Military History | Ayette Indian and Chinese Cemetery — The Rank Cut in the Stone Is Labourer

British fighting troops opened this burial ground in September 1917, at the end of a farm track outside Ayette, in the valley of the Cojeul. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission's own account of the site says the village was taken by German forces in March 1918 and retaken on 3 April, and that burials resumed here in the autumn.

Most of the men in it had never been soldiers. From 1917 the British army recruited labourers in China and in India on civilian contracts, and the Commission's account describes them working on transport, maintenance, salvage and construction, and afterwards on the clearing of the battlefields. The Commission's board at the site counts eighty men buried or commemorated here; its register now gives eighty-seven, sixty-four of them identified — thirty-five from India, twenty-eight of the Chinese Labour Corps and one German. Published counts differ.

What had to be invented for them is legible on the stones. Above a Chinese name the Commission cut a four-character phrase, right to left, with an English line beneath; among them are 流芳百世, A GOOD REPUTATION ENDURES FOR EVER, 勇往直前, A NOBLE DUTY BRAVELY DONE, and 鞠躬盡瘁, FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH. A narrow column at the right gives the man's home county — 山東安邱縣人 on one stone, 直隸 on the one beside it, two different provinces. Both of those are dated June 1919, after the fighting had stopped. A few rows away a headstone carries ॐ भगवते नमः above the 53rd (Santhal) Indian Labour Company, and the rank cut over the name is LABOURER.

The Commission's record names William Harrison Cowlishaw, an Arts and Crafts architect who laid out several of its smaller cemeteries, as the designer. The plot is walled in knapped flint, a stone shelter with flint-panelled piers stands in the wall line, and the low terrace at the entrance is cut AYETTE INDIAN AND CHINESE CEMETERY.

📸 Cover: the shelter and the ranks at Ayette — René Hourdry, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the entrance terrace with the cemetery's name cut into it, same photographer and licence.