The death bell has just rung. Under a hazy sun on this October day, we can see the silhouettes of a Scottish regiment advancing towards the military cemetery. We are in Loos-en-Gohelle, near Lens, in the former Pas de Calais mining area. With serious faces and bare heads and brown uniforms, these soldiers carry a coffin wrapped in a British flag on which rests a wreath of blood-red poppies. We advance slowly towards the hole dug in the ground where this unknown soldier will be buried, like four others, with military honors. The ceremony, regulated to the millimeter, was attended by university students from Loos-en-Gohelle, enthusiasts of the war from 14 to 18 and some elected officials from the city, scene of three major battles between May 1915 and August 1917, during the which are completely shaved.
Representatives from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) are also present. It is she who manages the twenty-three thousand military cemeteries spread across one hundred and fifty countries, including three thousand in France, where the soldiers of Great Britain and its empire rest. Founded by royal charter in 1917, this commission is funded by the United Kingdom, India, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, constituent states of the British Empire at the beginning of the last century. It is responsible for commemorating the victims of the two world wars in these countries.
The remains of the five soldiers. that will be buried in the softness of this autumn afternoon have passed into the expert hands of their archaeologists. Four of them were found in 2022 in Saint-Laurent-Blangy, near Arras, during construction work on a prison. “ It is very likely that they were killed on April 9, 1917, the first day of the Battle of Arras, when on the 26thmy 9th Infantry Brigademy Scottish division attacked the place where they were recovered », we read in the brochure published for this ceremony. For the fifth, the conditional is also appropriate. It is, again, “ very likely » which fell in 1915, during the battle of Loos-en-Gohelle. His bones were discovered in a tunnel between two trenches at Haisnes, 6 kilometers away. The five are “ known by God » (known only to God, in Old English), the epitaph that appears on all the graves of these unknown soldiers.
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