Military History | Cimetière militaire portugais de Richebourg — The First Line Is the Country

Portugal entered the war in 1916 and sent an expeditionary corps to French Flanders under British command. It held a sector of the line here from 1917 until the German offensive of 9 April 1918 broke across it, and its dead were left scattered — through the base cemeteries of France, through Tournai in Belgium, and in the ground where prisoners died in Germany.

Gathering them took fourteen years. Portugal acquired this field in August 1924, and the Portuguese war graves commission worked with the French administration to find the bodies and bring them in, from Le Touret and Ambleteuse, from Brest and Chartres and the Channel coast, until 1,831 lay here. It is the only Portuguese military cemetery in France. Some 1,500 graves were already in place when the Portuguese consul at Arras had the enclosing wall built in 1935 and the gateway raised after it. The French state's dossier for the site's UNESCO listing records that the material came from Portugal by sea and was landed at Le Havre, 104 tonnes of worked stone and 137 tonnes of headstones, that Portuguese workmen laid it, and that the ground is French with its management given to Portugal by convention.

What that bought is legible in the stone. The headstones are grey Portuguese granite, cut close to the British pattern but rising to a shallow gable instead of a curve. On the ones that resolve in photographs of the rows, the top line is not a name but the word PORTUGAL. Over the gate arch, in stylised letters, CEMITERIO MILITAR PORTUGUES. At the back a screen carries the national arms between two pylons of shields cut with the old provinces, MINHO, DOURO, TRAZ OS MONTES and BEIRA ALTA on one side and ALGARVE among the four opposite; the wings are dated 1916 and 1918, the span of Portugal's war rather than the front's. The Indian memorial stands a couple of hundred metres up the same road. A chapel of Nossa Senhora de Fatima was built opposite in 1976, and a ceremony is held here every April.

📸 Cover: the memorial screen at the head of the cemetery with the ranks of headstones before it, grassrootsgroundswell, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the gate arch and its lettering, Ivan Pacheka, CC BY-SA 3.0.