After 100 years, WWI soldier is laid to rest in a marked grave
A BRITISH soldier killed in the First World War will finally receive a marked grave having been “lost” for more than 100 years.
Lieutenant Osmond Bartle Wordsworth was shot at the Battle of Arras, in northern France, in 1917.
His body was placed by his fellow soldiers in an unmarked grave and left for decades.
Then, in 2013, a French farmer digging in nearby Henin-sur-Cojeul stumbled upon the remains of a soldier.
Although the body was exhumed and reburied in another unmarked grave at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery near Arras in 2015, work to identify the man got under way.
Poet
Experts studied cloth and metal items from the grave, including a pocket watch and trench whistle.
Volunteers at the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum, in Woodstock, near Oxford, concluded the man was an officer from the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry.
After conducting research around the world, they eventually declared Lt Wordsworth was the most likely casualty.
They were then able to trace a living descendant and a DNA sample was obtained and compared to one taken from the remains dug up.
It has now been confirmed that the unknown soldier is Lt Wordsworth, a great nephew of poet William Wordsworth and a Cambridge University graduate.
Lt Wordsworth was 29 when he was killed, and had grown up in Tyneham, Dorset. Earlier, he had survived the sinking of the RMS Lusitania in 1915.
The commission will now give the officer a named headstone and a marked grave for his relatives to visit in the future.
Major Tom Shannon, who conducted the research, said: “The words that we have had back from the Wordsworth family are that it does mean an awful lot to them to go and visit his grave.”