Daily Times

The remains of three Canadian soldiers who died in World War I, 105 years ago, but were only recently identified have been reburied in France at an emotion-filled military ceremony. Hundreds of thousands of servicemen died in the war but only a few of those whose remains languish in the fields of northern France have been identified — until now. Thanks to major infrastructure projects and better organisation within the agencies that deal with the dead, the remains of more and more WWI soldiers have been discovered in northern France in recent years. “We knew he’d been killed. We knew he was honoured on the Vimy Memorial. But to have a place of remembrance is something else,” said 77-year-old Gordon Gilfether of his great uncle, Sergeant Richard Musgrave, who died when he was 32. The Vimy Memorial, north of nearby Arras, is inscribed with the names of the 11,285 Canadians who died in France in WWI and have no known graves.

“It’s been a very emotional day,” Gilfether said on Thursday’s ceremony at the British cemetery in Loos-en-Gohelle near the northeastern city of Lille. “It’s marvellous,” another grand-nephew, James Musgrave Coltman, 83, said of the ceremony. “I only wish his sister, who was our granny, was here to see it.” Musgrave’s body was found in 2017 near Lens and reburied at the British cemetery along with those of the men discovered with him — Harry Atherton, 24, and Percy Howarth, 23. All three were born in Britain and emigrated to Canada before enlisting and returning to Europe to fight. They fell on the first day of the Battle of Hill 70 in August 2017, when more than 10,000 Canadians were killed or wounded trying to retake the strategic mining town of Lens. A sixth of the 600,000 soldiers who went missing in northern France during WWI were from the former British Empire.