The Diggers

[Drummy]

Just curious if anyone knows the upto date total of British, French, German remains recovered to date since the excellent work of the Diggers began, cheers Neil.

[Aurel Sercu]

Hi Neil,

Up to now : remains of 165 fallen soldiers.

(Including 3 Canadian soldiers exhumed at Passendale, and 2 British soldiers found southeast of Ypres. All the others (160) found at the Canal site at Boezinge, north of Ypres.)

I'm afraid I cannot give you the exact separate numbers of British, German and French soldiers found. The reason is that I do not have these data (nationality etc.) for the period before the summer of 1999 (approx. 40 soldiers), as registration was not done by us then. Also because (but only exceptionally) in some cases it was not possible to determine the nationality. But based on the data I have of the soldiers found after the summer of 1999 :

- British : almost half (45 percent)

- German : one third (32 percent)

- French : about one fifth (22 percent).

I think you can say that one can extrapolate these proportions to the first 40 remains as well. Which would give as a result for the total :

British approx. 70, German approx. 50, French approx 35.

But again : this is only a hypothetic extrapolation.

Aurel Sercu

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