He was buried in the Australian War Memorial’s Hall of Memory in Canberra.Ĭanada followed the Australian example in 2000 at the suggestion of the Royal Canadian Legion and other groups. In 1993, Australia marked the 75th anniversary of the end of the First World War by repatriating from France the remains of its own Unknown Soldier, the first Commonwealth country to have done so since 1920. These tombs and memorials gradually assumed broader significance, becoming sites of memory and mourning for all war dead, and for civil ceremonies of broadly based remembrance instead of simple military commemoration.

France and the United States followed Great Britain’s example in 1921, as did numerous other countries in subsequent years. The original ceremony, presided over by King George V, had included many of the British Empire’s Victoria Cross winners, and a group of 100 women, each of whom had lost their husband and all their sons during the war. Since 1920, a single Unknown Soldier in London’s Westminster Abbey had represented the unidentified war dead of Canada and other Commonwealth states. The Unknown Soldier was originally intended to represent all war dead whose remains had not been identified, a common problem along static First World War battlefields frequently churned by artillery and subsumed in mud. The idea originated as a millennium project of the Royal Canadian Legion and was coordinated through the government by Veterans Affairs Canada. Canada repatriated the remains of an Unknown Soldier from France in May 2000 and laid them to rest at the National War Memorial in Ottawa.

Tomb of the unknown