France - Etaples

We set off in the morning to look for another Creswick digger, driving through some very lovely countryside.

Gorgeous view

Our little car

Then on to the Etaples Military Cemetery. Etaples is near the coast, and was a British military base, training and reinforcement camp, and military hospital with 20,000 beds. Most of the soldiers who are buried here died in the hospital. Some died as late as September 1919. Over 11,000 people are buried here, including 20 women (mostly nurses), 660 Germans, and 120 soldiers from WWII. This cemetery, the largest CWGC cemetery in France, is all that remains of the military base of Etaples.

It doesn't look all that big from the road

But once inside......

......it's enormous

We were looking for Matthew William Borradale. Thankfully, the CWGC provides maps, so we took one with us as we went searching. It still took a while.

We spent quite some time wandering around the cemetery. The sheer number of gravestones was tragic; when one thinks of all the other cemeteries and memorials, the scope of death is incomprehensible.

The gravestones of the German soldiers are a different shape

A Belgian grave

And here are a selection of individual headstones that caught our attention.

Even Brigadier Generals......

This chap died on the day the war ended

A matron, one of a small number of graves of women killed in the war

This Polish man was one of the WWII casualties

South African Native Labour Corps graves

A handful of Hindu soldiers from the Indian Forces

A solitary Chinaman, a member of the Chinese Labour Corps

And a surgeon