The War Grave With The Wrong Name And The Man Who Came To Correct It

My aunt volunteers with a group that photographs and transcribes war graves. It is careful, unglamorous, deeply moving work and she has done it for nine years.

In a corner of a cemetery in the north there is a stone that has been recorded, in every database, as a name that does not exist in any regimental record.

Not a misspelling of a known name. Not a man transferred. Nothing. A name with no man behind it.

She photographed it on a Tuesday. She wrote it up on the Wednesday and put a note in the file: "Possible stonemason error. No match."

On the Thursday, at the cemetery, a man came and stood beside her while she was working two rows over.

She described him to me as: old, but not frail. An overcoat that she thought was "too warm for the day". Very clean shoes.

He said, "You've got the K wrong. It's a hard K, at the front."

She said she did not know what he meant.

He said the name. He spelled it. He said it twice, patiently, and he said the second name too — a middle name, which is not on the stone at all.

She wrote it in her notebook because she is a woman who writes things down, and she asked whether he was family, and he said, "Something like that," and he walked off toward the gate.

She looked up the corrected spelling that evening.

It is a man. He exists. He died in 1917, aged twenty-two, and he is recorded as having no known grave, and the middle name matches, and the K is hard.

She reported it. There is a process. It took two years, and there is now, as of last April, a small addendum in the official record connecting that stone to that man.

She went back for the unveiling of the correction.

She looked for him. Of course she looked for him. She had, she told me, prepared a whole speech.

He was not there.

She left flowers. She is not a fanciful woman — she is a retired dentist — and she told me, in her kitchen, with her hands flat on the table, that when she put the flowers down she said, out loud, "Is that right now?"

And the wind, she said, did what wind does.