Military History | Deutscher Soldatenfriedhof Chambry — Thirteen Names Out of 998

Chambry, on the low ground north-east of Meaux, was among the furthest points the German First Army reached in its advance toward Paris. The fighting on the Ourcq ran from 5 to 9 September 1914; the army then withdrew to the Aisne.

What was done with its dead is a German record about a French field. The Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, which has worked here since 1927/28 under an agreement reached with the French military authorities in 1926, states that the cemetery was laid out in January 1919 by those authorities, who gathered the German dead of twenty-five communes of Seine-et-Marne into it. The French state's memorial portal dates the same ground to 1924. Neither account mentions the other.

Nor do the counts agree. The Volksbund gives 1,062 dead, 64 of them in individual graves and 998 in the communal graves; the French portal gives the cemetery 998 in all. The lower number is the one cut into the brick stele inside the gate — IN EINEM GEMEINSAMEN GRABE RUHEN 998 DEUTSCHE SOLDATEN, 985 BLIEBEN UNBEKANNT — above thirteen names in two columns. Three of the thirteen are a surname alone, with no rank and no date. The Volksbund's explanation of the anonymity is unadorned: the dead were buried fast where they fell, and it happened again when German attacks reached this ground in May and July 1918.

The gate plaque reads DEUTSCHER SOLDATENFRIEDHOF 1914 - 1918 CHAMBRY above CIMETIERE MILITAIRE ALLEMAND. Behind it, low stone markers stand in rows in mown grass, hedged, wheat on three sides of the D97. Five hundred metres off, across the railway, is the Nécropole nationale de Chambry: the French portal counts 1,334 dead in it, the Volksbund 1,258. Neither state's books agree with the other's, on either side of the line.

📸 Cover: the communal-grave stele and its inscription, by Aubry Gérard, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the entrance plaque and gate. Third: the rows of individual graves, CC BY-SA 3.0. All three by the same photographer.