There was no cemetery here before April 1915. The land south of a farmhouse the British called "Essex Farm" was just unnamed farmland on pre-war maps, the kind of polder field used for grazing or beet. Then the Canadian Field Artillery established a dressing station on the canal bank during the Second Battle of Ypres, and the men who died there had to be buried somewhere. The 49th (West Riding) Infantry Division began putting their 1915 dead into what is now Plot I, often without orderly rows. The dressing station was operational from early 1915 to August 1917, which is also the burial window for most of the men here. The cemetery's name probably came from one of the first interments: a soldier of the 2nd Battalion of the Essex Regiment, buried in June 1915. Twenty-eight more men of the 11th Battalion joined him during 1916.

Valentine Joe Strudwick had lied about his age to enlist, like thousands of other underage British boys in 1914 and 1915. His local paper in Dorking, Surrey, ran an obituary that captures the tone of the era with painful clarity: "Pte Valentine Joe Strudwick of the 8th Rifle Brigade, joined up twelve months ago, and at the time of his death...had not reached his sixteenth birthday... a fine example to those of maturer years who have not yet joined up." Read it twice and the recruiting-poster pressure is impossible to miss. He has become, in the decades since, one of the most-visited graves on the entire Western Front. Schoolchildren leave poppies, notes, sometimes small wooden crosses. The stone itself is unremarkable - the same Portland limestone as every other grave in the cemetery, the same regimental badge, the same single line of permitted family inscription.

A few rows away lies Thomas Barratt of the 7th Battalion, South Staffordshire Regiment. Barratt was 22 when he died on July 27, 1917, the day before the Battle of Pilckem Ridge opened the larger Passchendaele offensive. He was on a scouting patrol in no man's land when he came under fire from German snipers. According to his Victoria Cross citation, he "stalked and killed" the snipers one by one, then covered his patrol's withdrawal, then was killed by a shell on the way back to his own line. He received the VC posthumously. His stone carries the small bronze replica of the medal he never lived to wear.

The cemetery was redesigned in the years after the war by Sir Reginald Blomfield, one of the three principal architects the Imperial War Graves Commission appointed to give shape to the British and Commonwealth cemeteries of the Western Front. Blomfield's contribution to the IWGC's standard vocabulary was the Cross of Sacrifice - a tall stone cross with a downward-pointing bronze sword on its face, meant to be visible from a distance and to read clearly as Christian without being denominational. The Cross stands at the northwest corner of Essex Farm. Across from it, on the east side, is the Stone of Remembrance, the second IWGC standard, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens to look pagan and altar-like rather than Christian, so that the dead of any faith could rest beneath it equally. Between the two stones, the headstones run in disciplined rows that don't quite hide the disorder of the original burials.

Somewhere in this cemetery, or near it, lies Lieutenant Alexis Helmer of the Canadian Field Artillery - the friend whose burial by John McCrae produced the poem In Flanders Fields. McCrae himself officiated, reading the burial service from memory because no chaplain was available. The grave was marked, but later shellfire destroyed the marker and disturbed the ground, and Helmer's body has never been re-identified. A monument near the entrance commemorates the composition of the poem in May 1915. A few steps north, the concrete bunkers of the dressing station where McCrae worked still stand on the canal bank, and the poppies still come up red each spring along the embankment, exactly as he described them.