The slaughter at loos in September 1915 was typically horrific. British soldiers advancing across the open French fields dropped in droves, raked by German machine guns and blown apart by shellfire "falling very thick around," as one war diarist recorded it. Private Isaac Wren, 17 years old and an eager but untested volunteer, landed in France on Sept. 10. He died at Loos 16 days later. His body, like thousands of others, was never found.

His niece Dorothy Williams, now a 58-year-old nurse in Preston, northwest England, was taken to the Loos Memorial to the Missing by her mother. There at Dud Corner Cemetery, so-named because of the number of unexploded enemy shells discovered after the Armistice,

You try to imagine what it must have been like ... what they must have suffered is unbelievable — DOROTHY WILLIAMS

they found Wren's name among those of more than 20,000 killed at Loos and other battles in the area. Williams made that pilgrimage 50 years ago. Since 2000, she has visited three more times. It's not a journey she makes alone — last year more than 1 million people visited France's World War I battlefields.

Williams began to piece together her uncle's history a few years ago, but she could find little about him. Wren's "death penny"—the bronze memorial plaque sent to his mother in 1922, bringing on a nervous breakdown—had been kept in the family, but by now no one even knew what Wren looked like. Then one day Williams' aunt discovered a battered gold locket, see below, in a tin of buttons under the stairs. It had belonged to Williams' grandmother, and it bore a tiny torn picture of a young man in uniform. This had to be Wren. Williams had the photo enlarged, then framed, and by combing family and military records found the missing chapters to her uncle's tragically short story. She also discovered that half a dozen other relatives, including two great-uncles, perished between 1914 and 1918, their memorials and graves scattered across the battlefields of the Western Front. Says Williams, "I'm sure my family was not unusual when you consider that hundreds of thousands of men died."

Williams has been making an annual trip to the battlefields of the Somme, Ypres and Loos, joining a small specialized tour group. She has read the military histories and even tracked down the war diary kept during the Loos fighting by an officer in Wren's battalion. "It's very moving to go to the sites—you try to imagine what it must have been like … what they must have suffered is unbelievable," she says, her voice choking up a little. Last year, she left a poppy wreath for Wren, pinned to the ground with a shard of slate from England's Lake District, where he grew up. She also carried a bag of small Royal British Legion crosses. "I left them on graves in the furthest corners, where people might not visit—some on German graves, too," she says. Williams has taken both her sons on separate pilgrimages and hopes they will carry on the tradition. She has asked them to accompany her back to Loos in 11 years' time, for the 100th anniversary of Wren's death. "They all gave so much for us," she says. "We need to remember."