The Missing on the Western Front
The Missing on the Western Front After the Great War, the British Empire faced a monumental task of cleansing the battlefields of bodies. Over 600,000 empire troops had died across thousands of square miles spanning Passchendaele in Belgium and the Somme in France. The Imperial War Graves Commission had resolved in November 1918 to identify all isolated graves, exhume remains, and then rebury them into larger cemeteries, where they would receive reverent care. The commission divided the battlefield up and allocated the Villers-Bretonneux sector to the Australian Corps for cleansing. The corps then formed a battalion of 1,100 volunteer soldiers. Private Henry Whiting volunteered for the battalion, partly because he wanted to ensure his brother received a decent burial. Whiting’s squad covered ground recently fought over. ‘I can assure you that it is a very unpleasant undertaking,’ he recorded. ‘They are far from being decayed properly so you can guess the constitution o...