The bones of the lost dead

Walter Mansfield found the bones of the lost dead.

Walter Mansfield was a man, like you and I, but a man born at the wrong time, 1899, on the dawn of a new millennium, an omen of great hope, people said. But they were wrong.

Walter’s family went to war. All seven brothers signed up on the same day. The youngest, David, was just 14 and lied about his age in order to fight alongside his brothers.

However, the brothers were split up on their first day in the army, sent to different regiments across the country. Within a few weeks though they had all completed their training and they all made their separate ways to France, to the front line. Within a month, one of the brothers, Joshua, was already dead, or assumed dead, missing in action in the second battle at Ypres.

All seven brothers died in the war, Walter often said in later life, though in truth he lived on, albeit with the physical and mental scars. When the war finally ended, four years one hundred and eight days later, all his brothers were dead, though none were buried, their bones all missing in action, lost in the chaos and confusion of war. There were no funerals, no piped services, no military solutes, just telegrams, pieces of paper, informing Walter’s mother of her loss.

After the war Walter settled in France. He took a job with the War Graves Commission. He specialised in finding lost bones, identifying the names of the dead and finding the bones of the missing.

The first bones he found were those of David, his younger brother. He made the arrangements for a proper funeral, inviting the few surviving friends. His mother was too frail to make the trip to France. Though just 49 she had aged 1,000 years with each of her sons’ deaths and was, so Walter heard, though he hadn’t been home to see, reduced to ‘sitting around the house as if waiting to die.’ His father came, and it was he who spoke a few words and threw a clod of soil onto the grave, which was marked with a named, white cross.  

His father made the trip to the next burial, four years later, but missed the next, as Walter’s mother had died and was being buried the same day.

Walter remained in France for the rest of his days. He married a French girl, and they had a family, seven brothers, Albert, David, Bernard, Robert, Daniel, Joseph, Roger, all good, sensible British names, albeit pronounced in a stupid French way, so Walter often thought, though never said.

Walter served with the Commission for thirty years, over that time he gave names to thousands of bones, finding them new homes in the ground where their former lives could properly marked and commemorated. And against all of the odds he found the bones of all six of his brothers.

The last of them, Simon, he buried on the first day of September 1939, over thirty after the war had ended, the very day that Germany invade Poland. Shortly after that he re-joined the army, the French army this time, and prepared for the next war.

When the Nazis invaded France Walter was in the front line. Some say it was Walter who fired the first bullet, the starting pistol for another generation of bloodshed, though in truth the war was already in full fight.

Walter wasn’t seen after that first day.  He died, though his bones were lost in the chaos and confusion of war.

It was another twenty years before his bones were found. His son David, who had taken on his role in the War Graves Commission, found a hole in the ground where his bones could finally make their peace with the world, marking the spot with a named white cross.