The Royal Army Medical Corps organised front-line medicine into a chain. A regimental aid post sat just behind the trench line, where battalion medics gave morphine and dressed wounds quickly so a man could be moved. From there stretcher-bearers carried casualties to an Advanced Dressing Station, perhaps a mile or two back - far enough to be reachable, close enough that the wounded had not yet died of shock or blood loss. At the ADS, surgeons triaged: dress and evacuate, operate on, or set aside as too far gone. The dugouts cut into the railway embankment at Transport Farm served this purpose from 1915 onwards. Peak usage came in 1916 and 1917, when offensives on the Salient generated more casualties than the medical chain could clear. Men were treated in the dugouts. Men died in them. Men were buried within yards of where they had died, because there was nowhere else and no time to do otherwise.

Second Lieutenant Frederick Youens of the Durham Light Infantry was twenty-four years old on the day he died. The story of how he died is on the citation that accompanied his Victoria Cross. On 7 July 1917, near Hill 60 on the Salient, a German raiding party threw grenades into a British position. One of the grenades fell among Youens's men. Youens had been wounded earlier that day and was being dressed when the alarm came; he picked up the grenade with the intention of throwing it back, away from the men around him. It detonated in his hand. He died of his wounds later the same day, at the dressing station, and was buried at Railway Dugouts. His Victoria Cross, awarded posthumously, was sent to his family in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. He is one of more than two thousand men in the cemetery; his row, his grave, his stone.

Not every body in the cemetery was buried at the dugouts. After the Armistice, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission concentrated dozens of small burial grounds whose sites had been destroyed or overrun by fighting. Among those gathered into Railway Dugouts were men whose original cemetery, Valley Cottages Cemetery in Zillebeke, no longer existed. Whatever wooden crosses had marked their graves had been blown apart; the ground had been shelled into unrecognisability; some of the graves themselves had been destroyed, the bodies lost in the churn of mud. For these men, the cemetery carries 'special memorials' - headstones bearing their names where no body is buried beneath. Each one is inscribed with a line written by Rudyard Kipling: 'Their Glory Shall Not Be Blotted Out.' Kipling, who had pushed his only son into the army and watched him disappear at Loos in 1915, knew what those words had to carry.

Sir Edwin Lutyens designed the cemetery. He had designed the Cenotaph on Whitehall, the great empty tomb at the heart of London's Remembrance Day. He had designed the Thiepval Memorial on the Somme, the largest British battle memorial in the world, with 72,000 names on its arches. At Railway Dugouts he worked in a smaller register. The Stone of Remembrance - his austere altar-form, the same one repeated in cemeteries across the Western Front - sits between the rows. The shelter buildings frame the entrance. The rows themselves curve gently to follow the slope of the ground falling away from the old embankment. King Albert I of Belgium had granted the ground to the United Kingdom in perpetuity, a gesture of thanks for what the British Empire's soldiers had done. Lutyens designed the space as though the Belgian land had become, by the act of burial, English ground.

Trains no longer run on the line; the embankment remains, a long earth bank covered in grass. Transport Farm itself has been rebuilt; the cemetery sits behind it, the rows of pale headstones visible from the road. There are 2,463 men buried here in plot after plot, with the special memorials to the Valley Cottages dead set slightly apart. Visitors come in small numbers - the famous Salient cemeteries like Tyne Cot draw most of the coaches - but the visitors who do come tend to stay longer. They find the men of particular regiments whose battalions died here. They find Frederick Youens. They find the headstones that say 'A Soldier of the Great War, Known Unto God,' and the personal inscriptions families paid for: lines from hymns, fragments of letters, the names of mothers and wives. The Salient is full of cemeteries like this one. It is not full of cemeteries quite like this one.