In the autumn of 1914, the British Army that crossed to France was a small, professional, hereditary thing. Its officer corps was drawn heavily from the landed aristocracy and the upper gentry - the cousins and second sons of dukes, baronets, and earls, men who had been at Eton or Harrow and then at Sandhurst, who had family commissions in the Guards regiments or the smart cavalry. When the war came, they went with their battalions. Many of them died in the First Battle of Ypres, the desperate autumn fighting that stopped the German advance through Flanders. They died at the head of their men because that was where Edwardian officers were taught to be: in front, encouraging, visible, the first up out of the trench. Visible men in 1914 were targets. The casualty rate among officers of the original British Expeditionary Force was, by November, catastrophic.

Zillebeke was on the front line. The village church, the small Catholic parish church of Onze-Lieve-Vrouw, stood close behind the fighting. The trenches ran across the fields east of the village. In those early weeks of the war, the formal cemeteries that would later organise the Salient's dead did not yet exist. Burials were ad hoc; the nearest churchyard was where you put your men. The thirty-two soldiers buried in the Commonwealth War Graves section of Zillebeke Churchyard fell mostly between 29 October and 17 November 1914, in the close-quarters fighting that stopped the German push for the Channel ports. Lord Bernard Gordon-Lennox, third son of the 7th Duke of Richmond, died on 10 November aged thirty-six, hit by a shell while in his dugout. Lieutenant-Colonel Gordon Chesney Wilson of the Royal Horse Guards, husband of the war correspondent Lady Sarah Wilson, was killed on 6 November leading his squadron. Lord Worsley of the Royal Horse Guards, heir to the Earl of Yarborough, was killed nearby at Zandvoorde on 30 October 1914 - one of the very earliest aristocratic deaths in the Salient, and one of the losses that defined the cemetery's character.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission was founded on a principle: equality in death. Every soldier, regardless of rank or birth, would have the same plain Portland stone headstone, the same regimental badge, the same family inscription if the family chose one. Sir Frederic Kenyon's foundational 1918 report was explicit: the Commission's cemeteries 'were designed to avoid class distinctions that would conflict with the feeling of brotherhood which had developed between all ranks serving at the Front.' Zillebeke Churchyard breaks that principle, in two cases. Among the rows of standard headstones stand two private memorials: a separate stone for Lieutenant John Henry Gordon Lee-Steere of the Grenadier Guards, killed on 17 November 1914, and the substantial tomb of Second Lieutenant Baron Alexis George de Gunzburg, of the 11th Hussars, killed in 1914. They were placed by the families before the Commission was formed, before the rule existed. They were not removed. The cemetery still carries them - a small inconsistency in a vast and otherwise rigorous system.

The Commonwealth War Graves part of the cemetery was designed by W. H. Cowlishaw - not one of the famous Commission architects like Lutyens or Blomfield or Baker, but a competent designer who handled many of the smaller plots in Belgium. Cowlishaw worked with what he had: a few rows of headstones tucked into the parish churchyard, the village church on one side, a low wall around the consecrated ground. There is no Stone of Remembrance here - too few graves to warrant one. The Cross of Sacrifice is small. The headstones are the standard Portland stone, the inscriptions arranged in the standard way. The visitor comes through the gate of the village churchyard, walks past the Belgian family graves with their photograph plaques and their ironwork, and arrives at the British plot almost by accident.

The phrase 'aristocrats' cemetery' is not a flattering one when you stop to think about it. It describes a real demographic fact - too many titled men in too small a space - but it also points to something the war did to a particular class of British society, and through it to British society more broadly. The October and November of 1914 took a generation of young aristocratic officers and used them up almost as fast as they could be replaced. By 1918 the Army was officered increasingly by men from the middle class, by sergeants given temporary commissions, by anyone who could lead. The aristocratic monopoly on command did not survive the war. Zillebeke Churchyard is one small piece of evidence for that change - a record, in pale stone and Belgian grass, of the moment when the old order's sons were still going first.