Descendants tell the

Nelly Ayres received a telegram from the British Army in October 1917 telling her that her husband Arthur had been made “non-effective by death”.

Sapper Ayres, of the Royal Engineers, died in a military hospital near Boulogne in France, three weeks after being wounded at Passchendaele, as he helped care for injured comrades.

A century later, his paternal granddaughter Sue Patterson was among the 4,000 descendants of those who fought who attended a memorial service for the fallen at Tyne Cot Cemetery near Ypres, where so many of the dead are remembered.

Some of those who have come have relatives buried in visitable graves, while thousands whose bodies were never recovered are remembered in names etched into plaques on the walls of the largest Commonwealth cemetery by the number of the interred in the world.

Mrs Patterson said a letter from her grandfather’s commanding officer had revealed that after being wounded himself at Passchendaele on October 1 1917, he was helping bandage injured comrades when he was wounded again by a second artillery blast.

He died in hospital 21 days later, leaving Nelly a widow