Nine Elms Military Cemetery in Thelus, Nord-Pas-de-Calais

About

Get directions Thelus, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France

Coordinates: 50.34672, 2.78441
Cemetery ID:

Members have Contributed

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.

Photos

See 1 more

1 open photo request.

Thelus is a village about 6.5 kilometres north of Arras and 1 kilometre east of the main road from Arras to Lens. The cemetery is on the western side of the main road and about 1.5 kilometres south of the village.

"Nine Elms" was the name given by the Army to a group of trees 460 metres East of the Arras-Lens main road, between Thelus and Roclincourt. The cemetery was begun after the capture of Vimy Ridge by the burial in what is now Plot I, Row A of 80 men of the 14th Canadian Infantry Battalion, who fell on the 9th April, 1917; and this and the next row were filled by June, 1917. Three burials were made in Plot I, Row C, in July, 1918. The rest of the cemetery was made after the Armistice by the concentration of British and French graves from the battlefields of Vimy and Neuville-St. Vaast and from certain small cemeteries.

There are now nearly 700 casualties of the First World War commemorated in this site. Of these, almost 150 are unidentified and a special memorial is erected to one Canadian soldier, believed to be buried among them. Other special memorials record the names of 44 soldiers from Canada and ten from the United Kingdom, buried in other cemeteries, whose graves were destroyed by shell fire. Four graves in Plot IV, identified as a whole but not individually, are marked by headstones bearing the additional words: "Buried near this spot". The great majority of the British graves are of April, 1917; the French are of 1914 and 1915. 177 French graves have been removed to other cemeteries. The cemetery covers an area of 3,355 square metres and is enclosed by a low brick wall.