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from The Guardian  Saturday 28  October 2000

A final salute for 12 unknown soldiers returned to the earth of Flanders
Remains of men who fell at Ypres found after 85 years
Ian Black
in Boezinge, Belgium

It was just another cemetery: neat tombstones, a memorial arch and the haunting words: "Their name liveth for evermore>"

But under a wintry Flanders sun a poignant record was set this week with the biggest burial of unknown British soldiers in decades.

More than 80 years on, they are still anonymous, victims and perhaps heroes of the charnel house that was the first world war. They were given an honourable send-off, but in 12 pitifully small boxes lowered carefully into the damp clay.

Scenes like this have been going on since 1918. And though a staggering 100,000 Commonwealth soldiers are still missing - listed on the Menin Gate at Ypres and the nearby memorial at Tyne Cot - it is rare for more than one or two to be interred at once.

Burial on such a large scale is the result of unique circumstances. The undulating land where the remains were found, by a canal at Boezinge, is being used to extend the unlovely industrial estate of Ypres - "Wipers" to the men who fought and died here during three offensives over a few miles of ground.

But the land has been used only for grazing since the guns fell silent. Since last summer Belgian archaeologists, keeping one step ahead of the bulldozers, have unearthed 103 victims, 39 British, the rest French and German.

The 12 buried on Thursday included an officer from the Yorks and Lancaster Regiment, two Lancashire Fusiliers, a Northumberland Fusilier and three rifle brigade soldiers - identified by scraps of clothing or a badge, but nothing to give them a name.

"It's the biggest single find in recent memory," said Barry Murphy, of the Commonwealth war graves commission, which runs the Cement Hill cemetery and scores of others like it across Belgium and France. "We are talking decades."

Twelve wooden boxes, each smaller than a child's coffin, were lined up on green baize before the brief ceremony, conducted by the Reverend Ray Jones, a former soldier and now chaplain of St George's Memorial Church, Ypres.

"It's very strange," Mr Jones said, surplice fluttering in the stiff autumn breeze. "There are times when a burial is extremely moving and others when you being to distance yourself from it.

"But you can't do that here. Being an ex-soldier makes me feel it's more emotive."

Nothing special was laid on. But the smart salutes of two uniformed officers - a Greenjackets representative for the now disbanded rifle brigades and a colonel from the British embassy in Brussels - were a reminder that these men had died on duty.

So too were the poppy wreaths, laid slowly by the edge of the neat, deep trench cut so carefully into the Flanders earth.

Two buglers - men of the Ypres fire brigade who perform nightly at the Menin Gate - sounded the Last Post and Reveille.

Otherwise there was just silence, broken by the roar of passing traffic, a few passing battlefield tourists, cemetery workers, veterans, local historians and a couple of saluting Belgian officers. It was respectful, but no-one knew who they were mourning.

Boezinge was the scene of heavy fighting during three separate offensives around Ypres, where the allied salient protruded into German lines. Most of the men found since last summer died in early June 1915. Only one has been identified.

The final attack, in November 1917, through mud which swallowed soldiers, horses and tanks, took the ruins of Passchendaele, a village which by then no longer existed. Typically a box of remains contains bones, wet uniform fragments, leather, buttons, shaving brushes, even overcoats.

Uncovering them is the passion of Aurel Sercu, a retired teacher who spends his Saturdays with fellow members of the Diggers group, operating under licence from the Belgian ministry of interior. He was at Thursday's burial to pay his last respects.

"It is very careful work, because you realise you are dealing with mortal remains," said Mr Sercu, 55, who once found five bodies at the bottom of a trench he had excavated.

"I'm not sure if satisfaction is the right word," he said, "But it does give you a sense of pride that these poor guys are finally going to a decent grave after 80 years in the soil."