But the earth around Polygon Wood had been churned and reshelled and rebuilt and reclaimed so many times over that the grave Jim had made with his own hands had simply vanished. He searched and found nothing and eventually had to leave without the closure he had crossed an ocean to find.
He carried that with him for the rest of his life.
Until 2006, when a construction crew hit something beneath a Belgian road and Johan Vanderwalle got a phone call that would change everything.
So moved was Johan by the bond between those two brothers, by the image of a young man stopping in the middle of battle to bury his brother with his bare hands, that he refused to let the story end with a DNA result and a military reburial. He and his friends created the Brothers in Arms Memorial Project and commissioned something that would make the story visible and permanent and impossible to walk past without feeling the full weight of it.
An Australian artist worked from family photographs and battlefield relics to shape a bronze sculpture of Jim holding Jack one last time. The statue weighs 800 kilograms. It cost 160,000 euros. Every gram and every cent of it is a monument to what it means to love someone enough to stop a war, even briefly, even just for yourself, to make sure they are not left alone in the mud.
