A letter written by two Australian soldiers as they sailed to France was uncovered off the coast of Australia, more than 100 years after it was written.
The World War I soldiers had only been a few days into their voyage when they wrote the letters and placed them in a Schweppes-brand glass bottle, which was discovered in October by the Brown family.
Father and daughter, Peter and Felicity discovered the bottle during a quadbike expedition at Wharton Beach in Western Australia.
“We do a lot of cleaning up on our beaches and so would never go past a piece of rubbish. So this little bottle was lying there waiting to be picked up,” the family’s matriarch, Deb Brown, said.
Seeing the letter, the family opened the bottle and discovered the pencil scratches of Privates Malcolm Neville, 27, and William Harley, 37, dated August 15, 1916.
Neville and Harley shipped off on the HMAT A70 Ballarat from Adelaide on August 12, only three days before they wrote the letter.
Neville was killed the same year he sailed off, while Harley survived two potentially devastating war wounds and died in 1934 of cancer, his family attributed to German gassing.
Letter finally received by families
Neville had planned for the letter to reach his mother, asking the finder to send it on but Robertina Neville perished the same year as her son.
“May the finder be as well as we are at present,” Harley wrote in the letter.
Neville detailed to his mum how he was “having a real good time, food is real good so far, with the exception of one meal which we buried at sea.”
“We just can’t believe it. It really does feel like a miracle and we do very much feel like our grandfather has reached out for us from the grave,” Harley’s granddaughter Ann Turner told Australian Broadcasting Corp.
“It sounds as though he was pretty happy to go to the war. It’s just so sad what happened. It’s so sad that he lost his life,”. Neville’s great nephew Herbie Nephew added. “Wow. What a man he was.”