Serre Road Cemetery

Serre Road Cemetery

The cemetery was started in May 1917 when the British V Corps cleared the battlefield of soldiers’ remains when the territory around the cemetery came into British hands. Many hundreds of soldiers had been killed in the vicinity of this cemetery in the British offensive of 1st July 1916 and it had not been possible to retrieve their bodies for almost a whole year. The British 31st and 4th Divisions had attacked along the Front on that day and had suffered heavy casualties, many of whom were killed in No-Mans-Land and were irretrievable for many months.

In February of 1917 the German Army left their positions at Serre village and the Redan Ridge, which they had firmly held since September 1914 and made a tactical withdrawal to a line of defence they called the Siegfried Stellung, known to the British as the Hindenburg Line.