This is also a substack post. Late last year I finally got down to writing a chapter where my character Sarah visits a cemetery in Northern France where her brother is buried. He was killed in the First World War. When I began planning how the visit would unfold, I luckily had a very clear map, (see below) and from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission was able to download a listing of all the 1,997 soldiers buried there. But where would he be? What part of the cemetery?

From the map you can see it is divided into 9 sections marked with roman numerals. Funnily enough there is no section 9 but I quickly realised that I couldn’t just pick any section. It had to be where real-life soldiers of Eddie’s battalion, the 45^th would have been buried. And after studying the excel sheet I realised that the country and the date of death were also a factor. 

Importantly, even though this is Dernancourt Communal Cemetery Extension and the two battles of Dernancourt were fought in March and April of 1918, there were many other soldiers from Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom buried there from nearby battles, sometimes two years previously and up to the war’s end. 

How was I going to work out the most likely section for Eddie? I started making notes of the different battalions that were buried in each section working through the list alphabetically but I could see that this was going to take forever. I also had Sarah’s friend, Randolph and Clarissa wandering around with her trying to find their nephew who was from the 48th. Two battalions to watch out for.

Of course, I didn’t want them finding Eddie and I didn’t want him found too soon as dramatically I needed the tension and the distress of seeing all the headstones affect all three characters. But how could I work it? I finally come up with the idea of reorganising the excel sheet by section. This gave me a sort of virtual reality tour of what all my characters would find section by section. The name, the dates and the battalions.

It quickly became apparent that soldiers buried in the sections on the left-hand side of the cemetery where Randolph and Clarissa are searching, were killed much earlier in the war. Just as Sarah begins to realise, as she wanders through the later sections, VI, VII, and VIII, that she is going to be the one to find Eddie. 

With all this new information, including what was on the headstones and some of the inscriptions, the scene began to take shape and I realised that this was becoming a major chapter in the novel. The denouement in fact. (When I had only planned for it to be a fleeting incident.) I hope I have done the scene justice. Especially for those people who have actually gone to visit an overseas cemetery where a family member is buried.