Ste. Emilie Valley Cemetery, Villers-Faucon
After the Armistice, this slightly elevated roadside cemetery was laid out around three large German‑made British graves and many Irish burials from March 1918, with a curving semicircular stairway entrance, axial Cross of Sacrifice, sloping boundary wall, and sparse planting of whitebeams and cotoneaster.
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Description
After the Armistice, three large graves for British soldiers were created here by German soldiers in the current plot i. The other graves were transferred from an older cemetery with the same name, and from one of the battlefields. Many of the victims were Irish soldiers who died in March 1918.
The cemetery was elaborated by assistant architect Hutton and displays parallels with the cemetery in Méricourt- l’Abbé. The cemetery lies on a slightly elevated and rising piece of ground along a trunk road. The semicircular entrance is combined with a stairway that curves outward. The stairway leads the visitor to a forecourt with special memorials and then via a stone path to a stairway between two brick plant boxes. The Cross of Sacrifice stands on the entrance axis, in the middle of the cemetery. The graves are oriented toward the entrance.
The cemetery is surrounded by a wall that follows the slope of the ground. Hutton’s touch can be recognized in the way the jumps in height in the wall have been designed. Four young whitebeams (sorbus area) grow in the cemetery. There is cotoneaster behind the special memorials. (Geurst, 2010, p.403)
Bibliography
Geurst, J. (2010) Cemeteries of the Great War by Sir Edwin Lutyens. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers.
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