Sometimes you hate to be right:

A BELGIAN World War I expert has described as a ”nightmare” the methods used by an English archaeological firm to exhume the bodies of about 300 Australian and British soldiers left for 90 years in a mass grave in France.

This follows my post back in May when I asked if it was morally correct to exhume these men after so many years. At the time I noted that it was technically possible, but perhaps morally hazy. Now it seems its a technical issue as well:

Johan Vandewalle’s chief anxiety is that the methods used to excavate – going deep into the centre of graves instead of working meticulously layer by layer – means there is no guarantee that every set of remains can be attributed to one individual and that they may be jumbled.

I take no satisfaction in being correct about this. We should never have desecrated these mass graves.

The Age- Fears for bodies of the fallen Fromelles diggers

Work is about to begin near Fromelles France to exhume approximately 400 Australian and British World War One soldiers thought to be buried in a mass grave.

The stories of the soldiers are as touching and as fascinating as you might expect. The research done by Lambis Englezos is, in my view, deserving of an OBE. The technology in use is also interesting and of course DNA investigations form the corner stone of this project. But here’s where I become a little concerned.

“We don’t even know if it is going to work yet,” Peter Jones, a British DNA consultant to the project, said yesterday.

“If the DNA is there and in good condition, then you get profiles from all of the samples from the grave. But I don’t think you are going to get that.

So despite the fact they are going to exhume these dead soldiers, there are concerns that it might be for nothing. Not only are they uncertain about the DNA validity, but they are short on for decendants willing to offer their DNA:

…fewer than 15 British families have registered to take part in the project and an 11th-hour public campaign has now been launched in Britain to try to ignite interest in the Fromelles discovery, coax potential relatives to register and increase the chances of individual identification.

This may be due to a less than ideal PR/advertising campaign, but I’d like to suggest that some descendants hold the same view that I do- that we ought to leave the dead as they were.

These are a mix of young men from Britain and Australia. They went to war as volunteers, fought side by side and died together. In the fields of Fromelles they have lain side by side for 90+ years and it is my view there they should remain.

While I am always interested in this sort of forensic work, I wonder if this isn’t possibly desecration. There may be a prevailing view that these men deserve a proper burial, but I’m of the view they have already received one:

The Germans, to their credit, gathered the dead and buried them in mass graves under the shadow of Fromelles’s church. Before they did so, they removed the identification tags, recorded the names of the dead and sent the tags back to Australia.

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Work Underway To Identify Fromelles Fallen [via The Age]