THE COMMITMENT CONTINUES 100 YEARS ON
AT 11AM ON 28 SEPTEMBER 2017 A CEREMONIAL BURIAL TOOK PLACE FOR 19 UNIDENTIFIED WORLD WAR I SOLDIERS AT THE CWGC’S NEW IRISH FARM CEMETERY TO THE NORTH EAST OF YPRES
A total of 22 bodies were uncovered during ground work at an industrial building site at Briekestraat, Ypres. The site was a wartime cemetery that was moved to another site just 300 metres away – but somehow these men were missed.
The men are among the many sets of remains still being recovered each year. They are found during building or road works or by farmers working the land.
“We recover possibly one a week,” said Victoria. “At the beginning of the summer we had about 110 bodies in the recovery units in France and Belgium, and we will probably end up with that number at the end of the year, even though we are still re-burying steadily. When you think there are 200,000 people listed on the walls of the Memorials to the Missing, just on the Western Front, I suppose it’s not altogether surprising.”
The identification process has changed considerably through the years, although it still requires a large degree of detective work to give the dead back their names.
“Sometimes it is impossible, especially when bodies are found with no historical context. It‘s particularly sad if souvenir hunters have removed things like the insignia – then it becomes incredibly difficult to work out what nationality the person was.”
If the nationality of the person can be established, the next step is to find out when they might have been lost.
“Then you’ve got a chance to narrow it down,” explained Victoria, “because you’ve got the regimental rolls, and you know who went missing around that time and around that point. It’s only when you get to that point that you can say, OK, that’s probably someone from, for example, the York and Lancashire Regiment, because they were there on that date. Let’s have a look and see who was missing and who was never recovered. Then you end up with a handful of people – and then you can start to go down the route of calling for potential relatives and see whether DNA profiling is possible.”
The task of identification rests with the relevant government. In the case of these 19 men, it was the UK Ministry of Defence and their dedicated unit called the JCCC – the Joint Casualty and Compassionate Centre.
Of the 19 British soldiers, four served with the Essex Regiment, one with the Monmouthshire Regiment, one with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, one with the Northumberland Regiment and one with the Royal Irish Regiment. The final 11 were ‘Known Unto God’.
“They were originally going to be burying all 22 men,” added Victoria, “But actually there’s quite a strong chance we may be able to make identification so we are holding off on that.”
These burials are likely to be the last of 2017 as winter weather will make further internments impractical. In the spring of 2018, almost a century after the end of the conflict, the CWGC’S work to bury the dead of World War I will begin again.