Killing Time: Archaeology and the First World War by Nicholas Saunders

Author:Nicholas Saunders [Saunders, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: World War I, World, History, Military
ISBN: 9780752476186
Google: aVY7AwAAQBAJ
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2011-11-08T21:09:47+00:00

THE BEGINNINGS OF ARCHAEOLOGY

The excavations of amateur groups such as The Diggers and ABAF have revealed many kinds of (often startling) information that had not previously been valued or investigated. Their work is not only an integral part of the historical development of Great War archaeology in Belgian Flanders (and therefore important in its own right), but is also significant from the perspective of what they found and where, and how their discoveries contributed to our understanding of the war itself.

The Diggers are a group of Great War enthusiasts and amateur archaeologists with a shifting membership who were formed during the 1980s to investigate the old Ypres Salient battlefields. Their first digs were at Bayernwald (also called Croonaert Wood) near Wijtschate, and Polygon Wood between Hooge and Zonnebeke. During these early years, they also investigated a German bunker beneath the old Ypres–Roulers railway, where they uncovered the remains of six German soldiers.

Their largest and most famous dig began in 1992, near Boezinge, a small town just north of Ypres, in an area marked for an extension to the Yperlee industrial estate along the eastern bank of the Ypres canal. This area had been part of the battlefield that saw the first German gas attack on 22 April 1915, and had been left virtually untouched since 1918. The high water table in this area has led to remarkable preservation of all kinds of material culture, from whole systems of intact trenches to a tin packed with tobacco found on the body of a Royal Welch Fusilier.

One example of how The Diggers’ investigations have contributed to the region’s war heritage is Yorkshire Trench, part of the Boezinge site. The dugout was begun in early 1917 by the 173rd Tunnelling Company of the Royal Engineers, and it served as a headquarters for the 13th and 16th Royal Welch Fusiliers at the start of the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) later that same year.

The Diggers began their work in 1998, and soon revealed a zigzag line of trenches footed with duckboards beneath which were drainage channels. Investigations also uncovered two flights of steps leading down to a cluster of eleven subterranean rooms and connecting galleries. On the surface, they found a wealth of objects relating to the war, including the remains of a Decauville light railway, unexploded artillery shells, bayonets, cartridge belts, telephone cables, coils of barbed wire, rum jars, playing cards, pipes, iodine ampoules (for soldiers’ wounds), the remains of a stretcher, and even an English–French/ French–English dictionary. Although the area is now rebuilt with large warehouses, Yorkshire Trench was reconstructed, and opened as a tourist attraction in 2003, with new sandbag reinforcements and a visitors’ information board, along with an unusual display of British Livens projectors – a primitive form of trench mortar.

Most poignant of all were the human remains that The Diggers found. Between 1992 and 2000, they discovered 155 soldiers across the whole Boezinge site, most of whom were found in No Man’s Land, between the Allied and German trenches.

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