Soldier Record

Watching Matthew Kelly's quest to find the grave of his great uncle in France was especially poignant for me. I too, undertook a remarkably similar journey last year, looking for my great Uncle's grave.

I have always had a fascination with history, and particularly the First World War. There's something about the sheer futility and stupidity of that episode in British History, where so many pitifully young men were led to their slaughter in unimaginable horror, that resonates so deeply with me.

I was aware that my Nan had lost a brother in the Great War, and that it had been her dearest wish to see his grave but was too young to appreciate the significance of this until much later.

A couple of years ago, my mum went to Ypres and was so moved by it, I went soon after. She said she had looked for his name and I thought I would be able to find it somehow. Only then did it hit home how naïve I had been for one who considers herself very worldly wise. The sheer numbers of dead, and the multitude of graveyards, made me realise that there was going to be a much harder task ahead.

I returned chastened but with a strong desire to return and find him. This wasn’t helped by the fact that I had such scant information to go on. My mum is the only one around and she only knew his name. I tried to look on the internet but with only this information, this proved impossible..

Then a strange thing happened. My mum had given me some keepsakes which had belonged to my Nan- postcards sent during the war and photos. I had looked at them many times before but a photo must have got tucked away between the lining of one of the embroidered cards and it popped out. It was a photo of him, and most importantly on the back, was his date of birth. He’d always been known as Joe, but in fact was Charles Joe. It was with this vital information that I went back onto the internet, and within seconds I had found him.

So it was that in March of this year, I set off from my home in Essex to France. He is buried in Assevillers New British Cemetery, near the small town of Peronne.

The journey took four hours. We booked into a small hotel about one mile away. The next morning, armed with the only flowers I could find, a small bunch I had managed to procure from the only shop open (it was a Sunday in sleepy Peronne) we went.

We located it immediately. After 90 years, almost to the day, and after a mere 4 hour journey, aided by the powers of the internet, his family had finally come to see him.He had died on the 27th March 1918. He was eighteen

Who knows the circumstances in which he had died, what fear he must have felt, how he must have missed his family and thought of them.I wondered if he realised just how much he had been loved, and how much he would be missed. And I hoped that somehow, in ways I can’t possibly explain, can’t possibly account for, he’d know that he still was.

To my Nan, such a journey would have been almost as impossible as going to Australia-the working-classes didn’t have the ease of travel in those days that we have today. But he was four hours away from my house. Four hours and ninety years.

I can’t begin to put into words the emotions of that day. Pity, gratitude, regret, but most of all peace. And a sense, that through this small journey I had reconnected a bond straight back to my Nan-my lovely gentle kind loving Nan, whose dearest wish had been fulfilled finally, through me.

The thing that I took away from that most was not the sense of carnage, the desperate sadness of it all, but a sense of calm. And a belief that what matters, more than anything else in this often senseless, world, is that someone, no matter how late, cares to remember us.

Sarah Howard