12/10/2025
In 2006, construction workers digging near Polygon Wood in Belgium uncovered what remained of the First World War: fragments of uniforms, rusted equipment, and the skeletal remains of five Australian soldiers lost during the fighting of 1917. Most had been swallowed by a century of soil and silence, the kind of battlefield discovery that is tragically familiar in Flanders. But one of the bodies stood apart.
He had been wrapped carefully in a military groundsheet. His arms had been folded across his chest, not by chance or by the shifting earth, but with unmistakable intention. Someone, in the chaos of war, had stopped long enough to bury him with gentleness.
Archaeologist Johan Vandewalle was called to examine the site. He’d seen hundreds of battlefield recoveries over the years, but this one felt personal. Soldiers in the Great War often died where they fell, left in the open as battles moved on. A careful burial during the firestorm of Polygon Wood was something extraordinary.
DNA testing, uniform fragments, and surviving service records eventually led to a name: Private John “Jack” Hunter, 23 years old, 55th Battalion, Australian Imperial Force. He had died on 26 September 1917, in the brutal opening days of the Battle of Polygon Wood, where thousands of Australian soldiers were killed or wounded.
When Johan contacted the Hunter family in Australia, they told him something he hadn't expected. Jack Hunter hadn’t been anonymously buried by stretcher-bearers or medics. He had been buried by his younger brother, Private James “Jim” Hunter, who had enlisted with him, marched with him, and fought beside him from Egypt to Belgium.
On that September morning in 1917, amid machine-gun fire, artillery bursts, and the churn of mud and smoke, Jack was hit. Jim saw his brother fall. He fought on until he could reach him, then knelt in the shell-blasted earth and wrapped Jack’s body in a groundsheet. He folded his brother’s arms across his chest. And in one of the most violent battles of the war, he gave Jack a burial shaped by love, not orders.
Jim had no way of marking the grave. Landmarks were swallowed by craters. Trenches collapsed. The battlefield shifted hour by hour. When the war ended, Jim returned to Belgium in 1919 determined to find the spot where he had laid Jack to rest. He searched the devastated landscape, comparing what little remained to his memories of that terrible day. But everything had changed. The ground had been shattered and remade. Nothing looked as it had before.
He never found the grave.
Jim carried that grief home to Australia. He lived until 1978, haunted by the knowledge that Jack remained somewhere in the soil of Belgium, in an unmarked place he could never locate again.
Nearly a century later, that place found him.
When Johan learned the story behind the burial—the care, the love, the bond between the Hunter brothers—he knew this discovery could not simply be recorded and filed away. With friends and supporters, he founded the Brothers-in-Arms Memorial Project, dedicated to honoring the brothers and the thousands of families like them.
The group commissioned Australian sculptor Peter Corlett, renowned for his depictions of ANZAC soldiers, to create a monument worthy of their story. Working from family photographs and battlefield artifacts, Corlett sculpted a bronze statue depicting Jim Hunter kneeling and holding his brother Jack in his arms—a moment that only the two men had witnessed in life, now made visible for the world to see.
The finished sculpture weighs nearly a ton. Every fold of the uniform, every line in Jim’s face, every detail of Jack’s stillness carries the weight of that day in 1917.
On 25 September 2022, exactly 105 years after Jack fell, the memorial was unveiled in Zonnebeke, not far from where the brothers last stood together. Descendants of the Hunter family traveled from Australia. Veterans gathered alongside local residents. Some had no connection to the Hunters at all, yet many found themselves moved to tears.
Nearby, Johan’s private museum preserves items recovered from the site: Australian buttons, fragments of webbing, rusted metal, and photographs of the brothers smiling before the war reshaped their lives. In a small display case sit two interlinked brass rings, fashioned from shell casings found near Jack’s burial—symbolizing the brothers reunited.
Jim Hunter never found his brother. But in 2006, the earth finally gave Jack back. And in 2022, their story found the recognition it had always deserved.
In the gentleness of a field burial, in the determination of a brother’s search, and in the care of strangers who refused to let the story fade, the Hunter brothers are together again—honored, remembered, and finally at peace.
Reshared
