The First World War was not only fought between the living, at times, it was also fought against the dead. Cemeteries were occasionally turned into battlegrounds where soldiers entrenched themselves among the deceased. Elsewhere, burial sites were blindly shelled and reduced to rubble by artillery fire. Alongside this mainly incidental damage, were also deliberate acts of desecration. Wooden crosses were kicked down, vaults forced open, headstones destroyed, latrines placed over graves, tombs looted, coffins broken open, and even corpses violated. While reasons that led soldiers to act in such ways are complex, it remains essential to situate them within the changing contexts of the war on the Western Front. The invasion of 1914, the strategic retreat to the Hindenburg Line in 1917, and the collapse of the German army in 1918 each created different conditions where such violations could occur, and these moments also gave soldiers different opportunities and the perceived licence to attack both civilian and military cemeteries. Cemetery desecrations therefore cannot be dismissed as incidental missteps that happened during the war; they must instead be seen as part of a wider dynamic of totalising warfare. This paper examines how these acts of outrage were addressed and constructed in newspaper articles, official reports, photography, literature contemporary to the war, and diplomatic exchanges. While it stresses that these were not entirely widespread practices on the Western Front, this paper does show that the desecration of graves are meaningful acts as they can reveal a lot about the nature and the multifaceted dynamics of wartime violence.