Clausen War Cemetery

The terraced cemetery on the slope of the Rue Jules Wilhelm, on the way up to the Kirchberg, is German, and older than either of the wars its stones are mostly from. After the Congress of Vienna made Luxembourg a fortress of the German Confederation in 1815, a Prussian garrison was stationed in the city, up to six thousand men, and it stayed for fifty-two years, until the Treaty of London sent it home in 1867. Its dead were buried here. The earliest graves on the lower terrace are older still, from the war of 1813 against Napoleon, and the soldiers of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 who died in Luxembourg lie among them.

The two world wars filled it. On the upper terrace are 205 soldiers of the First World War, their names on two plaques beside the steps; on the lower, 262 of the Second. In the winter and spring of 1945, as the Battle of the Bulge burned out along the country's northern border, the American graves service gathered the German dead and buried them provisionally at Sandweiler, and its own at Hamm. In 1952 Germany and Luxembourg agreed to bring the German dead from a hundred and fifty cemeteries across the country together at Sandweiler — all except these, which were left where they were. The Volksbund, the German war graves commission, looks after both.

It is a quiet, steep place, and it tells a longer story than the American cemetery at Hamm: not one war but a century and a half of soldiers from the other side, most of whom died in a garrison town in peacetime, a long way from home.