Revealed: an unknown soldier of Ypres

Eighty-five years ago today, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the guns fell silent on the Western Front. The Great War, the war meant to end all wars, was over.

The horrors of the trenches are now passing over the horizon, from living human memory into history. But the battlegrounds of France and Belgium continue to give up their secrets.

Yesterday, a few miles north of Ypres, the remains of another nameless British soldier were being unearthed. Not much was left - a few bones, some buttons and a pair of boots - lying in the crater gouged by the shell that killed him.

Over the last few months, a team of British and Belgian archaeologists have been busy excavating a trench system near the village of St Jan. The site is on the route of a new motorway and the government in Brussels decreed that it should be thoroughly researched.

Six British dead have been recovered and, for once, a name may soon be attached to one of them.

William Storey was barely a man when he signed up for the Northumberland Fusiliers. From Blyth, Northumberland, he was part of a detachment from the regiment's 5th Battalion, which went into action on Oct 26, 1917. In all probability he was killed by a shell while waiting to go forward.

The battle in which he was taking part has become a byword for hellish and seemingly pointless sacrifice. Passchendaele was the Third Battle of Ypres, an attempt by Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig to break the German line in the third year of the war.

The campaign began in July 1917 and ended in November when the British advance ground to a halt in a sea of mud. The thousands of names on the memorials and headstones that dot the flat, often waterlogged landscape stand as testament to its failure.

Before the excavation, William Storey had no grave. Listed as missing, his is one of 34,888 names engraved on the enormous memorial at Tyne Cot, near Ypres. That may now change.

During the dig, the Anglo-Belgian team discovered a shoulder bone and on it a fragment of uniform carrying a rare form of insignia, a flaming grenade under the designation T5 NF. The code stood for the 5th (Territorial) Battalion of the Northumberland Fusiliers.

It was subsequently discovered that only four members of the unit had gone missing in that sector. Three were officers, whose uniforms did not carry such shoulder flashes. That left Acting Lance Corporal Storey.

The investigators are still cautious, because mistakes can be made and there are, even after all the years that have passed, family sensitivities involved. But they are quietly confident that L/Cpl Storey is the man.

Another four sets of remains have been discovered in and around the 80-yard stretch of trenches. Three are believed to be a machinegun team from the Royal Sussex Regiment, killed in a shell hole. Another, some distance away, is thought to be from a cavalry regiment. Despite the vast swathes of land scarred by the trenches, few have been examined to such an extent. The excavation has produced a picture of life lived under almost unimaginable hardship. Among personal effects found are jars of rum, which provided a degree of comfort as well as a much-needed buttress for courage.

The trench lines tell the story of the Ypres Salient, a bulge in the line held by the British for most of the war at horrendous cost. The trenches of 1915, to which the British retreated after the first German gas attack, are only a few feet away from the attack trenches dug towards the enemy lines prior to Haig's offensive two years later. The site may be preserved, but the demands of modern transport could win out.

Peter Barton, one of those involved in the excavation, said: "This is a unique site. It is the first time an excavation like this has been done. But it is ironic that the very first site they have excavated is under threat, within months, of being closed. Because the fighting was so intense here over such a long period the whole of this area is one huge cemetery. And there are hundreds of thousands of men still out there waiting to be found."

If the remains are identified as those of L/Cpl Storey they will, according to tradition, be interred at one of the Commonwealth war cemeteries near the scene of their discovery. One, named Track X after a route marked on military maps of the time, lies only a few hundred yards from the excavation towards the German lines.

It is an intimate place, a small patch of earth marked by a cross and the headstones of some 300 British and Dominion troops who fell nearby.

There are so many human remains in the area of the Ypers Salient that any significant building project seems to bring some to light. This took place in 1998:

BURIALS AT MONCHY-LE-PREUX

On Wednesday, April 15th., 1998, the weather in Northern France was very cold and wet. The drivers on the Paris-Lille motorway were driving with headlights on and some of them, at least, had reduced their speed in compliance with French traffic regulations. Driving more slowly, and keeping their distance, in accordance with the signs beside the carriageway, they might have had a little more time to look around them, and take notice, briefly, of the countryside they were passing through.

There are very many war cemeteries in the area around Arras, and some of these are very close to the motorway. One of these is the cemetery just outside Monchy-le-Preux. It isn't a large cemetery, but is instantly recognisable for what it is, standing a few dozen yards from a narrow road, surrounded by farmland. On any other day, there would have been nothing to distinguish it from the many which can be seen from the motorway, but on this day, as drivers passed by, they would have seen the unusual sight of 18 British soldiers, standing by the road in three groups of six, bareheaded in the rain. And the cemetery itself, which is deserted more often than not, was full of people. I was one of them. We were there to pay our respects and attend the burials of three British soldiers who had been killed in 1917 and whose bodies had been lost for 80 years.

Last year, in the Arras area, during an archaeological "dig" undertaken as part of the preparations for road-building, the bodies of 27 British soldiers were found, buried together in a shallow mass grave. From their equipment, it was possible to tell that the men were members of the 13th Battalion, the Royal Fusiliers. They were killed in the phase of the fighting around Arras which began on April 9th, 1917 and lasted until April 14th. The allied attack of this period stretched across a front of 15 miles. The 13th Royal Fusiliers were to attack the village of Monchy-le-Preux and they were successful in this, though their losses were very heavy, and the 27 men whose remains were found by the archaeologists were among the casualties, probably losing their lives on April 12th.

In the cases of 24 of the soldiers, there was no possibility of identification, and their remains were buried in a British cemetery in a quiet ceremony in December, 1996. But the researchers from the Ministry of Defence were certain that they had positively identified two of the soldiers, and had hopes of identifying a third, and so these three bodies were kept in the mortuary at Arras. These were the bodies which were to be buried at Monchy on 15th April, 1998.

Private Frank Harold King, aged 21, came from Hampton, South-West London.

Private George Hamilton Anderson, aged 32, was from Paddington, London.

The third soldier remains unidentified. They say that his remains suggested that he must have been unusually, tall, and that it was hoped that this might provide a clue as to his identity but this was not to be the case.

The day before the burials I had been at Delville Wood, where I joined in a conversation with a few other visitors, in the tea-room-cum-shop. The word was was that huge crowds were expected and that the Frence police would be closing roads for some distance around the cemetery. "Be prepared for a long walk," I was warned. In the event, I was able to drive to within a quarter of a mile from the cemetery. Two policemen stood at the last road junction, turning people away. I parked on the car-park of one of the new industrial units near the motorway and we walked from there. It took less than five minutes.
Inside the walls of the cemetery, a band was playing - The Normandy Band of the Queen's Division - and there were standard-bearers from the Royal British Legion and the Royal Fusiliers Old Comrades Association. There were perhaps a couple of hundred people inside the cemetery limits, probably the greatest number ever to visit the place at any one time. My wife, daughter and I decided not to go into the cemetery, but to walk along outside the wall and watch from there.

Inside the cemetery we saw three open graves, with two fusiliers standing at attention, one on either side of the prepared burial-sites. Standing nearby was a firing-party of twelve fusiliers and out on the road stood three more groups of six fusiliers. These were the bearing-parties, waiting for the arrival of the coffins. They came from the present-day 2nd Battalion, the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers.

There was a lull before the ceremony began. this was an opportunity for friends to meet and I had hoped to meet five. There was Hazel Basford and her husband Hedley, from Kent. Hazel is a bell-ringer who researches the lives of Kent bell-ringers who died in the war. We had not met before but had arranged to recognise each other by looking for the hats we had told each other we would be wearing. This arrangement worked very well. I also met (again for the first time) Marco Hoveling and Peter van den Heuvel who had come from Holland. The last person I was looking for was one I knew well, Phil Curme, author of the "Swavesey Chronicles" web-site . (See my LINKS page for a link to his site.) Strangely enough, Phil was the one person I failed to locate that morning.

Sitting in a wheelchair near to the standard bearers was a Great War veteran - himself a Royal Fusilier who had taken part in the same actions as the three of his old comrades who were to be buried today. Next to him, on a bench, sat two children with their mother, one of them a very small girl. I think they were relatives of one of the soldiers, who had come to the cemetery earlier than the rest. But there they sat, the oldest and youngest people there, and they sat without complaint then and throughout the ceremony on that bitterly cold day.

The "official" cars arrived next, bringing the relatives of Ptes. King and Anderson plus the important dignitaries who were attending. These included the Officer Commanding the Royal Fusiliers, high-ranking Officers of the French Army and His Royal Highness the Duke of Kent, who is the President of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, but who was also there in his capacity as Colonel-in-Chief of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. The Duke took no part in the service, and didn't even stand at the front of the group of dignitaries but, like the rest of us, he had taken the trouble to be there.

In between the band pieces, the drone of the traffic on the motorway reasserted itself and it was while I was looking in that direction that I saw three hearses cross the bridge over the motorway and drive down the narrow, country road towards the cemetery. Each hearse carried a coffin draped with the Union Jack and the three hearses drew up level with the three carrying-parties. Then, led by The Reverend Canon D.A.Ruddle, Honorary Chaplain to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission for the Nord/Pas de Calais Regions, the three coffins were carried into the cemetery and laid over the waiting graves. It was very sombre scene and one which I never thought I would ever see - soldiers burying other soldiers who had died in the Great War, in a War Cemetery. Phil Curme told me later that the weather on the day was just as it had been on the day when the men were killed.

There were hymns and prayers in the cemetery as the burial ceremony progressed. And there was the band, of course, and hundreds of voices to take up the singing. The carrying parties returned to the graves at the appropriate moment and lowered the coffins into the graves with military precision. They had obviously rehearsed everything down to the last detail. Things were clearly very different from the day when Ptes. King, Anderson, their unknown comrade and the other 24 unidentified men were buried for the first time, in their shallow mass grave. The original burial might, perhaps, have been a rather hurried affair - a battlefield burial undertaken when time and personnel allowed, and with fewer people present.

I don't like crowds and wondered what it must have been like to be there at that first burial.

The burials had lasted for over an hour in very cold, wet weather. As the ceremony ended, the rain began to fall even more heavily, and everyone must have felt that it was time to get to somewhere warm and dry to get out of their soaking clothes. After a few quick farewells to those I knew, my wife, my daughter and I headed back to the car. Our next plan was to drive into Monchy-le-Preux itself so that my daughter could see and photograph the Newfoundland Caribou Memorial there. We reached the village, but the police were still keeping traffic moving, so although we were able to drive past the Caribou, we were not able to stop and look at it. So we went to Arras to find some lunch.

About an hour later we decided to try visiting Monchy-le-Preux once more. The rain had stopped by now. The drive to Monchy took us past the cemetery again and we saw that, although all the crowds had gone, there was a group of Commonwealth War Graves Commission gardeners at work. They had already filled in the graves and were replacing the turf over the burial-sites. They also had three new headstones ready, leaning against the other headstones in the row of graves which now contained the new graves.
My photograph shows Pte. Anderson's headstone waiting to be positioned by his grave, with the unidentified soldier's headstone next to it. To the right, not visible in my photograph, Pte. King's headstone is being placed into position.

Finally, the CWGC gardeners positioned the remaining two headstones. They then set about the task of tidying up the general site. Some of the cemetery's grass, the subject of so much of their care and attention, had taken rather a beating under the feet of so many visitors, and the places where most people had walked had become decidedly muddy. But this was not too much of a problem, for the cemetery's hour of fame had passed, and it would now revert to its usual quietness and the grass would recover.

After all the ceremony, the music, the hymns and speeches, the final act of recognition had been performed for Frank King, George Anderson and their unknown comrade. Many, many people witnessed their coffins being lowered into the ground, but only my family and I saw their graves being marked. Their Name Liveth for Evermore.

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