Fred Feston is a real man to us even though we never knew him. His daughters never knew him, the first only a baby and the second born after he died. His widow remarried so his memory gradually faded.
We know him because of our interest in family history and we have been able to piece together his life before the war and the events surrounding his few brief months in the army in France before he disappeared into the mud of Flanders. No grave-just a name inscribed on a long wall among so many others and an entry in memorial book.
The Third Battle of Ypres ended at the beginning of November, too late for Fred Feston and for close to three quarters of a million men who died there in less than a month. In a poem, Sigfried Sassoon put it "I died in Hell, they called it Passchendaele."
Those dreadful years and the enormous human toll need to be remembered and recorded. Not just those that died but their families and also the men who returned, alive but broken.
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