FINAL JOURNEY OF THE UNKNOWN WARRIOR

In the final extract from his impossibly moving new book, RAF veteran John Nichol reveals how the remains of ONE anonymous fallen serviceman were chosen to represent ALL of Britain's First World War missing

- John Nichol

I HAVE seen the Tomb of The Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey many times, but it wasn't until I stopped to study the inscription a couple of years ago that I fully understood what it represented. "Beneath this stone rests the body of a British warrior unknown by name or rank brought from France to lie among the most illustrious of the land and buried here on Armistice Day, 11 Nov, 1920."

Those simple words truly resonated. I suppose I'd always thought it was symbolic, like the Cenotaph. Embarrassingly, the penny dropped. There really is the body of an unknown soldier under there. I feel I should have known this.

So how did an anonymous corpse from the First World War come to be buried among the kings? Why did vast crowds turn out to witness the interment of an unidentified body in a box? And how does the Unknown Warrior still exert such a powerful hold on us today? These are the questions I have sought to answer in my new book and stage show, The Unknown Warrior.

REVEREND David Railton, an Oxfordeducated army chaplain and vicar of Folkestone, is at the heart of this incredible story. His job was to carry a Bible rather than a rifle and offer spiritual support to the warravaged troops as best he could.

Padres like Railton conducted countless burials, many using a treasured Union Jack to cover a body during the brief service. Necessarily short because of the ongoing battles and the sheer number of the dead as soldiers gathered to say farewell, they were deeply aware they might soon be lying beneath the "padre's flag" themselves.

As I wrote in Saturday's Express, I was stunned when I began researching my new book to learn that 526,816 British and Commonwealth soldiers have no known resting place. Of those, 338,955 were never buried at all, while 187,861 have graves but have never been identified. Their bodies were blown to pieces by shellfire or lost in the choking mud of the trenches as the fighting raged back and forward.