‘Lost so long,’ soldier’s body returned to family
WALKING THE
WESTERN FRONT
Katie Daubs and Richard Lautens retrace the footsteps of Canadian soldiers as they follow the trenches of Belgium and France
PLOEGSTEERT, BELGIUM— It is nearly impossible to make out trenches these days, but the past always turns up in the Belgian soil.
Shells, grenades and other war materiel are all common enough to be picked up at the end of the road like garbage. It is the signs of life that give pause — like the red toothbrush found in the farmer’s field in 2008.
Alan Mather, a handsome 37-year-old bachelor with twinkling eyes and a thick moustache, had the Flexadent France toothbrush with him when he walked across no man’s land on June 8, 1917.
When he was killed, the men in his unit told the higher-ups what they knew: “He was caught by a shell which hit him in the head, killing him instantly. I do not know place of burial as I was wounded the same morning and I cannot refer to anyone,” Pte. Herbert Leslie Taylor said from a hospital in England.
Lance Cpl. Ralph Clarence said that a shell exploded near Mather and he “was carried back and should be buried in one of the cemeteries just behind the line.”
The war kept going, the deaths kept coming, but nobody knew about Mather. The paperwork sent to the family in July 1917 noted his burial place was “not yet to hand.” In 1921, the Australian government sent the “Where Australians Rest” pamphlet to the family — part of efforts to connect far-flung relatives with Europe in a time before commercial flight.
“It really was a sadness the family bore with the stoicism of the era,” says Mathers’ great-niece, Kim Blomfield. “There was a silence around his death and his life.”
It was a silence protected by the Belgian soil, where he lay entombed with his belongings.
“It brings me unhinged every time,” Blomfield says of the toothbrush, from her home in Australia.
Ploegsteert, a small town called Plugstreet by British soldiers who couldn’t pronounce the Flemish names, was well known by Australian soldiers. The heavily shelled town between Ypres and the French border was the southernmost point of the 19-mine explosion that immediately killed10,000 German soldiers on June 7, 1917.
In August 2008, volunteers with the No-Man’s-Land archeology group — a crew that specializes in First World War digs — were excavating an old trench site outside of town when they found British-pattern boots, attached to feet and legs.
The soldier was just east of the German front-line trench, which had become the Australian trench after explosions, archeologists Richard Osgood and Martin Brown write in their book Digging Up Plugstreet. This soldier was close to the surface, surrounded by battlefield debris and personal possessions: a souvenir German helmet, iodine ampoules, and mess kit.
They contacted the authorities to get permission to excavate the unknown man with care and respect — a five-day task.
Archeology is historical detective work, and the scene suggested a man who had been covered by a blast of soil just after his death: his knees were still drawn toward his chest; his left hand still clutched his gun.
There was no sign of reverence in his resting spot; if his friends had buried him, they would have taken his gun and supplies.
In the soil nearby, there were pieces of corduroy pants and Australian badges, a wallet with French francs from 1916, and little clippings of hair around the collar of his uniform: he had a fresh haircut before his death. He also had lice.
The team figured he was from Australia’s 33rd Battalion, killed when advancing on the German line. A battalion history notes that the Battle of Messines was the group’s first major action, as part of the 9th Infantry Brigade.
“One soldier wrote that holding the line at Messines was far worse than taking it,” the history notes of the German bombardment.
As they write poignantly in their book, with more than 60,000 Australians killed in the First World War, and 6,000 still lost in Belgian fields, the archeologists wanted the Menin Gate commemorating the missing to have one fewer name. The team paid their respects to the unknown solder, and laid a wreath at the local memorial.
Then they began the hard work: finding out who he was.
Alan Mather’s relatives still live in Inverell, a town of 13,000 in New South Wales, Australia, where Mather’s father had once been the mayor.
There is still an A. Mather in the phone book, and in April 2010, he got acall. It had taken the team two years of historical research and lab analysis to narrow the options to three men: Alan Mather was a candidate for the unknown soldier in the field. The family buzzed with the news. It was an uplifting time, Blomfield says. Kath Mitchell, just a toddler when Uncle Alan left for war, and now 100, provided the DNA sample that solved the mystery: Alan had been found. The family had a funeral to plan, a headstone inscription to write. They wanted “Lost so long.” They needed to go back in time and write the headstone as they would have done in 1917, so it would fit in with the others. Of course, none of them were alive then, save for Mitchell, who didn’t remember anything about Uncle Alan — except for the day when the bad news came. Claude Verhaeghe drives from his restaurant on the main street of Ploegsteert toward the rural spot where Alan was found. Like many involved with this story, Verhaeghe calls Mather by his first name, and likes to “say hi” when he drives by the graveyard where he is now buried. “Between these two places Alan was found,” he says, stopping his van at a wheat field on the outskirts of town, pointing to two groups of trees 200 metres ahead. “The road we are standing on is the British front line,” he says. “He was advancing.” In 1917 this field was pockmarked with shell craters. Today, it is cold, green and windy. A farmer is washing his tractor on the road. About 2,000 people live in Ploegsteert, a town rebuilt after the war. The local industry is agriculture, and to a lesser extent tourism. It is very close to France, and part of Wallonia, the French-speaking region of Belgium. A lot of people here used to work in French fabric factories, but those jobs have gone to the Middle East, Verhaeghe says. Inside his restaurant, a slide show of the town before and after the war plays on a loop. In 2008, Richard Osgood and the other archeologists came into his restaurant that Ver- haeghe has owned with his wife since 1981, called the Auberge. Verhaeghe became a part of the team, delivering sandwiches to the field every day.
When it comes to locals and the war, there are two types of people, he says: those who continue to be interested in the stories, and those who have lived with them for so long that they see the cemeteries as fixtures of the landscape.
Verhaeghe is the first kind, the type to pop by Prowse Point cemetery to say hi to Alan Mather.
At the cemetery, the sod above the grave doesn’t quite blend in yet. It is not the only plot that doesn’t exactly match: to the right of Mather’s grave are those of three soldiers who were also found in a field in the past 10 years. The shrubs quiver as the wind cuts across the farm fields.
Three generations of the Mather family came for the military funeral in 2010, along with Osgood and his team.
“It really put something to rest — perhaps a burden that the family had carried — and then there was suddenly a peace. I don’t know how to describe it,” Blomfield says.
For Richard Osgood, who usually deals with neolithic subjects who don’t have modern relatives in the phone book, it was especially meaningful. “Getting that moment when you find the photo of him, that was an astonishing moment,” he says. “I know for a fact that he trained at the Bustard (at Salisbury Plain) at the site the Canadians used in 1914, 1915 . . . the stories and narrative connected to World War I are in many ways more powerful than the prehistoric stuff I’ve dealt with.”
Kim Blomfield says the family will always have a special connection to Osgood and the team who helped finish her great-uncle’s story.
“I always say, ‘He was your soldier before he was my great-uncle,’ ” she says. “They knew him for nearly two years before we got to know him as a family member.”
She has been over to Europe five times, and will be back. There is a pull to this place, where a gravestone finally marks the spot where Mather lies with the dignity of a name.
“So far from home, never forgotten, may you rest in peace, bearing an honoured name.” Find more at thestar.com/westernfront