When is an English Cemetery not an English Cemetery?

​​Two places to the east of Toulouse are known as le cimitière des anglais, or the English cemetery. The question is, are any Englishmen buried there?

This story follows on from my previous post about the Battle of Toulouse, fought on 10 April 1814 between the armies of Wellington and Soult. In that post, I explained that Wellington’s allied army included troops from all corners of the British Isles, several German cavalry regiments and a large number of Spanish and Portuguese units.

The retreat along the Canal du Midi

The day after the battle, Marshal Soult and his army retreated along the south bank of the Canal du Midi. The allies were scouting the hills to the north, so Soult’s engineers blew up the bridges along the canal to keep them at a safe distance. The French planned to cross the canal at Baziège and follow the old Roman road towards Castelnaudary. To protect this crossing point, Soult posted infantry and cavalry units in the hills above Baziège to stop the allies attacking the long column of his retreating army.

The Battle of Baziège

A detachment from the French 75th infantry regiment took up a position in the grounds of the Château de Lamothe, two kilometres north-east of Baziège. Four hundred metres to the north-east of the château stands the chapel of Sainte-Colombe, and inside its porch is a brief account of a cavalry clash that took place in the surrounding fields on 12 April 1814. At the end of it, 25 French and 52 allied cavalrymen lay dead.  

Burying the dead

The next day – 13 April – the mayor of Baziège mobilised the local population to clear the battlefield. They buried their own dead in a communal trench in the graveyard of Sainte-Colombe. As for the allied corpses, they were buried in a separate communal grave nearer to the château. Ever since, it has been known as le cimitière des anglais, and for around a hundred years the British Army paid the landowner to leave it fallow. The practice became a habit and the land remains untilled to this day, although unfortunately it has become something of a junk yard in recent years and there is no public access.

The account in the chapel’s porch claims the allied dead came from the 5th dragoons, a British regiment. My own research suggests they came from a brigade that comprised an Anglo-Irish regiment (the 18th hussars) and the 1st hussars of the King’s German Legion. This cimitière des anglais is unlikely to be filled with Englishmen, although there may be few.

The English Cemetery at Saint-Félix Lauragais

After the bloody encounter at Sainte-Colombe, the allied cavalry rode off to Saint-Félix-Lauragais carrying their injured with them. According to what seems to be no more than oral tradition, around 40 cavalrymen wounded in various skirmishes near Baziège were cared for in a makeshift hospital in a barn below Saint-Félix, and eight of them subsequently died. These poor souls were buried in the cimitière des anglais which lies across the valley to the south of the main Catholic cemetery. Supposedly, a cypress tree marks the resting place of each pair of English soldiers.

More than a myth?

A pleasant walk from Saint-Félix will take you to the cemetery which is marked by a granite stele erected by the Friends of Napoleonic Heritage. I asked that association’s departmental representative, Pierre-Alain Buvry, who, if anyone, might be buried there. To his knowledge no excavations have ever been carried, but when he and his team were clearing the ground and preparing their stele, they probed the topsoil and found that in most areas it was only ten or twenty centimetres thick, too shallow for graves. There may, however be a communal grave somewhere in the south-east corner where the bedrock lies deeper. He also reminded me that any corpses would have been buried with virtually nothing, making it extremely difficult to identify their regiment or nationality if any remains were ever found.

Le cimitière des anglais? Le cimitière des irlandais? Le cimitière des allemands? No one knows for sure.

explore by topic or map