The first British burials were made in September by the 10th Royal Fusiliers.  Foncquevillers Military Cemetery remained in use by fighting units and field ambulances until March 1917.  The burials made in July 1916 are especially numerous. 

Foncquevillers Military Cemetery was used again from March to August 1918, when the German offensive brought the front line back to nearly the old position. 

Seventy-four graves were brought in after the Armistice from battlefields of 1916 and 1918 to the east of the village. 

The 325 French graves were removed to La Targette French National Cemetery near Arras. 

A small number of 1939-1945 war casualties are commemorated in the cemetery.  They comprise five from the RAF and four Germans of which two are unknown.

Special memorials are erected to two soldiers from the United Kingdom thought to be buried in the cemetery.

Foncquevillers Military Cemetery is bounded by a brick wall and a hornbeam hedge, and planted with catalpa and other trees.  It stands in farming country among the woods.

Foncquevillers Military Cemetery contains the graves of many officers and men of the Sherwood Foresters.  Foncquevillers has been ‘adopted’ by the town of Derby.

The grave of Captain John Leslie Green V.C. Royal Army Medical Corps, attached to the 5th Battalion Sherwood Foresters (Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Regiment) is in the cemetery. 

He was killed in action at Gommecourt on July 1, 1916, aged 26. 

He was born at Buckden in Huntingdonshire and was the son of John George and Florence May Green, of St. Mark's Lodge, Cambridge.  He was educated at Felsted School and Downing College, Cambridge, and Bartholomew's Hospital. 

An extract from the London Gazette dated August 4, 1916 records the following: 

‘For most conspicuous devotion to duty.  Although himself wounded, he went to the assistance of an officer who had been wounded and was hung up on the enemy's wire entanglements, and succeeded in dragging him to a shell hole, where he dressed his wounds, notwithstanding that bombs and rifle grenades were thrown at him the whole time.  Captain Green then endeavoured to bring the wounded officer into safe cover, and had nearly succeeded in doing so when he himself was killed’.

Foncquevillers Military Cemetery Fact Panel