LORD Kitchener’s face appeared to be everywhere that late autumn of 1914. His piercing eyes stared down from countless posters up and down the land, exhorting young men to join the colours without delay.

From John O’Groats to Land’s End, the youth of Britain answered the call in their thousands. The First World War was only a few months old but the British Expeditionary Force had virtually ceased to exist.

The battles of Mons, the Marne, Aisne and First Ypres had worn down the original force to barely 10,000 men and a new army needed to be formed as soon as possible.

Men joined in droves. And among those eager to fill the gaping ranks of the small force that had gone to France and Flanders that summer was a lad from Church Walk, St Clement’s, Worcester.

Henry William Went – known to his family as Billy – was only 17, yet somehow managed to convince the recruiting sergeant of the 12th Bn Gloucestershire Regiment that he was old enough to go to France, and so he was nodded through.

Nearly a century later, Pte Went’s memory still burns bright for his niece, Iris Yeomans, of Melrose Close, Comer Road, St John’s, Worcester. For she has just fulfilled a lifetime’s ambition to visit her uncle’s grave in Belgium not far from the bloody killing fields of Passchendaele where he was mortally wounded in October 1917, aged just 19.

Mrs Yeomans said: “My mother always wanted to find the grave but it never happened.

“She said the family’s last memory of Billy was waving him off as he sailed to France for the last time.”

The years went by and then the journey was made possible by Mrs Yeomans’ daughters, Wendy Morgan, of Eliot Road, Worcester, and Sandra James, who now lives in Cambridge. They decided to treat their mum for her 80th birthday and so the three travelled across the Channel on their pilgrimage of a lifetime.

That journey’s end came at Godewaersvelde British Cemetery, which nestles in the low Flanders Hills near Poperinghe. Billy Went died near here at a casualty clearing station before he could be invalided back to Blightie and home to Worcester.

Tears flowed down the women’s cheeks as they stroked the white Portland stone that marked Billy’s last resting place. And after they had knelt at the grave to place a blood-red poppy cross, Mrs Morgan said: “I don’t want to go… I just feel I cannot leave now that I have found him after all this time.

“The whole experience has been wonderful, although rather overwhelming.”

But as they rejoined the tour coach, this mother and her daughters could at least reflect that they had at long last paid their respects to the youngster who left his native city to fight for king and country so many years ago… never to return.