The unknown warrior's body was chosen from a number of British servicemen exhumed from four battle areas - the Aisne, the Somme, Arras and Ypres. These remains were brought to the chapel at St Pol on the night of 7 November 1920, where the officer in charge of troops in France and Flanders, Brig Gen L J Wyatt, went with a Col Gell.
Neither had any idea where the bodies, laid on stretchers and covered by union jacks, were from.
Gen Wyatt selected one body - it has been suggested he may have been blindfolded while making his choice - and the two officers placed it in a plain coffin and sealed it. The other bodies were reburied.
The next day the dead soldier began the journey to his final resting place. The coffin was taken to Boulogne and placed inside another coffin, made of oak from Hampton Court and sent over from England
This second coffin had a 16th Century sword, taken from King George V's private collection, fixed on top.
The body was then transported to Dover via the destroyer HMS Verdun and taken by train to London.
On the morning of 11 November 1920, the body of the unknown warrior was drawn in a procession through London to the Cenotaph
At 1100 there was a two-minute silence, and the body was then taken to nearby Westminster Abbey where it was buried, passing through a guard of honour of 100 holders of the Victoria Cross.
In a particularly poignant gesture, the grave was filled with earth from the main French battlefields, and the black marble stone was Belgian.
An estimated 1,250,000 people visited the Abbey to see the grave in only the first week.
On 17 October 1921, Britain's unknown soldier was given the US Medal of Honor. On 11 November 1921, the US unknown soldier was reciprocally awarded the Victoria Cross
"The point was that it literally could have been anybody...an earl or a duke's son, or a labourer from South Africa. Those parents and wives who had lost men to war didn't have anything tangible to grieve at, so the unknown warrior represented their loss." #ww1 #reality #stayzero