Wimereux Communal Cemetery is unusual because all the headstones lie flat due to the sandy nature of the soil. Three Rutland soldiers lie buried here and so does Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, author of the poem In Flanders Fields, grave IV.H.3. Wimereux was the headquarters of the Queen Mary's Army Auxilliary Corps during the First World War and in 1919 it became the General Headquarters of the British Army. From October 1914 onwards, Boulogne and Wimereux formed an important hospital centre and until June 1918, the medical units at Wimereux used the communal cemetery for burials, the south-eastern half having been set aside for Commonwealth graves. By June 1918, this half of the cemetery was filled, and subsequent burials from the hospitals at Wimereux were made in the new, and ultimately much bigger, Military Cemetery at Terlincthun, 3kms away. Wimereux Communal Cemetery contains 2,847 Commonwealth burials of the First World War. There is also a plot of 170 German war graves. The Commonwealth section was designed by Charles Holden.