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Effry National Military Cemetery

La nécropole nationale d’Effry. © ECPAD

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Effry National Military Cemetery contains the bodies from the lazarett, the German military hospital set up on the premises of the Briffault factory. Within these walls, civilian prisoners were interned in poor sanitary conditions. The cemetery contains the buried remains of 127 French, between 281 and 305 Russians, between 227 and 229 Belgians, 23 Romanians and one Italian. However, these figures are not definitive because the bodies were initially buried in mass graves before the cemetery was reorganised in 1927. In 2007 a brick memorial was unveiled in memory of the factory where the lazarett was located.

These civilian victims include, notably, the remains of women and children, some of them very young, such as Madeleine Beaujeux aged 4 years (grave 157) and Louise Questroy aged 12 years (grave 89). Two sisters from Origny-en-Thiérache, Yvonne (aged 24) (grave 79) and Noëlla (aged 20) (grave 77) who died on 25 May and 7 June 1917 respectively, are buried there along with a father and his son from Colligies, Eugène Grenier (aged 21) and Ernest Grenier (aged 49) who died on 12 and 17 October respectively (graves 162 and 163).