A long strange journey home for a Saskatchewan-born soldier came to its close today, 70 years after his death in the Second World War.

Pte. First Class Lawrence S. Gordon was fighting with U.S. forces when he was killed in a battle in northern France. But it would not be until Wednesday’s memorial service in Eastend, Sask., that he was finally laid to rest near the area where he grew up.

Gordon was riding in an armoured car when a German shell hit it on Aug. 13, 1944. In the aftermath, it’s believed someone draped an article of German clothing over Gordon’s body.

Supplies were running low in Normandy in the summer of 1944, with the Allied forces focused on the pushing ahead the invasion and hopefully end the war with Germany quickly. Gordon’s family says it’s likely nothing else was available to cover the corpse.

Gordon was later buried in a temporary American grave, but his body was moved to a German grave after the piece of a German uniform was found. He was moved again in 1961 to an aboveground fibreglass vault, his family said.

In all, Gordon’s remains spent the better part of seven decades in German war cemeteries in France.

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The first steps in efforts to change that began in 2000, when nephew Lawrence R. Gordon discovered that his uncle’s remains were not interred where they should have been. That discovery would start a 14-year odyssey to reclaim his uncle’s body.

“I had no idea whenever I pledged to my father that I would visit his (brother’s) grave sometime that I would have to find him and identify him first, and then bring him home so that he would have a grave that I could visit,” he said.

Gordon connected with Jed Henry, a journalist who began working on a documentary on the journey. Henry’s grandfather had served with the elder Gordon in the war. The big break in the case came earlier this year, when DNA tests finally confirmed the fallen soldier’s identity.

After consultation with the French and German governments, the decision was finally made to bring the soldier’s body home to Canada, according to Casey Gordon, the younger Lawrence’s cousin.

After a journey across the Atlantic and the United States (including a stop at a funeral home in Wisconsin, and more stops in South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana), the body made its way to Medicine Hat, Alta.

Then it was over the Saskatchewan border to Eastend, a town of about 500 people about 390 kilometres southwest of Regina. Casey said the final procession — including 50 members of non-profit U.S. veterans group Rolling Thunder — was unlike anything he had ever seen.

After 70 years, Pte. Lawrence Gordon received the military funeral his family felt he deserved.

“It’s a real sense of closure,” said Casey, who was not directly involved in the effort to bring his uncle home but was one of many members of the family who attended the service. “It means a lot.”

For the younger Lawrence, the 14-year quest to reclaim the body was a positive one.

“It restores your faith in humanity when you see what people are willing to do for free, for principle.”

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With files from The Canadian Press