WWI Australian soldier buried in Flanders Fields, Belgium, 93 years after dying in battle

Belgium buries Australian soldier 93 years later

PLOEGSTEERT, Belgium — A ceremonial guard fired three volleys into the sky Thursday as a final salute for Australian Pvt. Alan James Mather, who was buried 93 years after he fell in Flanders Fields.

The remains of the soldier, who died Battle of Messines on June 8, 1917, were recently unearthed by a British archaeological group. The service was attended by members of the Mather family, including his 86-year-old nephew, John Mather.

The archeologists recovered the remains in August 2008, along with Mather’s personal effects. He was still clutching his rifle and in his knapsack he had a German helmet, a souvenir often picked up by soldiers of the time.

Martin Brown, a member of the group that excavated the site, said Mather was not wearing his own helmet. “That was a bad idea, perhaps,” Brown said. Instead, he wore an army slouch hat, a common practice among soldiers that identified them instantly as Australians.

Identification of the body was completed this year after DNA tests were performed by the Belgian Institute of Criminology.

Mather, who was 37 when he died, volunteered for the army from a farm in Invernell, New South Wales. He served in the 33rd Infantry Battalion.

“I am extremely pleased that we have been able to restore the identity of this Australian soldier who has been missing for almost a century,” said Alan Griffin, Australia’s minister for veteran affairs.

Belgium’s Flanders region saw some of the fiercest and bloodiest trench warfare on the Western Front during the war.

Some 150 war cemeteries dot the region and experts believe 100,000 soldiers remain unaccounted for almost a century after the end of one of the bloodiest wars ever fought in Europe.

Hundreds of WWI remains are discovered each year by archeologists, farmers, or by construction crews. On Monday, the remains of 249 allied soldiers left in a mass grave in Fromelles, France, were moved to a new cemetery for reburial in a ceremony attended by Prince Charles, relatives and high-ranking government officials.

Mather’s name is inscribed on the Menin Gate in Ypres and listed as a soldier with no known grave. His name will now be removed from the list of nearly 55,000 still missing in action.

A further 35,000 names of the missing are listed at the nearby Tyne Cot military cemetery, which contains 12,000 graves — making it the largest Commonwealth military burial site in the world.

AP correspondent Slobodan Lekic in Brussels contributed to this report.

(This version CORRECTS number of years in both headlines and the first paragraph.)