Saint Symphorien Military Cemetery in Mons, Hainaut

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Get directions Mons, Hainaut, Belgium

Coordinates: 50.43265, 4.01015
Cemetery ID:

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About these numbers These percentages indicate the number of Find a Grave memorials that have a grave photo or GPS coordinates. We don't know the total number of burials in a cemetery, so we cannot calculate a percentage of those with memorials, photos or GPS coordinates.

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St. Symphorien Military Cemetery was established by the Germans in late August 1914, after the Battle of Mons and the subsequent British retreat from Belgium. It remained in German hands until November 1918 and has the distinction of containing the graves of some of the first and last casualties of the First World War. The site for the cemetery, an artificial mound in the grounds the estate of local landowner Jean Houzeau de Lehaie, was given to the occupying Germans and was used by them for interments of their and Commonwealth dead from the opening weeks of the war. The plan differs from the stark, regular layout of most Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries in that it contains a variety of different trees, shrubs, flowering plants, and landscaping features which, combined, give the effect of an English country garden. At the highest point of elevation in the park, there is a granite obelisk some seven metres high, erected by the Germans in memory of both German and British servicemen killed in the actions near Mons in August 1914, and elsewhere in the cemetery there are further German memorials to officers and men of the Middlesex Regiment (Plot III), Royal Fusiliers and Royal Irish Regiment (Plot VI). At the Armistice, the cemetery contained the graves of 245 German and 188 Commonwealth servicemen, but further graves were brought in later from other burial grounds in the area, so that there are now 229 Commonwealth and 284 German servicemen of the First World War buried or commemorated in the cemetery. The Commonwealth interments are all standard-issue CWGC markers, but the German war graves are marked by headstones in a variety of different styles.