The Unknown Warrior (35 page)

Medical treatment and immediate first aid was available to troops. In the British Army, members of the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) frequently risked their lives to help wounded soldiers. In the history of the highest gallantry award available to the British soldier, the Victoria Cross, only three soldiers have been awarded it twice. Their acts of bravery have meant that two of these men belonged to the RAMC (Laffin, 2003: 212). Infantry casualties could be removed from the field of battle by medical orderlies and then treated in hospitals behind the lines prior to their rejoining their units or being taken to one of the many military hospitals in Britain, if they had not died of their wounds. This is not to say that medical treatment was immediately available at all times; there are countless anecdotes of soldiers being stranded for very long periods in no man's land following a failed offensive, their screams pervading the night. At times the belligerent parties observed local ceasefires so that an army could retrieve its dead and wounded after such an attack (see, e.g., Graves, 1960: 134).

Biological anthropological studies of the remains of the French individuals excavated from the mass grave at Saint-Rémy-la-Calonne have revealed interesting facts about the general health of the troops – although the set of twenty-one soldiers is, perhaps, too small to draw any overall conclusions about health in the French army as a whole. Duday (1999: 103) noted some interesting features among the fallen of the 288th Infantry Regiment. In one sample, he commented, it was perhaps unsurprising to see degenerative conditions such as arthritis. What was more interesting was that, in a scene reminiscent of the French troops some hundred years before at Vilnius, one of the individuals (number 17) had suffered an injury some time prior to death that would have made a life of marching in an infantry regiment most awkward. The man's right leg, at its joint with the ankle, showed signs of a double fracture, a wound that had reshaped the limb when reset.

With the majority of soldiers in the grave wearing identity discs it was possible to detect a hierarchy of burial with differentiation between the officers and the men (see Memorials and Burials, page 205). Boura (1999: 81) also noted a discrepancy in the height of the two groups:

There is a marked contrast in the stature of the officers and rankers in the mass grave at Saint-Rémy. The latter ranged between 1.54m and 1.68m (5ft 1in–5ft 7in) in height, the average being 1.60m (5ft 4in), whilst the officers were 1.7m (5ft 8in), 1.75m (5ft 10in) and 1.88m (6ft 3in) tall. The infantrymen were from Gers and, for the most part, were artisans and farmers. Their skeletons had traces of a physical lifestyle with healed fractures and initial stages of arthritis – the general state of the teeth was also poor.

This study is among the first to differentiate between officers and other ranks, allowing archaeologists to discern important differences between the medical health of the two. Had years of poorer diet restricted the growth of the men?

THE PRISONER

Soldier Fahlenstein of the 34th Fusiliers recorded in his diary that orders were carried out on 28 August 1914 to kill wounded French prisoners. At around the same time NCO Göttsche of the 85th Infantry Regiment was told by his captain near the fort of Kessel, near Antwerp, that no English prisoners were to be taken. According to the diary of a German doctor, French wounded were bayoneted to death by a company of German sappers on 31 August. A Silesian newspaper even reported (under the heading ‘A Day of Honour for our Regiment') that French prisoners were finished off in late September.

(Ferguson, 1998: 373; see also Holmes, 1999: 178–9, on the

killing of prisoners)

The option of being made a prisoner, even when wounded, was not always open to the defeated infantryman. There were times when, following capture, there remained the possibility of being killed behind the lines. This was thought to have been the case with the incidents surrounding one of the most comprehensively excavated First World War sites. On 21 September 1914, twenty-one soldiers of the French 288th Infantry Regiment of Mirande (Gers) disappeared in a wood at Saint-Rémy-la-Calonne (see page 199). For some time it had been suggested that they had been executed by the German army – a war crime. About seventy years later the burial pit, measuring 5.2m by 2.6m, was excavated by the Lorraine archaeology service and a different story emerged. From the pathology, it was clear that wounds were random with impacts coming from several directions and at different angles and, although it was impossible to rule out the possibility that some of the wounds were of a
coups-de-grâce
nature, it seems more likely that the group was simply surrounded and eliminated (Adam, 1999: 35).

Information on prisoner-of-war camps is scarce. Although images of prisoners can be seen on postcards of the time, much of the documentary information relating to captives both in Britain and in Germany was destroyed during the Second World War. Furthermore, archaeological information about

the camps is sparse.

First World War prisoners, like their Napoleonic and Boer War predecessors, engaged in trench art (see pages 163 and 195) with the manufacture of small artefacts. They made these to sell, as well as to alleviate boredom. As Saunders (2003: 42) said: ‘In prisoner-of-war camps, trench-art objects were made primarily of wood, bone and textiles. The scrap metals associated with battlefields were not generally available, though bully-beef tins could substitute on many occasions, and occasionally brass and copper were available.' Snakes were made using beadwork and bearing legends such as ‘Turkish Prisoner 1915' (
ibid.
, 42; see also fig. 7.6).

An account of this type of work appeared in the
Leigh Chronicle
on Friday 26 February 1915, in which the fascinated correspondent wrote of a

huge shoulder-blade of a cow [that] is a work of great skill and penmanship. On one side are about sixteen four line verses, written in a legal hand, the coat-of-arms and flag of the Brandenburg Regiment, laurel wreaths denoting the battles the author has taken part in and at the bottom the words in German, ‘The English are very brave, but nothing to be frightened of.' On the back are the names and regiments of the prisoner's friends who have fallen in battle. (L. Smith, 1986: 40).

As with the above example, some of this art is particularly illuminating in terms of illustrating the names of German prisoners, their units, dates and places of internment on a single item. One example of a carved bone was illustrated with an epaulette and the unit number 57, as well as the inscription
‘Heinz Cremer Erinnerung An Meine Kriegsgefangenschaft'
, followed by crossed flags, the date of 1915 and the camp name of ‘Stobs' (Saunders, 2003: 117). Stobs held more than 5,000 German prisoners in 200 huts. The prisoners formed their own orchestra and ran a camp newspaper entitled
Stobsiade
. Little survives of the camp, although the remains of a cairn built to hold the bodies of two inmates who committed suicide are still visible. The bodies of the deceased were moved to Cannock Chase in Staffordshire where the 2,143 German prisoners of war who died in Britain are buried.

Non-commissioned prisoners could be made to work during their confinement on tasks that often required physical labour. German prisoners, for example, were used to reconstruct the Arras to Lens railway line between the armistice on 11 November 1918 and the peace treaty of 1919. Alain Jacques has excavated one of the gang's workshops and recovered the remains of a veritable craft industry. The soldiers had spent time fashioning shell cases and similar materials into matchbox covers, belt buckles and paper knives (Briet, 2002: 20).

Another pastime that is virtually untraceable archaeologically, but was popular in the prison camps of both the Allies and the Central Powers, was football. An account in the
Leigh Chronicle
, Friday 26 February 1915, stated:

A football correspondent in jocular mood writes that as he notices the prisoners of war are always playing football in the compounds at the camp he is hoping to raise a team of ‘coalers' to play on the Mather-lane ground for the benefit of the Belgian Fund against a team of Germans. There must be no rules, referee or linesmen, and the team that comes off the playing pitch alive wins. There would be a bumper gate, he adds. (L. Smith, 1986: 42).

There are several written accounts of prisoner escapes from camps in the First World War (see, e.g., Warin, 1989, for British attempts, and L. Smith, 1986: 47, for a German version), but the limited amount of fieldwork related to such sites means that our archaeological evidence for these attempts is small. However, splendid photographs exist of failed escape tunnels at the prisoner-of-war camp at Holzminden, discovered and dug out in 1918 (Photo ID Number: Q 69484 6008-01 Imperial War Museum), and at Clausthal (Photo ID Number: Q 115193 8508-26 Imperial War Museum) in Germany.

In terms of imprisonment, it was not simply captured opponents that were interned; soldiers could be incarcerated by their own side for various breaches of military code, the ultimate sanction being execution by firing squad. In the Belgian town of Poperinge several British soldiers were shot for desertion, after having been imprisoned in one of four small cells in the town on the night before their execution. Conservation work to the walls of these cells has revealed graffiti scrawled by men held within during the First World War, often for smaller offences than those for which a capital sentence was handed down. Soldiers' names, verses, pictorial representations, and even downright salacious inscriptions were found. The miscreants of various nations are represented in these carvings and drawings, including doodles of an American soldier bayoneting a German soldier (somewhat erroneously wearing a
Pickelhaube
given the date of 1918, by which time German infantry were equipped with the familiar steel helmet) and a German officer (the Kaiser?), and an image of the Australian slouch hat. Names covering the walls include 609234 W. Finlay from ‘Durham, South Shields', who was locked up for being ‘27 days Absent without Leave-Court Martial'. These writings are some of the best traces we can find archaeologically for a form of imprisonment in the First World War.

MEMORIALS AND BURIALS

Memorials to events in the First World War are to be found throughout the Western Front, both to regiments and to the individual soldiers themselves. Cities, towns and villages of the belligerent nations commemorated their own dead and rare was the place that did not have anyone to mourn. This was not the first war to see the common soldier remembered – indeed there were monuments to the fallen in the Boer War (see
Chapter 6
); however, this war, wherever possible, buried its dead together. Rows of white Portland stone headstones rising from the ground like so many teeth from a vast skull are to be found in Commonwealth cemeteries, while the French used simple plastic crosses and the Germans adapted their cemeteries to the landscape in which they were sited.

Holyoak (2004: 13) points out that attitudes to burial differed between the countries:

despite families' entreaties, the [British] empire's dead were left where they were, for reasons of cost and equality. Repatriating only identified remains, it was argued, would discriminate against the families of the hundreds of thousands in graves marked only ‘known unto God' or listed as missing … It was different elsewhere. In 1920 the French government caved in to pressure and allowed relatives to reclaim their war dead, at state expense. Within two years, in a remarkable exercise in logistics, some 300,000 fallen had been exhumed and returned to their home towns.

Most poignant of all are the memorials to those men who were either unidentifiable at the time of burial, or were simply never recovered. The names of the latter are generally recorded on the walls of cemeteries or huge monuments, such as the Menin Gate (Ypres), Thiepval (Somme), Le Mont-Kemmel (French) and Langemark (German; see Plate 28) in the Ypres Salient. Bodies that were found, but were unrecognisable, were buried in graves with as much information as possible, ranging from an ‘Unknown Australian Soldier' to a ‘Soldier of the Great War, known unto God'. In Britain's case, wooden battlefield crosses set up to denote the presence of a grave and the man it held were gradually replaced with headstones. Often the crosses were sent back to England, where they can be found in parish churches, such as at the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Hawkesbury, St Leonard's Church, Tortworth, South Gloucestershire, and Bromham Church in Wiltshire. There is even a wooden cross to an unknown soldier in Talbot House, Poperinge.

Some of the cemeteries are vast, such as Tyne Cot in Passchendaele, the largest Commonwealth cemetery. It contains 3,588 burials, and commemorates 34,872 missing servicemen. This graveyard preserved elements of the First World War within its very fabric, forever entwining the causes of the death of the men in their memorial. The large Cross of Sacrifice is built over one of the massive German concrete blockhouses, which is visible through a small gap in the Portland stone. Inscribed upon the cross are the words, ‘This was the Tyne Cot blockhouse captured by the 3rd Australian Division 4th October 1917.' A further blockhouse is also visible within the grounds of the cemetery.

Units and nations are also commemorated, many with statues. As with the Boer War, soldiers are generally depicted in poses of remembrance and mourning and, given the huge loss of life in all armies, there is little triumphalism. Individual, unknown, low-ranking soldiers are often portrayed: an unknown ‘Tommy' striding forward with fixed bayonet and rifle at Flers; an Australian ‘Digger' carrying a wounded comrade back from danger at Fromelles; the French
poilu
at the Butte de Vauqois armed with rifle and grenade, looking towards Verdun. An even more muted representation is to be found at the German Langemark cemetery where four shadowy figures, bronze statues of mourning soldiers – unknown mourners for unknown dead – pay their respects to the mass German grave (see Plate 28). Here, more than 44,000 German dead are remembered, around 25,000 of whom were buried in a Kameraden Grab (Comrade's Grave) for unknown soldiers from all over Flanders. Mourning parents are also represented in the German cemetery at Vladslo, north of Ypres, where a kneeling man and woman are portrayed, sculpted by Käthe Kollwitz whose son Peter is interred in the cemetery.