Thread by @ajcdeane

#Deanehistory 150 hat tip: @SilverAlso.

Today, in Flanders fields the poppies blow, between the crosses, row on row. Over a hundred years ago, during the First World War, things were very different.

Private Percy Buck of the Hertfordshire Regiment was 26 when he was joined the great fallen in 1917, killed on the battlefield at the Third Battle of Ypres.

One amongst his enemies, Corporal Josef Wilczek, found a black and white photograph in his hands as he lay dying. Perhaps, as he might have hoped, it was the last thing Buck ever saw. The picture was of Buck’s family - his wife, Bertha, and his young son, Cyril.

On the back of the photograph there was a note asking whoever found it to post it to his family in England if he died. And Wilczek did.

He sent the photo to the Red Cross, along with a letter: he wrote, “I, wishing to fulfil the last will of the dead comrade, send it to you. May he rest in peace.” By the Red Cross’s auspices it duly found its way to Buck’s family in Hitchin.

This small act of human kindness on the bleak Western Front was of course but one amongst many moments of decency which took place as the flower of a great generation was destroyed on Europe’s muddy battlefields.

A mere two months after he retrieved that photograph on the battlefield, Wilczek was captured and spent the rest of the war in a prisoner of war camp in Scotland, later returning to his home town, then Makoschau in Germany and now Makoszowy in Poland. He died in 1983, aged 86.

But, like many veterans, it seems Wilczek did not talk about his time in the war when it was over– so whilst after she received the photo in England Buck’s widow wrote to Wilczek’s family to thank them, his later descendants had no clue about what their soldier ancestor had done.

Thus it was that Wilczek’s modern day relatives – and the rest of us – only came to learn of his kindness via the research of a British historian, @DanHillHistory, over a century after the event.

Wilczek’s granddaughter, Ewa Pikulinska, was in her 40s when Hill brought her the story of a moment between two warriors a hundred years before.

She said "we are very proud to have learned a little more about his war and the kindness he showed” – a fitting conclusion to a glimpse of the vanished world our forebears endured.