in Northern France, where 11,000 burials make it the largest British and Commonwealth Cemetery in France. These were men who did not die on the battlefield, but in hospital behind the lines: of wounds, sickness and disease caused by frontline service. Here we see the grave of the oldest British soldier to die on the Western Front and the grave of one of the many women buried at Etaples.
BATTLEFIELD MAP:
5 Comments on “Battlefield Vlog: Etaples Military Cemetery”
Leave a reply to mattsmondeo Cancel reply
Old Front Line 
Another excellent Vlog
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That’s another one for my visit list! Such an impressive place.
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Very interestIng Vlog – thanks Paul. I read (during the pandemic) that Etaples was the site of a “superspreader” of the Spanish Flu with hundreds of thousands of troops being funnelled home via the camp and they brought it back to the UK. Don’t know how accurate that is but it was suggested in the article that the government hushed up the self evident truth of that statement. Perhaps the troops themselves were so anxious to get home that imperative overrode everything else.
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I worked on a TV project some years ago – the expert on this we interviewed said the same.
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My great uncle, Percy is interred there. He died of wounds, he served in the 14th Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders 40th Division. First thought was that he was in a hospital but a visit showed he was in a mass grave and was killed along with half a dozen other men from Scottish Regiments, as well as many others, on May 20th 1918 when the base was bombed by the Germans. The Division had been reduced to cadre and apparently having survived Bourlon Wood probably thought he was safe. There were no air raid precautions at the base. There is a newsreel of the funeral and all the casualties are buried together apart from the nurses.
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