Buttes New British Cemetery
cemetery in Zonnebeke, Belgium

Buttes New British Cemetery is a Commonwealth War Graves Commission burial ground for the dead of the First World War located in the Ypres Salient in Belgium on the Western Front.
History
Many of the men buried in the cemetery died as a result of the conditions in the trenches located in the Polygon Wood Sector of the Ypres Salient during the winter of 1917 to 1918. After the war, a number of the dead interred in the area were brought to a location eight kilometres to the east of Ieper and re-buried in what was named Buttes New British Cemetery. The cemetery is located in the northeastern corner of Polygon Wood.
The name is derived from an old butte, used as a rifle range by the Belgian Army prior to the war, which is on the western side of the cemetery. A memorial to the Australian 5th Division is located on top of the butte; this memorial was constructed with the assistance of German prisoners-of-war. Polygon Wood Cemetery is nearby.
Buttes New British Cemetery contains the remains of 2,108 Allied soldiers, the majority of whom are unknown. Over half of the burials are British; 564 are soldiers of the Australian Imperial Force, 162 soldiers of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force and five were from Canada. There are also 30 burials of unknown nationality.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Buttes New British Cemetery” as cemetery in Zonnebeke, Belgium. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as cemetery in Zonnebeke, Belgium. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 6, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q18110823. Authority coordinates are 50.856, 2.991. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1917 and 1918.
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This entry incorporates text from “Buttes New British Cemetery” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.