On September 25, 2022, exactly 105 years after the Battle of Polygon Wood, the monument was unveiled just steps from Johan’s café in Zonnebeke. Inside the café, his museum now holds the brothers’ full story. Helmets and shell fragments and photographs and two small brass rings made from battlefield shell casings, twisted together into a single symbol of two brothers who fought side by side and were separated by death and reunited by the earth that had kept its secret for nearly a century.
Jim never found Jack in 1919. But Jack had never actually gone anywhere.
He was right there. Waiting. Wrapped in a groundsheet with his arms folded across his chest, exactly the way his brother had left him.
The ANZAC spirit does not fade. And neither does the story of Jack and Jim Hunter, two brothers from New South Wales who went to war together and, in the end, were never truly apart.
