Queant Cemetery CWGC

 cemetery, First World War 1914-1918

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Queant Cemetery was made by the 2nd and 57th Casualty Clearing Stations in October and November 1918. It then consisted of 71 graves (now Plot I, Rows A and B) but was greatly enlarged after the Armistice when graves were brought in from the battlefields of 1917-1918 between Arras and Bapaume, and from certain smaller burial grounds in the area. There are now 2,377 Commonwealth servicemen of the First World War buried or commemorated in this cemetery. 1,441 of the burials are unidentified but there are special memorials to 56 casualties known or believed to be buried among them. Other special memorials commemorate 26 casualties buried in German cemeteries in the neighbourhood, whose graves could not be found.

In November 1994, while ploughing his field just behind the Australian Memorial Park at Bullecourt, a local farmer found the remains of Sergeant John White, 22nd Battalion, 77 years after his death. His identity disc was still intact.Found with John was a wallet containing, among other things, the still legible fragments of a letter and a lock of hair.In November 1995, Sergeant White’s flag–draped coffin was carried by six Australian soldiers to a grave in Queant Road Cemetery near Bullecourt. There, in the presence of his daughter, he was finally laid to rest along with the lock of hair he had brought from Australia all those years ago. A French bugler sounded the Last Post and Sergeant John White was no longer among the ‘missing’.