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Daily Mail
March 16, 2014
With the Battle of Passchendaele raging around him, Sergeant Percy Buck – dying from a fatal wound – clutched a picture of his family.
On the back, he had written his dying wish, that someone would return it to his wife.
He would have hoped one of his comrades would fulfil the request, it can’t have crossed his mind that it would be honoured by an enemy – let alone the one who had killed him.
However, this is the incredible story that has come to light now the soldier’s grandaughter has unearthed the photograph among her father’s belongings.
Christina Reynolds, 58, has uncovered the black and white photo almost 100 years after it was taken. It pictures the soldier with his wife, Bertha, and son – Mrs Reynolds’s father – Cyril.
Along with the photograph, Mrs Reynolds found the devastating telegram that informed her grandmother of her husband’s death and a letter from the German soldier, explaining the picture’s incredible journey from the Western Front back to Mrs Reynolds in Hitchin, Herts.
Mrs Reynolds, whose late father was only three when his Sgt Buck died, said: ‘My father barely knew his father but he had these items in a box.
‘The box has been passed down to me and in it were these letters by the German soldier and the Red Cross explaining the return of the photo to my grandmother in 1917.
‘It was this German soldier who probably killed my grandfather in an act of war.
‘He didn’t have to take the time out and maybe risk punishment to fulfil my grandfather’s wishes. He could have left it there.
‘The two men didn’t know each other but it was very kind of him to do what he did for a fellow soldier.’
The German who recovered the poignant image from Sgt Buck’s body was Gefreiter Josef Wilczek – Gefreiter is an army rank for enlisted soldiers equivalent to a private.
In a remarkable act of humanity, Gefreiter Wilczek sent the photo to the Red Cross in Geneva along with a forwarding note.
He wrote: ‘He was holding the card in his hand and the finder was asked to forward it to his wife. I, wishing to fulfil the last will of the dead comrade, send it to you.
‘May he rest in peace.’