WWI soldiers’ bottle letters found on Australia’s coast

Two messages in a bottle written by Australian soldiers early in their voyage to France in World War I have been discovered more than a century later on Australia’s coast, Euronews writes.

The bottle was found on Wharton Beach near Esperance, Western Australia, during a beach cleanup on Oct. 9. Inside were pencil letters from Privates Malcolm Neville, 27, and William Harley, 37, dated Aug. 15, 1916.

Their troop ship, HMAT A70 Ballarat, had left Adelaide three days earlier, bound for the Western Front. Neville was killed in action a year later; Harley survived the war but died in 1934 from cancer his family believed came from being gassed in the trenches.

Neville asked the finder to deliver his note to his mother in Wilkawatt, South Australia. Harley, whose mother was dead, said the finder could keep his.