'He's now at peace': lost soldier identified and buried after 102 years
But for a spoon and a “lightbulb” moment, Linda Cook would never have found her grandfather, who had been missing for 102 years.
He was lying where he fell, gradually hidden then finally lost as shellfire exploded in the earth around him in a field near Lens, northern France.
When the cold soil, compacted over a century, finally surrendered him on a sunny January day in 2018, he was another unknown soldier. It would take painstaking detective work before the name L/Cpl Frederick Thomas Perkins, 25, could be carved with confidence on a headstone.
At his reburial with full military honours this week at near Lens, ahead of Remembrance Sunday, his tearful granddaughter, now 67 and a grandmother herself, could still scarcely believe it. “Because he
