Scotsman William McAleer had been in France barely two months when, just before sunrise on Sept. 25, 1915, he was among thousands of other troops who launched the British army’s largest attack so far of World War I.
By the next day, the 22-year-old private from a seaside town in Fife was dead. Almost 60,000 British troops died in the Battle of Loos and a third disappeared with no known grave.
McAleer was one of them, until nearly a century later, when workers building a new prison turned up his remains in a common grave.
Photo: Reuters
On Friday, McAleer and 19 other still unidentified British soldiers were reburied with full military honors in a ceremony in this sleepy northern French village, close to where they fell in battle. The ceremony was a reminder of the horrors of a war that devastated this continent 100 years ago — and as a reminder of why many Europeans today are so wary of seeing a new conflict on their eastern flank in Ukraine.
World War I remains still turn up regularly, during construction projects or in the spring planting season. More than 700,000 soldiers killed in the Great War were never found, their remains now part of the earth along the 600km-long route of the Western Front.
In January a nearly complete skeleton of an unidentified French soldier was unearthed at the Memorial of Verdun, where construction is underway on renovations to mark the centenary of the war.
In May last year, the remains of 26 French soldiers were found in Fleury-devant-Douaumont, one of France’s “ghost villages” that were entirely destroyed by the war. And in 2012, another French soldier’s remains turned up during construction of a canal that stretches 100km along the old Western Front.
What makes McAleer’s case especially notable is that unlike most of these other cases, investigators were able to reach back through history and give him a name, a history and now, a proper grave.
In October 2010, workers building a new prison a few kilometers east of Loos-en-Gohelle turned up the remains that would eventually be identified as McAleer’s. They were found along with 19 other British and 30 German soldiers, carefully laid out in a common grave that investigators determined was dug by the German side, based on where the front line had then run.
McAleer was identified by investigators working for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission thanks to an ID tag found with his remains. Efforts to identify the others were unsuccessful, although investigators were able to trace half of them to a specific regiment. Their graves, like the majority of the graves in Loos’ British cemetery, will bear the epitaph “Known Unto God.”
Members of the Royal Regiment of Scotland’s 2nd Battalion, the modern-day descendants of McAleer’s Royal Scottish Fusiliers, were on hand on Friday to honor their fallen comrades. Representatives of regiments for the other 10 soldiers whose regiments could be traced also participated.
Julian Blake, a graves commission officer based in Beaurains near Loos, was in charge the day McAleer’s remains were found.
“It appeared to be a field burial carried out by the Germans, the way the bodies were laid out, not just fallen and buried by chance,’’ Blake said.
The German remains were handed over to VDK, the German war graves commission, which is working to identify them.
Blake worked on about 80 exhumations when he was the grave commission’s exhumations supervisor in France from 2007 to 2011 and most involved only a few remains. Finds on the scale of the Vendin-le-Viel discovery “are very rare,” Blake said.
Identifying a soldier is also exceptional. Sometimes shoulder badges with regimental identification are found still pressed against a dead soldier’s shoulder bone, Blake said. When badges or tags cannot be found, anthropologists are sometimes called in to examine the bones. DNA testing is impractical except in very rare cases, Blake said.
In McAleer’s case Blake had a full skeleton, regimental badge and ID tag, although the badge was in bad condition and difficult to decipher. It took Blake and his team about a month to identify the remains.
“You can’t describe the feeling of finding the casualty and seeing the headstone, and saying: ‘I think I made a difference,’” said Carl Liversage, another Commonwealth War Graves Commission official based in France.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
‘POLITICAL EARTHQUAKE’: Leo Varadkar said he was ‘no longer the best person’ to lead the nation and was stepping down for political, as well as personal, reasons Leo Varadkar on Wednesday announced that he was stepping down as Ireland’s prime minister and leader of the Fine Gael party in the governing coalition, citing “personal and political” reasons. Pundits called the surprise move, just 10 weeks before Ireland holds European Parliament and local elections, a “political earthquake.” A general election has to be held within a year. Irish Deputy Prime Minister Micheal Martin, leader of Fianna Fail, the main coalition partner, said Varadkar’s announcement was “unexpected,” but added that he expected the government to run its full term. An emotional Varadkar, who is in his second stint as prime minister and at
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia