Ypres battlefield excavations

Archaeologists excavating the route of a planned motorway near Ypres in Belgium have uncovered a series of trenches very little changed from the day they were abandoned at the end of World War I. . .

This is the first time the battlefields of Ypres have been excavated professionally, with a team of Belgian archaeologists working alongside military experts from Britain.

The dig has revealed a network of trenches which were home to thousands of British, Australian, Canadian and Indian soldiers between 1914 and 1918. Excavation workers have filled a ship's container with artefacts from the period which include rifles, rum jars and newspapers. Five bodies still in uniform have also been recovered. . .

But this important historical site is soon to be bulldozed to make way for a motorway. War graves protection groups are campaigning to get the road re-routed but historians warn that there would be nothing gained from changing the building plans. Ypres was such a significant World War I battlefield that the whole area is riddled with trenches and unmarked graves.

I don't doubt that this is true; about the only way one could avoid disturbing the site would be to erect an elevated highway, and even that would require a huge amount of (deeper) excavation. From the BBC.

And a bit more perspective on the scale of the slaughter from Ananova:

Each year around 60 bodies of First World War soldiers of all nationalities are found in the old battlefields, the spokesman went on. "They try to identify them from artefacts," he said. "In 99% of cases it is not possible to identify them. The dog tags they used do not last in the ground". . .

Battlefield expert Peter Barton told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme . . .
"Because the fighting was so intense here over such a long period the whole of this area is one huge cemetery. And there are hundreds of thousands of men still out there under these crops waiting to be found."

Plus an update from The Scotsman:

Archaeologists uncovered the remains of a British soldier on Friday, the seventh serviceman found since excavations began a year ago on Pilkem Ridge where 12,000 died men in one day in 1917 at the start of the third Battle of Ypres.

In the surrounding area of south-west Belgium around 30 bodies are dug up every year, mostly by farmers at ploughing time. “They call it the harvest of bones,” said Peter Francis of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

UPDATE: A writeup in the NY Times on Nov. 23.

Posted by David on November 10, 2003 10:05 AM