Tribute to soldiers will form part of anniversary commemorations

A special cross is to be placed on each of the graves of the New Zealand servicemen by a relative of one of the men buried there.

Geoff McMillan will be making the 22,000-mile round trip to the Commonwealth War Cemetery in Brocton to pay tribute to his great-uncle and comrades who trained on Cannock Chase.

They died in an influenza epidemic which devastated the camp in 1918.

The soldiers are remembered every year on April 25, Anzac Day, which commemorates all the soldiers from Australia and New Zealand who served and died in military operations. The date refers to the start of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign, in which many of them took part.

Almost 188,000 Allied troops were left dead, missing or wounded over an the eight-month operation.

The ceremony on Cannock Chase is the largest outside of Australia and New Zealand. In recent years a project started to place Dolores Crosses on the graves of all 30,000 New Zealand military personnel buried on foreign soil.

Mr McMillan, 73, has been asked to bring the tributes, handwoven from New Zealand flax, by Dolores Ho, the archivist at the National Army Museum in New Zealand, who started the project. The first time anywhere in the world these flax crosses were placed on graves was at Cannock Chase in 2008 by Lee Dent and Richard Pursehouse, members of the military historical research group The Chase Project.

Since that initial one-off gesture, the Dolores Cross programme has grown to involve hundreds of volunteers in honouring New Zealanders buried across the world.

Mr Pursehouse, aged 52, said: "It is very humbling to be involved in the commemoration of so many men who travelled more than 10,000 miles to fight in the First World War and never returned to their homeland.

"Now Geoff is following in their footsteps to pay his own tribute."