World War One Heroes Reburied 99 Years After Falling in Battle of Loos

William McAleer, a 22-year-old private from Fife, was among 60,000 British troops who disappeared without a trace in the Battle of Loos in 1915. Nearly a century later, workers building a new prison turned up his remains along with 19 other British and 30 German soldiers, carefully laid out in a common grave that was dug by the German side.

McAleer was identified by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission through an ID tag found with his remains. McAleer and 19 other, still unidentified, British soldiers were reburied with full military honours as pipers played Amazing Grace in a fog-shrouded cemetery in northern France, close to where they fell.

Efforts to identify the others have been unsuccessful, although investigators were able to trace half of them to a specific regiment. Their graves, like the majority of the graves in Loos' British cemetery, will bear the epitaph "Known Unto God." More than 700,000 soldiers killed in the Great War were never found.