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Attention: the War Dead Register only lists Belgian fallen soldiers.  
The War Dead Register provides basic personal information (name, first name, date and place of birth, etc.) and does not contain military files (giving a complete overview of the military career). According to date of birth the files are kept either by the Royal Military Museum or by the Defence archives service. The files safeguarded at the Military Museum can be consulted on site (Parc du Cinquantenaire in Brussels). The files kept up till now by Defence are currently transferred to the General State Archives.
The date on which they will be once again available has not yet been determined.   

 

Archives of the Royal Military Museum 

Documentation Centre 
Parc du Cinquantenaire 3
1000 Brussels
E-mail : cdoc.klm-mra@warheritage.be   
Website: www.warheritage.be

Cemetery details

Where?
Oerenstraat, 8690 Oeren (Sint-Pietersbandenkerk)
 
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History

Troops not on daily frontline duty but possibly to be deployed again at short notice can come to Oeren, a few kilometres from the Yser Front, for a short rest. The hamlet is also designated as a solution when the nearby Alveringem cemetery is filled to capacity. An emergency graveyard is therefore created around the deconsecrated Saint Peter in Chains Church (commonly referred to as St. Apollonia by the inhabitants) in mid-1915. 
The graves are laid out side by side according to date of death, but some soldiers fallen in 1914 are to be found here as well. The cemetery is redesigned around 1925. The dead are exhumed from the Alveringem municipal cemeteries and the surrounding area, and transferred to Oeren. Today 508 bodies are buried here, six of them unknown. Second Lieutenant Getteman’s grave is empty. He was transferred to his hometown of Maffle, but his headstone was not removed.  

 

Casualties

508 First World War (6 unidentified)

 

Description

The cemetery circles the church. It has a low wall of typical West Flemish brick on the street side and a central entrance gate.  
The graves are mainly arranged back to back in double rows, separated by flowerbeds. With the exception of five heldenhuldezerken (a Flemish word designating a Celtic cross with a Flemish motto, placed by the Heldenhulde committee and created during the First World War by Flemish intellectual circles to honour fallen Flemish soldiers, as a substitute for the official marking “Mort pour la patrie” (Fallen for the nation) in French), all the graves follow the typical Belgian bluestone model with bronze plaque.