Thursday 7 December 2023 – Canterbury: Margot Melsens (In Flanders Fields Museum), Hauling Bodies: exhuming and concentrating the war dead in Belgium.

During the post-war years, all countries reorganised their cemeteries. On the one hand, bodies from isolated field graves in every corner of Belgium were dug up and added to collective burial grounds. Smaller cemeteries were regrouped in larger concentration cemeteries as well. On the other hand, while tens of thousands of French, Belgian, German and American war dead were dug up and returned ‘home’, the British Empire was unique in deciding not to repatriate the dead.

This lecture focuses on this movement of bodies in the post-war years, based on research carried out as part of the international exhibition 'For Evermore: cemeteries of the First World War' at the In Flanders Fields Museum.

Canterbury venue, University of Kent, Keynes Seminar Room 16, start time 6pm.