Brandhoek New Military Cemetery
Zevekotestrasse 19, 8908 Leper, Belguim
Visited October 2025
It’s become part of our trip to SMC to pay respect to Allied soldiers that fell during WWI or WWII. It’s just a small matter of visiting a different cemetery each time on the Thursday and looking at the names, recognising just how young some of these people were – which for someone my age – just into his 60th year – is rather upsetting, because they seem to be lives cut short before they had time to “live”.
Last year we visited a small cemetery in Overloon, which held some lads as young as eighteen years of age – brave men indeed, but at my age I look on them as youngsters not far out of childhood.
This year we visited the Brandhoek area with several small cemeteries housing WWI casualties including Captain Chavasse of the Royal Medical Corps, who, along with several orderlies dies when a hospital tent was hit by enemy munitions.
Brandhoek contains 530 Commonwealth graves and 28 German graves all dating from WWI.
It’s a peaceful place, compact, but very well tended; and although no cemetery can be said to be a pleasure to walk around, there is a certain restful feeling about such places.
Whilst the “New Cemetery No.3 is instantly visible along a small road off the main carriageway, the one containing Captain Chavasse and his orderlies is tucked away across the road behind some houses.
The No3 Cemetary is a lot larger, containing 974 men.
Driving through this area of Belgium, using the smaller roads and not the motorways, the countryside is covered with multitudes of these small sites of remembrance, not half a mile can be travelled without seeing short rows of pale headstones clustered together.
It is also a credit to the local people who care and tend to these areas, keeping them not only clean and tidy, but tending the shrubs and flowers that decorate the graves.
It’s sobering to visit these places, to look upon the headstones bearing the names and sometimes the ages of these brave men, and silently give thanks to them for their sacrifice that allows us to live in the world we have now.
Putting a few small crosses and spending a moment with them is I feel, the least I can do, and hope that they rest in peace.
