Another Unknown Soldier of the Great War identified.
Another Unknown Soldier of the Great War identified. On 10 May, Corporal Frederick ‘Percy’ Bousfield was confirmed as the Canadian soldier buried in a previously unknown grave in Ypres, Belgium. Bousfield, who died in June 1916, had been commemorated on the Menin Gate Memorial along with 55,000 other empire troops who had no known grave in the Ypres Salient. Thanks to remarkable archival work, Bousfield’s grave could be conclusively confirmed. Yet what is most remarkable about this story, is how often remains are still discovered on the Western Front, with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission alerted almost daily to these finds. Why is this the case? Back in September 1921, the secretary of state for war, Laming Worthington-Evans, officially ended the search for the Western Front’s missing, citing that the battlefields had been searched at least six times. Yet British exhumation parties were still discovering 600 bodies per week. Worthington-Evans’ declaration gave the impressi