The Somme is a byword for British tragedy. The 57,000 dead, wounded and missing of 1 July 1916 have come to symbolise incompetent generals and the futility of the war in the public imagination. Military historians continue to debate and revise their assessments of the tactics, strategy and significance of this battle that ended only in November 1916, after five months of terrible suffering and losses on both sides. The human cost was staggering – altogether, 150,000 Commonwealth servicemen lied buried in 400 separate cemeteries (military and civilian) on the Somme, of whom 50,000 remain unidentified. A further 100,000 are still on the battlefields, and are commemorated on six more memorials to the missing (Dyer 1995).
Across the Somme battlefield – below ground and above – are the remains of the landscapes these men knew. Trenches, bunkers, unexploded bombs, bullets and military equipment lie interspersed with countless bodies (more usually their fragments) that rise to the surface every year, as they do along the entire Western Front. They are joined by the remains excavated by professional archaeologists and those uncovered by developers building motorways and industrial estates. This chapter explores the extraordinary and sometimes contentious discoveries made over the past seventeen years, and the distinctive contribution they have all made to Great War archaeology.
As we have seen in Chapter 1, the archaeology of the First World War in France developed along a different course than in Belgium, mainly because the French system of Direction régionale des affaires culturelles (DRAC) required and authorised its archaeologists to investigate and record Great War sites as just another part of France’s archaeological heritage. While French archaeologists do not seek out these sites, they have built a unique expertise by virtue of having to investigate (and in some cases developing a particular interest in) them, particularly in northern France, in Nord-Pas-de-Calais, and in and around the city of Arras.
French archaeology’s remit to engage with the First World War, reinforced by the legal requirements for conducting excavations, meant that there never developed in France a strong amateur tradition of battlefield digging, as happened in Belgium. In France, there was no obvious gap to be filled in this respect. There may also have been less obvious, perhaps cultural, differences between French and Belgian attitudes towards digging up Great War remains.
Although the boundary between postwar battlefield clearance and looting and opportunist digging (for military memorabilia) is a notoriously grey area for both countries, the French attitude to the land itself (and perhaps the bodies it contains) may partly explain the absence of any quasi-formal associations of battlefield diggers. This attitude, a strong sense of patrie, was certainly influenced by the Franco-Prussian war (1870–1) and the German occupation of Alsace-Lorraine (memories of which were still fresh in 1914), and may have contributed in a political and religious sense to notions of the sacredness and inviolability of French soil. Whatever the explanation, Great War archaeology in France involved professionals at one level or another from the beginning.
The only notable (and albeit partial) exceptions to this, and perhaps the nearest French equivalent to the Belgian tradition of organised groups, are the Association Souvenir Bataille de Fromelles (ASBF; see Chapter 1), and the Durand Group. ASBF includes Belgian and French members, and investigates the battlefield that was the small French town of Fromelles, some 12 miles west of Lille, and halfway between the well-known Great War towns of Laventie and La Bassée.
From 1914 to 1918, Fromelles was a town divided, one half occupied by the Germans, the other by the Allies. Between 19 and 20 July 1916, British and Australian forces launched an attack that was supposed to be a diversion from their activities further south on the Somme. The Battle of Fromelles (as it was called) was a disaster for the Allies, who suffered 8,500 casualties in twenty-four hours for no obvious gain.
ASBF works with the town authorities, the local museum staff and French archaeologists, and has several overlapping projects: archaeological excavation, museum displays, and the creation of a document and resource centre on the First World War at Fromelles. Located in the town hall, the museum was opened in 1990, and displays uniforms, military equipment and objects found in local excavations as part of dioramas of trench life. To date, ASBF has excavated a British dugout at Cellar Farm Avenue, a German trench mortar (Minenwerfer) position, and a shaft leading to a 1915 Australian tunnel system called Cordonnerie Post.
The Durand Group, by contrast, is composed of expert military and civilian volunteers, and has been investigating underground tunnels, particularly at Vimy Ridge since 1997. Some of its members specialise in the identification and handling of unexploded munitions, but their work also includes photographic surveying and mapping, and the pioneering of non-destructive geophysical prospection of battlefields. In recent years, they have been involved with ground-penetrating radar investigations of tunnels at the Newfoundland Memorial Park at Beaumont-Hamel, and excavation in advance of building the new visitor centre at Thiepval Memorial to the Missing (Dolamore 2000; Watkins 1998).
In France, as elsewhere, traditional and academic archaeology has not until recently been particularly interested in the physical remains of the First World War. The main issue appears to have been what role archaeology could play in a war that apparently was so well known already from military history – the sole exception being finding, perhaps identifying, and reburying Great War soldiers. The fact that there has, again until recently, been little communication between military historians and archaeologists compounded the problems facing Great War archaeology.
The wind of change first blew across the battlefields of the First World War between 1987 and 1989, when the professional archaeologist Yves Desfossés and his colleagues became involved in archaeological reconnaissance along that part of the TGV rail link that passed through Artois – from the Somme town of Bapaume north to the city of Lille (Desfossés 1999). Preliminary test trenches were dug along this north–south route that followed the British–German front line as it was in 1917. For the first time, these archaeologists were confronted with bullets, artillery shells, grenades, mortars, dugouts, trenches and abandoned war materiel of the First World War. The construction schedule for the TGV was such that it was impossible to investigate the many remains that were identified during this reconnaissance; it was only possible to highlight the problems presented by unexploded bombs and the remains of soldiers.
Ten years later, in 1997, archaeologists were asked to assess the archaeological potential of the A29 motorway on an east–west line between St Quentin and Amiens. Three areas received special attention as they represented different experiences of the war: the area around Villers-Bretonneux, which saw the rapid German advance of spring 1918 (and the equally rapid British response); the area around Vermandovillers and Ablaincourt, which had been a stable French-controlled area between 1915 and July 1916; and the area around Francilly-Selency, which had the first constructions of the German Hindenburg Line of 1917 (Desfossés 1999: 44–5). Altogether, some forty sites were located, ranging from Palaeolithic times to the present.
In the 80 kilometers of trenches dug, human remains of the Great War period were also found, and it was possible to identify those who had been intentionally buried, and those whose bodies had been covered over by an explosion. It was also sometimes possible to establish names and nationality by their locations and the personal effects that were retrieved. At Les Fiermonts, the remains of an 18-year-old British soldier were found in a shell hole and identified as those of a member of the 52nd battalion Northamptonshire Regiment, who possibly met his death during fighting in the area on 3 April 1918.
Other excavations in 1997, at the site of an industrial estate in the village of Braine, uncovered three burials within each of which was the skeleton of an adult horse (Desfossés 1999: 41–3). The presence of artillery shells in one burial, and the location of Braine in relation to the presence of cavalry in the area, suggested that these horses had been killed by German artillery fire during the British pursuit of the Germans at the end of the Allied counter-offensive on the Marne around 13 September 1914.
Arguably the most publicised archaeological investigation to date (and certainly one of the earliest) was the 1991 excavation of the bodies of twenty-one French soldiers at Saint-Rémy-la-Calonne (Meuse) (Adam 1991, 2006). The excavation was significant and contentious for several reasons, not least the presence among the dead of the French novelist Alain-Fournier, author of Le Grand Meaulnes. Lieutenant Fournier was one of a group of soldiers of the French 288th Infantry Regiment of Mirande that had gone missing in a wood on 22 September 1914.
As with so many other actions at the beginning of the war, this event had attracted a sinister legend – namely that all of these men had been executed by the Germans rather than been killed in battle. This rumour fitted well with other German war crimes reported during the early years of the war – it transformed Alain-Fournier into a hero, and added to the mystery of his inexplicable disappearance. Later research in German military archives indicated that, for unknown reasons, Alain-Fournier and his men might have attacked a German Red Cross ambulance before their deaths.
As an early example of Great War archaeology in France, it is notable that the excavation was surrounded with controversy even before it began. Searching for and excavating the remains of Alain-Fournier was not a priority for French professional archaeologists at a time when archaeology’s potential for investigating the First World War had only just begun to be realised in the wake of the preliminary excavations along the TGV route just a couple of years before. In fact, in 1990, a request to investigate the area believed to contain the remains of Alain-Fournier and his men had been denied.
Yet, only six months later, permission to dig and exhume the bodies was granted. New evidence had come to light – part of a French army boot and fragments of red material had been found at a spot that suggested a communal grave from the early part of the war. This second request to excavate was not made by an archaeologist, but by Michel Algrain, an admirer of Alain-Fournier who had been obsessed for years with finding the author’s grave. Together with a German colleague, and two local men equally fascinated by Alain-Fournier’s disappearance, Algrain appealed directly to Jack Lang, the French Minister of Culture.
The normal channels for archaeological research were circumvented, and permission was granted for a rapid exhumation of the bodies by the local Lorraine Archaeological Service under the leadership of Frédéric Adam, a contract archaeologist, and with the active collaboration of the official body known as the ‘Anciens Combattants et Victimes de Guerre’. The first scientific excavation of a Great War site in France was the result of individual motivation and political interest, and was anything but a straightforward archaeological project. From the beginning, all who promoted the venture saw it not as an archaeological investigation, but rather as a (physical) anthropological undertaking, designed explicitly to identify the remains of a famous personality.
Seventy-seven years after their death, Alain-Fournier and his fellow soldiers were recovered during a month-long excavation in November 1991. Initially, the excavation proceeded without any undue public attention, but, within days, the publication of an article in the Parisian press produced a media circus, and an influx of reporters and the public. Alain-Fournier’s fame, and the mystery of his disappearance, fanned the flames of public interest, and the possibility of obtaining war mementoes and relics lifted the excavation into a media event that required the placing of an armed guard round the clock at the excavation site. Even at this early stage of development, Great War archaeology demonstrated its ability to transform in unexpected ways, to connect with all kinds of interests, and to take on a life of its own.
The excavation itself revealed a strict adherence to military hierarchy, in that the bodies were laid head to toe, with the captain buried at one end of the communal grave, followed by the lieutenant and sub-lieutenant, the NCOs, and finally the ordinary soldiers (Adam 1999: 32). Among the equipment and personal effects were cartridges, water bottles, dentures, tent rivets, a pipe, fork, belt buckles, religious medallions, well-preserved boots, and sixteen identity discs (ibid.). Despite this apparent wealth of items, other objects were noticeable by their absence. There were no weapons and no kepis (caps), and some identity tags were missing – perhaps these items had been lost during the burial, or kept as souvenirs by the Germans who had buried the bodies.
One consequence of the focus on detailed physical anthropological evidence (rather than broader archaeological concerns) was to establish that the average height of the ordinary soldiers (mainly farmers and artisans) was 1.60 metres, whereas that of the three officers was 1.78 metres (Boura 1999: 81). This gave an insight into the social and economic background (and the dietary consequences) of men from different classes in French society.
These measurements were compared to the French Army’s official list of soldiers missing in action in this sector, and their physical characteristics and ranks. These, in turn, were supplemented by the more personal evidence of family records and photographs. This information, combined with the evidence of fragments of coloured uniforms, buttons, and pieces of braid attached to the foreams and epaulettes that still adhered to the skeletons, identified them beyond doubt as belonging to the 288th regiment. Altogether, archaeological, forensic and archival evidence allowed for nineteen of the twenty-one bodies to be identified (Adam 1999: 34).
Careful examination of the wounds inflicted on these men allowed for an accurate assessment of how they had met their death. Far from indicating a systematic mass execution, as had long been rumoured, forensic examination revealed that the bodies had random wounds. This was consistent with the soldiers meeting their death in combat, most probably by being surrounded and shot at from all directions and angles by German troops (ibid.: 35). This aspect of the investigation seemed to explode the myth of a German war crime that had endured for almost a century in the minds of many people.
The excavation at Saint-Rémy-la-Calonne raised many important issues, not least because of the celebrity status of Alain-Fournier, and the press attention his discovery and exhumation attracted. It was also significant because the mystery of his fate in 1914 had embedded itself deep in the French psyche concerning the war, and was connected to the shaping of national identity in the postwar years. It was important, too, because it highlighted the issue of the relevance of archaeology to investigate the (comparatively recent) events of the First World War. More far-reaching, perhaps, was the fact that while the events that surrounded Alain-Fournier’s death took place on French soil, they were by definition part of an international, not solely French, war heritage.
Although the excavation at Saint-Rémy-la-Calonne was an important milestone for Great War archaeology in France, its main impetus, focused on identifying an important French literary figure, meant that it was an unusual and isolated event. More influential for the archaeology of the war, in France and internationally, would be a series of discoveries (and subsequent rescue excavations) of British soldiers further north, on the later battlefields of the period 1916–18.
In December 1996, during the excavation of the Artoipole industrial estate at Monchy-le-Preux just east of Arras, archaeologists discovered a battlefield cemetery containing twenty-seven British soldiers, laid out in several communal graves. One of these was a shell crater that had been extended so as to contain six individuals; two other rectangular graves contained six and five bodies respectively; a fourth grave revealed the remains of four NCOs; and yet another (also originally a shell hole) nearby contained the incomplete remains of perhaps another six individuals (Girardet et al. 2003: 103).
The British Commonwealth War Graves Commision requested that the bodies be handed over within twenty-four hours, which precluded the forensic study (and perhaps identification) of at least some of the bodies. The men appeared to have been buried fully clothed, but the acidity of the soil meant that almost nothing of these materials survived. Nevertheless, with the exception of several steel helmets too badly damaged to be reused, the bodies had evidently been stripped of their weapons, much of their military equipment, regimental badges, and perhaps also their identity discs, by those who had buried them. What little remained, however, was enough to identify at least some of the men as belonging to 13th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, part of the British Third Army, which had been fighting here between 9 and 14 April 1917. This regiment had attacked and taken the small village of Monchy-le-Preux held by the Germans, but sustained heavy losses.
The majority of the bodies were incomplete, with arms or legs missing, indicating a brutal death by artillery-shell fire. Several bodies still had embedded in them the remains of high-explosive shrapnel. It is known that British soldiers in this area belonged to the Third Army, and that heavy losses occurred during a particularly fierce German bombardment on 11 April 1917. As the burials were near to where an advanced medical station was known to have been located, it is possible that some of the men may have survived briefly and then been buried alongside their comrades by the medical staff. It proved impossible to identify twenty-four of the twenty-seven bodies found, and these men were reburied in 1997. But the British Ministry of Defence (MOD) believed that the other three could be identified.
On 15 April 1998, another aspect of the archaeology of the war became apparent when the three remaining Royal Fusiliers were buried in the small CWGC cemetery at Monchy-le-Preux. One was still unknown, but two others had been identified. Private Frank King was 23 years old when he died, and George Anderson was aged 31. It had taken more than a year to track down relatives of the two men, some of whom had known nothing about their long-lost family members. Not only had archaeology given these men back their names and identities, but it had rewritten family genealogies as well. In the case of Private King, one relative watched the burial holding perhaps the last letter the young soldier had written home to his mother. Great War archaeology was revealing its unique ability to have an almost unbearably poignant emotional impact on the living, who, only a short time before, were totally unsuspecting of any such links to the First World War.
While the recovery and reburial of the war dead was understandably becoming a focus of Great War archaeology, at least from a media perspective, more typical kinds of excavation were also occurring. At the Newfoundland Memorial Park at Beaumont-Hamel, dominated by its caribou sculpture and memorial to Newfoundland’s 800 missing servicemen, a team from Parks Canada and the French Association pour les fouilles archéologiques nationales (AFAN) began excavations in 1998 (Piédalue 1998).
The site had been designated a Canadian National Heritage site in 1997, and the need to manage and redesign parts of the site for the growing numbers of visitors led to archaeological investigations in advance of building a visitor centre and car park. Excavations of the modest car park area revealed part of what on wartime trench maps was called Uxbridge Road trench. The archaeologists traced a portion of the trench’s zigzag course towards the front line, and discovered two distinct phases – one associated with the Battle of the Somme in 1916 (the area saw much fierce fighting, and the blowing of the mine on Hawthorn Ridge that always features on television programmes), and the other with the German advance in March 1918. Butchered cow bones (the remain of soldiers’ meals), bottles and live grenades were found, a report written, and the car park laid.
In the same year as the bodies from Monchy-le-Preux were reburied, and the Beaumont-Hamel car park site was excavated, a quite different discovery was made, but one that was to have a profound effect on the development of Great War archaeology in France. At the small village of Flesquières, near Cambrai, a British tank was discovered and excavated, and attracted international media coverage.
Apart from the publicity, the only similarity to the excavation of Alain-Fournier and his comrades was that at Flesquières the impetus for discovery was the obsessive enthusiasm and energy of a single person. Philippe Gorczynski, a member of the French Association 1914–1918, possessed an intimate knowledge of the area, and a special interest in the British tanks that took part in the famous tank battle of Cambrai in November 1917. Gorczynski followed up local rumours that a tank was buried in the area, and finally located it on the outskirts of the village. The tank’s upper entrance hatch was only 1 metre below the surface, and a first look inside revealed it to be virtually intact.
When Gorczynski and others excavated the tank in November 1998 (Desfossés and Gorczynski 2002), it was immediately apparent that it was a Mark IV (‘female’) tank, with heavy damage to its front right side, including the destruction of the tank commander’s seat. However, the left side had survived far better, and the caterpillar tracks, Daimler engine and exhaust pipe were intact. The rear section was especially well preserved, and its crew door was still open.
What struck everyone as unusual was that the tank had evidently been dragged into a hole, not left abandoned on the battlefield, and that there was a large quantity of German war materiel scattered around, including poor-quality steel shells typical of the final months of the war. In addition, everything that was recovered from inside the tank was German, not British. It seemed to Gorczynski that the tank had been knocked out during the Cambrai battle and had then been moved, buried and reused as an armoured German dugout; hence the presence of German war materiel. The tank’s British machine guns had been removed, presumably because the Germans had no suitable ammunition, and these had been replaced with their German equivalent. Several early identifications were made of the tank, but research in military archives, a study of trench maps and a contemporary photograph of a tank with identical damage ultimately convinced Gorczynski that the tank was D51 (called ‘Deborah’), that had belonged to D Battalion of the British Tank Corps in 1917.
What was inexplicable was, if the tank had been used as a shelter by the Germans, why had it not been stripped of its valuable workable items (especially the caterpillar tracks) for reuse as spares in their recycling of tanks to be used against the British? Only a few miles away, at Bourlon, the Germans salvaged many damaged (and sometimes only broken-down) British tanks for reuse against their former owners – might Deborah have been one of these?
While the excavation of Deborah was an important event in its own right, and particularly as it related to the great tank attack at Cambrai, it was equally significant for the effect it had on Great War archaeology more widely. The tank became a dramatic icon of Great War heritage, a kind of historical monument that excited great interest in France and around the wider English-speaking world. It represented the disappearing international heritage of the war, and demonstrated the need for, and power of, archaeology to rescue important objects from the conflict.
Soon after the discovery of Deborah, archaeologists found and excavated another battlefield mass burial at Gavrelle, a small village just a few kilometres northeast of Arras. It contained twelve German soldiers hastily buried by their comrades in an improvised shell-crater grave. Many of their personal effects had been removed, though pipes and a fountain pen (with a phial of ink) were found. Sections of their aluminium identification tags had been removed before burial, but enough remained to identify the men as belonging to 6th and 7th companies of the 152nd Infantry Regiments, 48th Division (Desfossés and Jacques 2000: 35). These men had evidently been killed during the great German spring offensive of March 1918. Their hasty and improvised burial presented a startling image to the excavators – a huddled mass of skeletons wearing only damaged steel helmets and boots.
In October 2000, beneath the streets of Arras, the city’s archaeologist Alain Jacques discovered and investigated the only complete subterranean British field hospital ever found on the Western Front. Less than 800 metres from the front-line trenches, a large underground quarry had been transformed into a casualty clearing station between Rue St Quentin and Rue du Temple in February 1917 (Girardet et al. 2003: 92–3). The realisation of this project was due to the energetic Colonel A.G. Thompson of the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), who calculated correctly that a large hospital so near to the battlezone would save many soldiers’ lives. Today, the site is known as Thompson’s Cave (ibid.).
Alain Jacques and his team surveyed the vast undergound cavern, which is about 120 metres long at its longest point. They identified, among other things, a waiting room, dressing room, operating theatre, kitchen, officers’ ward, mortuary, toilets and a well, and painted signs on the walls indicating not only the hospital facilities, but the direction of the front line as well. It has been calculated that the RAMC could treat around 700 men in these safe and electrically lit surroundings.
Above ground, and just a stone’s throw away from Thompson’s Cave, is another and quite distinctive kind of archaeological record inscribed on wartime dwellings along the streets that the soldiers of the First World War knew well. Just visible on the walls of several houses are black-painted signs, announcing ‘DCLI’ (Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry) and ‘Hair Cutting Saloon’, which have survived for almost a century despite having no preservation order to protect them. Even more remarkable, and intensely personal, are the inscriptions that can be seen if one looks closely at some of the bricks in the doorways. Here are names, dates and regiments, scratched by young men waiting in line for a military haircut, such as ‘Thomas [unreadable] C. Coy 11 Platoon 1st DCLI B.E. Force’, and (upside down and obviously refitted at some time), ‘R.D. Oliver 26 M.G.C, B.E.F.’. These artefacts form a particularly social kind of archaeology, an intimate landscape of soldierly experience, capturing time, inscribed into the pre-war topography of Arras, and today almost invisible, although in plain view, to those who hurry past.
In 2001, the year after the discovery of Thompson’s Cave, the truly multi-period nature of Great War archaeology became apparent, when Yves Desfossés from the Regional Archaeological Service (DRAC) Gilles Prilaux of the Institut National de Recherches Archéologiques Préventives (INRAP) of Nord-Pas-de-Calais joined forces with Alain Jacques and his colleagues from the Municipal Archaeological Service of Arras to investigate 63 hectares (out of a total area of 300 hectares) of the ZAC Actiparc site at Le Point du Jour, some 6 kilometres north-east of Arras, and on which a BMW car factory was to be built. Between April and July 2001, and again between January and September 2002, a total of some 120 kilometres of trenches was excavated, further areas evaluated, and five major occupations were found. There were significant remains from the prehistoric (Bronze and Iron Age) and also from the Gallo-Roman period, including a burial ground, and a small fort from the time of Augustus (Desfossés et al. 2002 and 2003).
These traditional kinds of remains had been cut into by some 6,000 structures associated with the First World War, highlighting again the complex relationship between the most ancient and most recent kinds of archaeology. Between October 1914 and April 1917 this sector of the Arras front had been fortified by two lines of German trenches (the intermediate and rear trenches). Constructions that were found included defensive and communication trenches, dugout shelters and observation posts; also found were the remains of thirty-one British soldiers, who seem to have been casualties of the British attack on 9 April 1917.
Twenty of these men were buried together, almost certainly by their comrades, in a shallow mass grave. They were laid out in a row, seemingly arm in arm, perhaps as a last poignant show in death of the comradeship they had shared in life. They were all still wearing their boots, though there were no weapons, equipment or helmets (except one) that, presumably, had been removed by those who had buried them. While none of the men could be identified – no identity discs were found – the presence of several regimental badges on some of the bodies indicated that they were from the 10th Battalion, Lincolnshire Regiment – the Grimsby Chums.
A grim reminder of the nature of industrialised war was evident where two men had been laid next to each other but all that remained of both men was a single arm, and four boots – in two of which was the lower half of a leg bone. Every other trace of the two men was missing, presumably blown to pieces by devastating artillery shellfire. In what must have been a gut-wrenching act, the survivors had collected these scattered pieces of their comrades and laid them out in exactly the same position as the other complete bodies. At the far end of the burial was a soldier slightly separated from the others, whose arms were laid out along his sides.
Apart from this poignant and well-publicised find, another, more unexpected – and so far unique – discovery was made. As we saw in Chapter 2, soldiers spent considerable time and effort in making objects from the debris of war (see Gygi 2004). These items, known collectively as trench art, were also made by prisoners of war on both sides, and after as well as during the war. While hundreds of thousands of such objects were made by soldiers, the preference of modern collectors for objects in perfect condition has meant that few half-finished pieces, rejects or manufacturing scrap have ever been found, published or offered for sale.
The excavators at Actiparc not only uncovered a treasure trove of such incomplete pieces and manufacturing debris, but were also the first to discover and investigate the remains of a trench-art workshop or atelier. Equally interesting was the fact that this was a postwar workshop, and the makers were German prisoners of war (POWs) engaged in repairing the railway from Arras to Lens in 1919 (hence this date inscribed on some of the pieces). Some items had the names of their makers engraved on them, while others were adorned with such incriptions as ‘Weltkrieg’ (World War), ‘POW’, and ‘Arras–Lens’. One of the matchbox covers was inscribed ‘Andenken’, German for ‘souvenir’ (Desfossés et al. 2005). The range of items included crescent-bladed letter-openers, fuse-cap inkwells, imitation belt buckles, and the ubiquitous matchbox covers, and made from such raw materials as empty artillery-shell cases, and brass and aluminium scrap.
What was especially valuable about this discovery was that among the items recovered were numerous cut-outs of scrap metal in the shape of these trench-art objects, half-completed (as well as finished) items, and even several small improvised hammers used (with a chisel) for decorating and inscribing the different kinds of trench art. This was a significant find from the point of view both of Great War archaeology and the anthropological study of trench art. It demonstrated how a modern archaeology of the war could uncover and make sense of a trench-art workshop, and fill in the gaps in knowledge concerning the (hitherto almost invisible) processes of manufacture of objects that are otherwise so well known as artistic souvenirs of the war. For once, it was the scrap and debris associated with trench art that was more interesting than the finished object.
While the ZAC Actiparc excavations were on a large scale, and revealed many different aspects of Great War archaeology, smaller discoveries continued to be made. In 2003, the remains of three German soldiers killed in 1915 were found at Thélus near Arras. ‘Soldier 2’, who belonged to the 12th Grenadier Regiment, yielded well-preserved personal effects, including a pipe, matchbox, pencils, a small crucifix, and a purse containing German and French coins. His corroded identity tag revealed a name beginning with ‘SPO …’, and showed his Berlin address as ‘144 Köpenickerstr.’. But there was also an intriguing paradox, as his possessions included a gold chain and a silver medal that was in effect a swastika surrounded by a twelve-rayed sun.
Here was a First World War German soldier carrying the emblem of the postwar Nazi Party at a time when Adolf Hitler himself was still a lowly corporal fighting in Belgium. The paradox was resolved when it was found that on the reverse of the swastika was the name ‘CARLSBERG’, referring to the Danish beer company. At their brewery in Copenhagen, Carlsberg had adopted the swastika (an ancient good-luck sign) along with the twelve-rayed sun and elephant as corporate symbols around 1880, possibly because of their commercial involvement with the British in India. They abandoned it in 1920, when the Nazis adopted and for ever changed its significance (Alain Jacques pers. comm.; Desfossés et al. 2004). It is interesting to ponder what battlefield looters would have made of such a find.
One of the most sustained and innovative excavations on the Somme has been the ‘Ocean Villas Project’, an archaeological investigation of Great War features located on the property of Avril Williams, owner of the Ocean Villas guest house and tearooms in the village of Auchonvillers on the Somme.
In 1996, the site had originally been investigated by a British group of Great War re-enactors, known as the ‘Khaki Chums’. A year later, in 1997, the excavation was taken over by a team that included a museum professional from the National Army Museum in London, a professional archaeologist and a historian, supported by volunteers. The aim of the investigation was now to explore the communication trenches leading to a cellar used by troops during the war, and to reconstruct everything as a commemorative tourist feature.
The motivation for the Ocean Villas Project is typical of the complex nature of Great War archaeology – neither obvious nor straightforward, and full of fascinating and difficult issues. The Ocean Villas tearoom is adorned with locally discovered Great War memorabilia in ways not dissimilar to the café-museums that have operated in the area since the 1920s. However, the owner’s strong personal commitment to the commemoration and interpretation of the war prompted her interest in offering her own battlefield visitors a glimpse of a conserved and reconstructed part of the tearoom building they were visiting. An important aspect of this was the existence beneath the building of a cellar that had served as a dugout during the war, and that contains wartime graffiti carved by soldiers.
Jon Price, the archaeologist in charge of the excavations, has observed another aspect of this kind if archaeology in such a rural area. In a village with a shrinking and ageing population, the Ocean Villas tearooms (made more attractive by the results of the Ocean Villas Project) offers local employment and improves the local economy (Price 2004).
The primary intention of the excavation at Auchonvillers was to find the original wartime form of the trench, and to relate this to traditional archaeological stratigraphy, and subsequently to allow for an authentic trench to be reconstructed for visitors in a way that demonstrated the validity of scientific excavation. This would stand in contrast to previous Great War digs that had uncovered many artefacts, but which could not relate them in any meaningful way to different levels and periods of trench building.
This approach, which saw the excavation and subsequent presentation of a Great War site as an achievable and worthwhile effort in its own right, also differed from most other kinds of archaeology on the Somme, where, constrained by traditional archaeological concerns, excavations of Great War sites (with their bodies and volatile munitions) were sometimes viewed as a hindrance to excavating the ‘real’ archaeology of the prehistoric, Gallo-Roman, or medieval periods that lay beneath. Implicit in the Auchonvillers project was the understanding that Great War archaeology was a new kind of enterprise that was linked by the joint interests of the site owner and the excavators to public concerns and participation in terms of war remembrance rather than strictly academic issues.
The other major difference at Auchonvillers was the fact that this was not – as so many other ‘battlefield archaeology’ digs had been – an excavation of a battlefield per se, but rather of a rear area where soldiers spent more time than in the front line, and so would investigate a hitherto ignored aspect of soldiers’ daily life. The composition of the excavation team reflected a recent development in archaeological thinking: there was not just one knowable past, but rather a diversity of pasts amenable to different interpretations and relevant to people with different motivations, different kinds of expertise, and different (sometimes emotional) ways of engaging with the First World War.
The original excavations by the Khaki Chums into the wind-blown loamy soil – with its liability to becoming waterlogged and to lose its features by weathering – had been such that the Auchonvillers team feared that archaeological signs of trench cutting, use and infilling might not be visible, and therefore would not produce the result that the team and the site owner wanted. Nevertheless, the Ocean Villas Project’s first excavations in 1997 revealed a clear stratigraphy, in which it was possible to identify an original wartime trench cut, and subsequent layers of dumping and natural sedimentation. This key discovery allowed the archaeologists to identify a preliminary sequence of phases, and to incorporate additional archaeological and historical information in their interpretation.
In this first scientific excavation of a First World War trench, the potential of modern archaeology to add significantly to understanding the conflict at the level of individual features was dramatically illustrated. Phase 1 represented the original cutting of the trench (with its drainage features) and the laying of a brick floor; Phase 2 saw the trench in everyday use, with the brick floor being kept clean and sediment building up in the drainage area; Phase 3 had evidence of run-off from the sides of the trench; Phase 4 identified the accumulation of dirt on top of the run-off (suggesting the trench was not kept as clean as previously); Phase 5 saw the deliberate infilling of the trench; Phase 6 indicated that the trench was filled with wire debris and surface run-off; Phase 7 saw the slumping of soil into the trench; Phase 9 gave evidence of more wire debris and surface run-off in the trench; Phase 10 saw the more gradual slumping of the trench sides and accumulation of run-off sediment; Phase 11 revealed evidence of debris collected from the surrounding area being thrown into the trench; Phase 12 saw garden soil spread across the site; and Phase 13 revealed the non-scientific excavation and movement of excavated soil undertaken by the Khaki Chums in 1996.
In other words, the Ocean Villas Project had created the first life story of a Great War trench, from its wartime origins in 1915 to its investigation by amateur diggers in 1996, and has thus contributed significantly to the development of a specific methodology for the archaeology of the war.
In the wake of these investigations, the trench was consolidated and reconstructed so as to realise the original aim of creating an interpretative feature for visitors to the Ocean Villas tearooms. It is significant, also, that this work allows visitors to glimpse and understand a Great War site that is out of the ordinary, that is not a front-line battle scene, or a cemetery, but rather an everyday feature of soldier life, in a place so ordinary that it receives only a passing comment in the written sources of Great War military history. As Jon Price remarked, ‘By approaching the excavation with the intention of delivering a product, rather than simply pursuing a research agenda, we have optimised the contextual synergy of the site, and have gone some way to establish the footings of a new and distinctively First World War kind of archaeological methodology’ (Price 2004: 188).
During the excavations at Auchonvillers, the excavation team formally became No Man’s Land, a group of professionals dedicated to bringing their own different specialisms to investigating First World War sites. It was as No Man’s Land that they were called upon to excavate several other Great War locations, one of which highglighted another distinctive feature of Great War archaeology – the investigation of sites associated with famous personalities from the war. While such a personalised agenda recalls John Laffin’s typically 1980s call for battlefield archaeologists to dig in search of Victoria Cross winners, the results of digging First World War sites often bears little relation to the original intention.
Arguably the second most famous example of this kind of Great War archaeology in France (after the Alain-Fournier excavation) was also an example of the previously mentioned television archaeology of the war, where a television company set the agenda and funded the research. In this instance, No Man’s Land were contracted by the BBC to investigate German trenches near Serre on the northern Somme battlefield that were captured and occupied by the British soldier and poet Wilfred Owen and his men in January 1917 (Brown 2005, 2009). Owen’s patrol endured a heavy artillery barrage while in the trenches, and one of the soldiers was blinded – an event that inspired Owen’s war poem ‘The Sentry’. These events evidently appealed to the BBC, and instead of a straightforward programme on Owen and military history (as may have been the case just a few years previously), they decided to incorporate archaeology into the project.
No Man’s Land excavated two trench sections at Serre, one of which had been filled in with chalk and other material (possibly as a result of German mine detonations designed to disrupt British attacks in 1916), and the second of which showed evidence of trench fighting, such as the empty magazines from a British Lewis machine gun, and a barricade known as a chevaux-de-frise (Brown 2005: 25–33). During the course of this main excavation, they also briefly investigated a nearby concrete observation post, the rear door to which preserved the impressions of hessian-weave sandbags, presumably laid there while the concrete was still soft. It may date to early 1918, a year or so later than the event that was the primary focus of the investigation.
The excavations of the Wilfred Owen dig recovered three skeletons, two German and one British. Both Germans have been identified, but the British soldier is still unknown. The recovery of his brass shoulder-titles indicated that he belonged to the King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment, whose 1st Battalion had taken part in a British attack on the German salient at Serre known as the Heidenkopf on 1 July 1916 (the first day of the Battle of the Somme). He seems to have been killed by a shell burst, as numerous shell fragments were found in and around the skeleton, and his upper right arm had been shattered.
As he was discovered associated with chalk debris of the German mine explosion, and as some personal effects may have been missing and there was no trace of an identity disc, it is possible that his body was subsequently searched or looted, and these items removed. The position of the body also suggested that he may have been given a temporary battlefield burial, though the presence of rat burrows in the body itself indicates that, deliberate or not, the burial was not deep.
The personal effects that were recovered included a leather purse in which French and English coins were found, and, interestingly, a penny from Jersey (Channel Islands) that may relate in some way to the fact that the 1st Battalion were stationed there before the war. The penny was dated either 1913 or 1915, and the battalion had left Jersey in 1911, evidence that might suggest that the soldier was a native Jersey islander. Whatever the truth, he was reburied in nearby Serre Military Cemetery Number 2 by the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment, successors to the King’s Own.
As for the two German soldiers, ‘skeleton 1’ had been wearing (or perhaps was hastily wrapped in) a rain cape, and his ammunition pouches were full – furthermore, one pouch was open, evidently ready for immediate use. Several personal effects were also discovered, including a piece of a mirror, a manicure set and a comb – finds that suggested to Martin Brown, one of the excavators, that his personal appearance was one way of keeping hold of his humanity in the filth and chaos of the trenches.
The No Man’s Land archaeologists also found a damaged identity disc, which, despite its corrosion, yielded a partial inscription that revealed he was number 2 on the company roll of 7 Kompanie. As 7 Kompanie of 121 Reserve Infanterie Regiment were at Serre between 10 and 13 June 1915, it is possible that he had been killed during the well-documented heavy fighting with the French at this time. As was often the case in the First World War, soldiers evidently felt the need to add some personal identification to their otherwise dehumanising military numbers, and scratched their names on the reverse of their identity discs.
Although heavily corroded, this man’s disc retained a partly damaged engraving that read ‘Mun …’ on the top line, ‘Hines’ on the second, and ‘Jak …’ on the third. Other items gave a context to this fragmentary inscription. The cuff buttons were of a Swedish style worn by some Württemberg infantry regiments, of which one, the 26 Reserve Division, was in the Serre area between March 1915 and November 1916. In this division, only the 121 Reserve Infanterie Regiment wore these distinctive cuff buttons.
Historical documents then came into play, and a search of regimental casualty lists for June 1915 showed that one Jakob Hönes, a labourer in a brickworks near Stuttgart whose family had fallen on hard times, had been lost in action. It seems as if the ‘I’ on his damaged identity disc was really an ‘Ö’. The Hönes family, which included Jakob’s only surviving son, was still living in the Stuttgart area, and, almost ninety years after Jakob died at Serre, he was reunited with his family, and buried in the German military cemetery near Metz (Brown 2009; Fraser 2004).
The second German soldier, known as ‘skeleton 3’, had also received no obvious burial, and he too still carried personal effects – a pocket watch, harmonica, penknife, razor and pipe, along with a bankbook from Halberstadt, in Sachsen Anhalt, eastern Germany. The presence of blowfly casts in the remains suggests that he also possessed perishable foods eaten by maggots, although such a discovery is also gruesomely typical of the decay of human soft-body tissue. Interestingly, he carried a prehistoric flint scraper of local Picardy flint, maybe found during his time in the trenches, and perhaps, as in other documented examples, suggesting an educated interest in the past. This artefact is also an indication, as we have seen in Chapter 1, that Great War archaeology involves a curious mixing of the oldest and newest kinds of material culture. Such discoveries reveal the intimate relationship between men and landscape that characterised the First World War, and led some individuals, evidently from both sides, to collect ancient archaeological objects which in turn became part of the modern archaeology of the war.
While no identity disc was found, archaeological and archival evidence indicates that skeleton 3 may belong to Albert Thielicke, an NCO in 7 Kompanie, 121 Reserve Infanterie Regiment (the same as Jakob Hönes), and who was killed in action on 11 June 1915. The NCO’s buttons and other elements of the uniform can be connected only with one person in either 121 or 119 regiments known to have been in the area at the right time, and who had any association with Halberstadt. Thielecke’s profession as an interior decorator, and his possession of a pocket watch, suggest that he may have been the kind of person who had a bank account. Whether or not this identification is correct, the circumstantial evidence convinced the German War Graves organisation – the VDK – that the body was Thielecke’s, and this is the name on the headstone of his grave in the military cemetery at Metz (Brown 2009).
The cases of Jakob Hönes and Albert Thielicke demonstrated the uniqueness of Great War archaeology when conducted by professionals, upon whom, of course, there is a moral responsibility not encountered in, say, prehistoric and medieval archaeology. Painstaking attention to archaeological procedures and the smallest physical details was combined with expert military history research to achieve what was in effect an anthropological goal – the study of what it is that makes us human. Through the power of Great War objects, Jakob and Albert had been reclaimed from the list of the German ‘missing’ on the Somme, both were now recognisable men as well as numbers, and, most satisfying of all, in Jakob’s case, he had been reunited with his son and family, bringing closure to everyone after almost a century.
The No Man’s Land investigations at Serre were originally designed (and funded) to explore the war landscape of Wilfred Owen, but they found no trace of him. Instead, the project developed in a quite different way, and demonstrated the power of Great War archaeology to reconstitute men’s humanity and identity through the objects associated with them, and to lift them for ever above the fields of ‘the missing’. By searching for traces of a world-famous British war poet, three other ‘unknown’ men were reclaimed from the battlefields, and reburied in what amounted to acts of individual remembrance. Two of these men – the German soldiers – were reunited with their names (and in one case with his family) after almost ninety years. Few kinds of archaeology can match such a poignant and many-layered conclusion to their investigations.
While the excavations at Serre revealed no trace of Wilfred Owen, the idea of at least some instances of Great War archaeology being driven by associations with famous personalities will probably never lose its attraction. The First World War is not only a momentous period in world history, but seems full of iconic figures as well. While most of these individuals are understandably European, one stands out as a true American hero – now entwined in the developing archaeology of the war.
Sergeant Alvin C. York was a hillbilly from Tennessee, a troublemaker who had unsuccessfully made every effort to avoid being drafted in 1917, when the United States declared war on Germany. To everyone’s surprise, York proved to be an excellent shot, and became a sharpshooter for G Company of the 328th Infantry Regiment, 82nd Division. He decided to fight in France rather than become a firearms instructor, and, on 8 October 1918, he advanced with sixteen men into an attack on German positions near Chatel-Chehery. After an initial skirmish, York silenced a German machine gun singlehanded, killed six charging Germans with only his service pistol, whereupon the surviving Germans surrendered. York and seven comrades then marched the 132 German prisoners back to their own lines. York became a hero, and was later awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. He was immortalised by Gary Cooper in the 1941 Hollywood film Sergeant York.
In March 2006, despite the passage of almost ninety years, a team of military historians and a geographer announced that they had discovered the location of York’s action. They said they had used a combination of trench maps, archival documents, Global Positioning System (GPS) and Geographical Information System (GIS) computer software to locate the spot, and had then verifed this on the ground by digging up spent bullet cases. While such evidence might be thought to be far from conclusive on a munitions-drenched Great War battlefield, more detailed investigations are planned, and final assessment awaits scholarly publication and scrutiny. It is interesting for ways in which different kinds of organisations can become involved with Great War archaeology that the expedition was supported and organised by a British battlefield tour company.
What emerges from many of these investigations is that Great War archaeology is more than the application of archaeological techniques to the battlefields of 1914–18 – it is fundamentally also about memory and commemoration, public participation and education, and tourism, in a far more complex and intimate way than more traditional kinds of archaeology. This aspect, albeit on a larger and more recognisably archaeological scale than the case of Sergeant York, has been highlighted by excavations of part of the battlefield associated with the opening of the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916.
Thiepval Wood, north of Albert, saw fierce fighting and terrible losses during the early stages of the Somme battle. From their trenches in the wood, the 36th Ulster Division attacked heavily defended German positions on 1 July, suffering around 5,000 fatalities altogether on the Somme battlefield. The 52-hectare wood had been owned by the same French family for more than a century, and was left virtually untouched since 1918, used to hunt wild boar and deer. In 2004, it was bought for £400,000 by the Somme Association – an organisation formed to commemorate the role of Ireland in the First World War.
An important aspect of the Somme Association’s preparations for commemorating the 90th anniversary of the start of the Somme battle in 2006 was to commission a small excavation (and subsequent reconstruction) of part of the front-line trenches. No Man’s Land archaeologists and soldiers from the Royal Irish Regiment found unexploded artillery shells, grenades, shaving equipment, bully-beef tins, and even a chocolate tin that had come from the cacao-growing Caribbean island of Trinidad. Evidence of the original construction and repair of trenches was used in the eventual reconstruction of the trenches as part of a guided battlefield walk for visitors (Kenyon 2005; Robertshaw and Kenyon 2008: 23).
One especially valuable aspect of modern Great War archaeology is its role in shedding light on common myths that have grown up about the war in general, and the Battle of the Somme in particular. At Thiepval, one famous example concerns Rifleman William McFadzean of 14th Battalion, Royal Irish Rifles, who selflessly sacrificed his own life to save his comrades by throwing himself on top of two grenades (ibid.: 38) (Kenyon 2005; Robertshaw and Kenyon 2008: 159). The spot where this has long believed to have occurred is marked by three metal crosses, though in fact McFadzean’s grave lies elsewhere in an as yet undiscovered location.
The Thiepval excavations are a truly cooperative venture – a community archaeology project, linked not only to Great War military history, but also to a wider network of related sites across the Somme battlezone, such as the nearby Ulster Tower, the newly opened Thiepval Visitor Centre, the Lochnagar Crater, the ‘Somme 1916 Museum’ at Albert, and the major museum of the area, the Historial de la Grande Guerre, at Péronne. Great War archaeology on the Somme is, as these varied developments illustrate, a complex and constantly evolving undertaking that raises (and cuts across) many different kinds of personal, political, economic, historical and ethical issues, and doubtless will continue to do so in the future (Saunders 2002b).
Great War archaeology in France is nothing if not diverse, and, in this sense, reflects the increasingly wide definition of modern archaeology across the world. One of the most intriguing, if as yet undeveloped, kinds of archaeological investigation of the war concerns the underground caves and galleries carved into the limestone countryside of northern France. These caves are found in and around the city of Arras, and to the east, in the open country of the departments of the Aisne and Oise, at places that were once part of the front-line areas between 1914 and 1918.
Only a few of these sites have been investigated by archaeologists, and of the majority that have not, the best documented are known through work of Great War enthusiasts, military and cultural historians, and the landowners on whose property they are located. Similarly, although known mainly from wartime photographs and magazine articles, there are isolated outcrops, such as an exposed chalk cliff at Aveluy on the Somme. Here, a melange of images was carved probably by French soldiers before 1916, and included a reclining naked woman, the embodiment of patriotic French womanhood represented as the head of Marianne, a soldier firing his rifle, and caricature heads of poilus (French soldiers; Jones and Howells 1972: 54). Cave sites and large open-air examples of chalk carvings can, of course, be seen as monumental kinds of trench art, but, as a distinctive kind of Great War material culture, they also invite formal archaeological survey, excavation and intepretation.
Arras, situated to the north of the Somme battlefield, has a medieval secret. Unknown to the Allied armies of 1914 and 1915, the city had been riddled with underground quarries during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to obtain limestone as building material. Some of these long-forgotten caverns were huge, covering hundreds of metres in area, and sometimes up to 15 metres high, with giant limestone pillars left in place to support the roofs. This subterranean landscape has been memorably likened to a giant Gruyère cheese. A few of the smaller caverns to the south of the city were used by the French 33rd Infantry Division whose soldiers left their marks inscribed on the subterranean walls in 1914 and 1915, but the rest, it seems, had long since slipped from memory.
It was not until September 1916 that the true extent of Arras’s underground city was realised, when officers of the New Zealand Tunnelling Company discovered a subterranean quarry that was part of a network of similar structures underlying the city’s eastern suburbs of Ronville and Saint-Saveur (Girardet et al. 2003: 63–76). The New Zealanders’ original purpose was to dig tunnels for mine warfare, but this was soon abandoned, and instead the cave systems were explored and adapted to shelter troops for the big Allied attack scheduled for April 1917 (the Battle of Arras).
The tunnellers had to learn to avoid areas where the limestone had vertical fissures that could lead to a roof collapse, and concentrate instead on locations with more stable horizontal stata. As they discovered and extended ever more caves, the New Zealanders gave them names from their homeland – such as Wellington, Auckland, Christchurch, Dunedin and Bluff. They also took over the enlargement of quarries and the digging of connecting tunnels first started by the British, which had been given names such as London, Manchester, Glasgow, Carlisle and Jersey. The main connecting tunnels had names such as Godley Avenue and King’s Avenue.
The city’s medieval quarries were first linked together by tunnels, and then extended out towards the German front lines. Electric lights were installed, telephone cables laid, and a narrow-gauge railway line put in. In early 1917, another large cave was discovered, and christened Blenheim. It became the headquarters of the 7th Shropshire Light Infantry, and was fully equipped with kitchens, toilets and medical facilities. Such was the disorienting vastness of this whole new underground world that the military authorities painted signs on the limestone to direct troops from one place to another, and the soldiers themselves carved inscriptions and left pencil graffiti on the walls. Beneath the city’s central Grand Place, ancient limestone cellars were also connected (to each other and the wider network), and given their own water supply, toilets, cooking areas and medical quarters. Altogether, the whole subterranean landscape of Arras housed more than 24,000 troops on the eve of the Battle of Arras.
This vast system of subterranean tunnels, galleries and caverns – extending over 22 kilometres – was a testament to the skills and efforts of the men who explored, enlarged and extended them into a single huge interconnected network. After the war, they were not totally forgotten, and served to shelter the civilian population of Arras during the Second World War. After 1945 they mainly faded from public consciousness. However, this was not to be another centuries-long abandonment, as military records, plans, maps and diaries recorded the existence, location and use of the caverns, particularly in the run-up to the Battle of Arras. This historical fact combined with two other important developments to revitalise interest in the underground city. The rise of battlefield tourism from the 1960s onward saw visitors to Arras curious to inspect the small section of cellars open to the public beneath the hôtel de ville (town hall), and, from the 1990s especially, professional interest in the whole network of caves and tunnels was led by the city’s own municipal archaeological service, and its chief archaeologist Alain Jacques.
Archaeological investigations of Great War heritage on the outskirts of Arras had already occurred (usually as rescue operations in advance of motorways and industrial estates) at such places as Actiparc (Le Point du Jour), Monchy-le-Preux and Gavrelle. Now, as at Auchonvillers, rising numbers of tourists were driving ever more commercially viable investigations into, and reconstructions of, Great War heritage. At Arras, one result of this was the archaeological investigation of the city’s extensive underground caverns, known locally as ‘les boves’.
Survey and prospection of many caves was undertaken by Alain Jacques and his colleagues, and produced, for example, a detailed map of all the caverns and tunnels in relation to the Allied and German front lines between 1916 and 1918. One such map showed the layout of Blenheim Cave, with its natural support pillars, and the locations of toilets, battalion headquarters, kitchen areas and medical quarters, access and exit points, and connecting tunnels to Nelson and Christchurch caves (Girardet et al. 2003: 69).
A photographic record of the caverns was also made, of both official and unofficial ‘wall art’. Signs painted in black (and sometimes red), such as ‘M.O. AND SICK’, ‘OFFs LATRINE’ and ‘To NELSON WELLINGTON’ authorised by the military authorities were recorded, as were examples of soldiers’ trench art, including pencil portraits of women, a mammoth (possibly elephant), and several small three-dimensional sculptures of human faces, one of which, uniquely, appears to be identified, as the name ‘W. Thompson’ is nearby. There are also several small crosses carved into the limestone, possibly as miniature altars – one has a rifle bullet still lodged on a ledge below it. The international nature of this aspect of French Great War heritage is vividly shown by the miniature carvings and inscriptions left by New Zealand Maoris, such as one that reads ‘No. 20680 Toi. Karinini MANGATUNA Tologo Bay N.Z.’ (Girardet et al. 2003: 67). What the Maoris, with their own traditional spiritual beliefs and worldview, thought about living in such a place is not recorded.
When first explored, the caves also yielded a wealth of everyday debris from their last soldier inhabitants of 1918. Cooking utensils, water bottles and cutlery lay rusted by the years, abandoned on the floors, alongside miscellaneous military equipment and the remains of telephone wires and electrical fittings. In Wellington Cave, high up in a niche of the limestone wall, were found two corroded coins (one French, the other British), which perhaps suggested that this was a kind of votive offering. The scientific investigation of these caves highlighted the information that could be gained from treating vestiges of the First World War as archaeological heritage – the latest use of what was, until 1916, a forgotten legacy of medieval town history. Equally important was the educational and commercial potential for opening up some of these sites to visitors. A project to open Wellington Cave as a kind of ‘living museum’ is under way, with a visitor centre, elevator and guided tours planned.
While Arras’s underground Great War heritage has benefited from professional archaeological investigations, the same cannot yet be said for other subterranean vestiges of the war. At various locations around the Somme battlefield, but especially east of Arras, there is a similar array of caves, galleries, tunnels, rock shelters, and open-air sites that possess three- and two-dimensional decoration dating to 1914–18. Few, if any, of these places have received the level of archaeological attention that the caves in Arras have enjoyed, although their potential is equally significant. Among the best-known caves of the Aisne and Oise departments are the Carrière de Montigny, at Machemont, and the Carrière de Chauffour at Thiescourt – both in the area of Noyon–Confrécourt, and Bucy-le-Long in the Soissons area, and ‘Dragon’s Cave’ on the infamous ridge of the Chemin des Dames.
These caves have a variety of carved images made by French, German, American and English troops, with such diverse images as portraits of an African Zouave (French colonial soldier), a French Joan of Arc and a Native American, and French cockerels, German and American eagles, and landscape scenes. A systematic survey and archaeological excavation would almost certainly yield new knowledge about even these well-known sites. It is certain also that many cave and tunnel systems remain to be identified and investigated, especially in more distant areas such as the Argonne.
Arguably the best-known and most accessible of these subterranean sites is the system of caves and tunnels at Confrécourt near Soissons (AIPS 1996; Becker 1999; Decock 1996). Carved deep into the local limestone, the caves here were occupied notably by the Zouaves, and part of the cave system served as a hospital. The walls of these galleries preserve a dazzling range of images produced mainly by French soldiers, and including military insignia, patriotic images such as Joan of Arc draped in the tricolour, and Marianne (symbols of the Republic and of French womanhood), patriotic landmarks such as the Arc de Triomphe, caricatures, and various kinds of religious iconography.
The French cultural historian Annette Becker has described a range of what she calls the psycho-sexual images of women, both clothed and naked, and carved in relief as fantasy figures with such titles as The poilus’s dream. Perhaps, as Becker observes, these images represent the soldiers’ need to leave a trace of their presence before a battle (and possible death) – an imprint of their life (Becker 1999: 124–5). In this sense, such artefacts are the definitive material culture of the First World War just as much as decorated artillery-shell cases, souvenirs and the more traditional archaeological traces of the conflict found on the battlefields.
Although professional archaeologists have hardly begun to investigate these caves, the work of the French Palaeolithic cave-art specialist, André Leroi-Gourhan, has been used to interpret them. It has been suggested that there is both order and disorder in the distribution of art in the Confrécourt caves, with profane images from the war (military insignia, caricatures, personal names and women) located in areas nearer to daylight, such as the entrance to ‘la carrière du 1 Zouaves’ (AIPS 1996: 14–15, figure 1), whereas more spiritual and religious imagery is found in the deeper and darker recesses (Decock 1996; Becker 1999: 18). However, the vast gulf in time, culture and context between these two eras, combined with the fact that military imagery appears throughout the cave, make this a rather idealised interpretation.
Far more convincing, and a view that connects the caves and their decoration to the specific conditions of 1914–18, is Becker’s observation that the omnipresent names of individual soldiers, their regiments, armies, corps and commanders, seems focused on establishing a sense of identity and belonging, of presence and comradeship in the chaos of war (Becker 1999: 122–3). The frequency of personal and military names and numbers in this subterranean landscape contrasts with their absence on most other kinds of Great War material culture. Trench-art objects are only rarely signed, and soldiers’ remains retrieved from battlefields are often impossible to identify. For Great War archaeologists, Confrécourt (and many other similar caves) is that rare thing – an archaeological landscape full of personal names and identifying inscriptions. Such places are a curious reversal of the official memorial landscapes of war cemeteries, where the bodies lie beneath, and the name above. At Confrécourt and elsewhere, the names are below, and the (often nameless) bodies somewhere above.
The underground limestone galleries of the area around Soissons and Noyon are also fertile ground for investigations that could be termed the archaeology of religion, not least because some had begun life as quarries for building materials to construct the medieval cathedrals and churches which dot the landscape of the departments of the Aisne and Oise. Archaeologically speaking, such locations were already places of deep time and ancient culture long before the First World War.
Appropriately (and ironically), the limestone that had been left behind in medieval times was itself now transformed into a new kind of religious architecture. Large three-dimensional altars were painstakingly cut into the limestone, and offered the (mainly French Catholic) soldiers a final spiritual moment before they shuffled up to the surface and into the trenches. The religious imagery of the altars is flanked by military insignia, regimental badges and numbers, and battle honours, as well with uplifting patriotic inscriptions such as ‘Vive Le Christ Qui Aime Les Francs’ in the cave at Pierre (Becker 1999: 120–1; 1996: 57), and ‘Dieu Protège La France’ in the so-called ‘Chapel of Father Doncoeur’ at Confrécourt (AIPS 1996: 14–15, figure 2). What the African Zouaves, with their animistic and shamanistic religion, thought of such religious expressions – or indeed of their primordial life under ground – is not recorded, but perhaps might yield to archaeological and anthropological investigation.
A unique example of subterranean soldier-life in limestone caverns occurred at the ‘Dragon’s Cave’ (Drachenhöle) on the bloody battleground of the Chemin des Dames. Here, almost unbelievably, the front line was extended and organised by mutual consent between the French and Germans among the underground quarries and galleries that had been used since medieval times. The walls of these linked caves have three- and two-dimensional images created by both sides during their long troglodyte conflict.
Material traces of the war in caves are also seen at the site of Les Cinq Piliers near Dreslincourt. The quarry and cave system was occupied by the Germans between 1914 and 1917, and was then taken by the French. There is a fascinating mix of imagery at this site, ranging from a monumental landscape scene painted directly onto a prepared chalk surface, a giant Imperial Prussian eagle sculpted onto a cliff face and (still today) painted red, and a smaller-scale but similarly three-dimensional multicoloured Gallic cockerel (Bonnard and Guénoff 1999: 15, 17, 31). This large site, part of which is open air, is a natural choice for a detailed archaeological survey and excavation.
Great War archaeology has not yet grasped the opportunities for research available in such unusual and challenging locations, despite modern archaeology’s concern with nationality, ethnicity, religious belief, art, and the creation and organisation of living space – all of which are brought together at such places. Ironically, while subterranean wall carvings, sculptures and graffiti are fixed (though they could, of course, be removed), and never had a commercial value – as did so many other kinds of trench art – they are an unusual and visual (international) feature of France’s Great War heritage, which will attract paying visitors in ever-greater numbers in years to come as they inevitably become integrated into battlefield tour itineraries.
Great War archaeology in France, while still in an early stage of development, has made many significant advances over the past two decades, due mainly to the expertise, professionalism and personal interest of the French archaeologists Alain Jacques, Yves Desfossés and Gilles Prilaux, and the British No Man’s Land group. Unlike in Belgium (see Chapter 5), official involvement with the physical remains of the First World War has been an integral part of French professional archaeology for many years, and so there has been less incentive to incorporate foreign specialists or institutions into French excavations – although foreign projects, such as those at Auchonvillers, Newfoundland Memorial Park, Serre and Thiepval Wood, have coexisted.
In France, as in Belgium, however, Great War archaeology has only a nominal presence in the world of academic archaeology, although this will surely change as modern archaeology embraces the idea that Great War heritage is but one of ‘the archaeologies of the contemporary past’. The approaching centenary of the start of the First World War in 2014 will surely stimulate public awareness of and interest in Great War heritage for a generation to whom the idea that the war is too recent for archaeology will itself be an anachronism.
Most Great War archaeology in France has taken the form of ‘preventive’ or ‘rescue’ excavations in advance of motorways, urban development, the building of industrial estates, and sometimes accidental discoveries that required professional attention. In many cases, also, Great War remnants have been found associated with prehistoric and/or Gallo-Roman remains, a fact that further required French archaeologists to investigate this overlapping or intrusive war heritage. By contrast, for example, the work of No Man’s Land has been more proactively focused on sites yielding only Great War remains. By accident or design, the remains of the First World War have been regarded as part of France’s wider archaeological heritage for far longer than has been the case in Belgium.
What emerges from the French experience of excavating Great War remains is, as in Belgium more recently, a realisation that modern archaeology can uncover and interpret a different view of a war hitherto known mainly from the historical sources of military history. Excavation – being down in the same soil as the soldiers of 1914–18 – gives a feel for the land, and the experiences of the men who fought in it. Subtle changes in soil colour, evidence of the recutting and repair of trenches, the identification of overlapping bomb craters, retrieving a man’s identity from limbo through discovering his personal effects, and the discovery of concentrations of industrialised war debris – all yield a sense of the war that is impossible to gain from written documents alone.
Excavating Great War sites is an experience that deeply affects the body and mind of the excavator, rather than engaging the intellect alone. And it is also an experience that can, when interpreted and presented with sensitivity and accuracy, connect directly to present generations who perhaps react more readily to objects than printed words. Having said this, the wealth of historical documents on the war, and the skill of military historians in interpreting this material, means that Great War archaeology has to be a truly interdisciplinary endeavour. Both archaeology and military history can inform, test and correct the assumptions and interpretations of each other.
On the vast rolling landscapes of France’s Great War battlefields, archaeology connects the ancient and recent pasts through the proximity of, for example, a Bronze Age enclosure, an Iron Age Gallic tomb and a First World War communal burial. Finding bodies and, more poignantly, dreadfully shattered pieces of bodies not only has an emotional force for excavator and audience, but also reveals the intensity and scale of the war at the most intimate level. Unlike the Ypres Salient in Belgium, French battlefields are vast, yet bodies are everywhere. And they are recent ancestors, not long-forgotten prehistoric forebears. Great War archaeology in France embraces landscape in a distinctive way – in depth and in breadth – testing assumptions, finding new truths, and breathing a different kind of life over the bones of the dead.