Soldier killed in wartime is finally laid to rest

Private Lewis Curtis, from Liskeard, Cornwall, who served with 5th Battalion The Wiltshire Regiment, was laid to rest at the Arnhem-Oosterbeek War Cemetery in a funeral with full military honours yesterday.

His remains were found in an unmarked field grave by builders clearing the way for a new housing estate, but it took five years to identify him using forensics. His family, including his great nephew Rifleman Richard Edwards, 20, who has just returned from Afghanistan with 5th Battalion the Rifles – the Wiltshire Regiment’s successors – were at the funeral.

Pte Curtis, who survived the Normandy landings, was killed aged 19 in the Netherlands in an artillery barrage during Operation Market Garden on October 2, 1944. He was buried in a shallow grave where he fell, but the markers for the plot at De Laar Farm were washed away when German military engineers flooded the area. His burial site was lost, and his family believed he had died in Belgium.

Six decades after his death, his remains were unearthed in 2003 during construction of the housing estate. Since then, a Dutch forensic team used tests including DNA analysis to establish who he was. But it was only after old dental records were uncovered in 2008 that Pte Curtis’s identity was revealed.

His sister Alice died 20 years ago but her children, Susan Wilbourne and Robert Cole, who are in their 50s and still live in Liskeard, flew to the Netherlands for the burial. Mrs Wilbourne said: “It’s been quite an emotional rollercoaster since we found out. It is just such a pity that mum couldn’t be here to bury her little brother, but I can feel her here. She was always very close with Lewis.”

The pair buried their uncle with a glass marble – one of the few keepsakes their mother had of her young brother.