The Pompeii of the First World War

The youngest, a boy of 16. The oldest, veterans in their 40s. The remains of 110 WWI soldiers have been found in a Belgian field surrounded by revolvers, HP Sauce bottles – even a harmonica. No wonder archaeologists are calling it . . .

THIS week more than 80 soldiers who perished during the Great War will finally be laid to rest with full military honours close to where they fell on the Western Front.

These burials, i ncluding those of 13 British soldiers who were killed more than a century ago, are the result of one of the most extraordinary archaeological discoveries of modern times.

It is a project that has yielded what the lead archaeologist on the dig describes as ‘ the First World War’s Pompeii’: an unprecedented snapshot of life on the front line from 1914 to 1918.

In fact, this rich historical find would have been lost for ever were it not for the determination of a passionate young Belgian archaeologist and his supporters, who organised a unique crowdfunding project to raise the money needed to carry out the dig on a site in Belgium little bigger than two football pitches.

This is believed to be the first time crowdfunding has been used to pay for a wartime archaeological dig.

In the event, the scale of the discoveries from the ‘Dig Hill 80’ project surpassed even the archaeologists’ wildest expectations: the human remains from an estimated 110 soldiers and thousands of artefacts.

Just days ahead of the burials of most of these servicemen in Belgium on Thursday and Friday, I was given an exclusive insight into the secrets that the dig has yielded from Simon Verdegem, the lead archaeologist on the project.

At his first-floor office on the outskirts of the Flemish city of Bruges, Verdegem pointed to rifles, revolvers, bullets, helmets, uniforms, buttons, belt buckles and other artefacts from the dig, as well as more personal items such as watches, toothbrushes, water bottles, cooking utensils and a harmonica.

Each artefact, or small group of artefacts, has been numbered from 1 to 3,300 by the discovery team.

Verdegem, 36, a father-of-three, even showed me a perfectly preserved HP Sauce glass bottle that had clearly been brought to the front line by a British soldier, perhaps keen to disguise the grim taste of war-time rations.

The original recipe of HP Sauce was invented and developed by Frederick Garton, a grocer from Nottingham, who first registered the name in 1895. He got the initials HP from the Houses of Parliament, where he heard there was a restaurant that had started serving the brown sauce. By the outbreak of the Great War, the product was available countrywide.

VERDEGEM, who specialises in battlefield sites, told me that part of his motivation for wanting to recover t he bodies of fallen soldiers was a moving quote from a German lieutenant who served in the Great War.

The officer had written: ‘The men don’t fear death any more, we have made our peace with the thought of our own demise. A much heavier burden is the fear to be forgotten in foreign soil – an inglorious end for any soldier. Swallowed by the earth, a long way from the Heimat [homeland ], without a sign of remembrance, separated from one’s comrades and the bereaved in the Heimat. Being forgotten – such a fate no one wishes for.’

It is a quote that Verdegem cites whenever critics of archaeologists or the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) say that it is ‘ wrong’ to dig up the remains of Great War soldiers and that they should be left undisturbed in the ground. Verdegem said he was deeply moved by his experiences. ‘ It’s not when you are in the field, then you are in work mode. But driving home I always think of the human cost of war and feel very sad.’

The site that yielded the Dig Hill 80 discoveries is situated on a ridge on the outskirts of the Belgian village of Wytschaete (also spelled Wijtschate): British soldiers, struggling to pronounce it, incorrectly called it ‘Whitesheet’, just as they crudely renamed the Belgian city of Ypres ‘Wipers’ for the same reason. The site first became of interest i n recent times i n the spring of 2015 when developers, who were planning to build 29 new houses, called in Ruben Willaert, the archaeology company that employs Verdegem, to examine the area – a requirement under Belgian law for former frontline locations. Aerial photos taken during the war suggested to Verdegem that the area would be of interest to archaeologists and a process of ‘trial trenching’, which saw a dozen small trenches dug by an excavator, soon discovered the remains of one British and three German soldiers. The way the Germans were lying in a row also suggested they might be part of a mass grave, and the trial also indicated the presence of trench walls and many artefacts. ‘It was an exciting moment,’ Verdegem told me. ‘We realised there was something beneath the ground that was likely to be extraordinary.’

Once he had written up a report on his findings, the government put the building project on ‘hold’, but the planned dig was so substantial that i t was estimated more than £150,000 – and possibly as much as £200,000 – was needed to proceed.

Historian and television presenter Dan Snow and the comedian Al Murray were among those to promote the crowdfunding.

Eventually, €178,000 (£162,000) was raised with hundreds of people from more than 40 countries donating to enable the dig to start in April 2018.

It eventually finished in mid-July last year after 60 days were spent working at the site. Verdegem was present on each of these days, regularly putting in 14-to16-hour shifts.

Five Flemish archaeologists worked with 50 volunteer archaeologists over the two months of the dig, while nearly 100 volunteers, with no expertise, spent up to a week with the professionals. The volunteers, including many Britons, worked with trowels to uncover artefacts but they had to leave human- remains recovery to the experts. Furthermore, if they found suspected weapons or ammunition – particularly hand grenades – they were instructed to alert an explosives expert immediately.

‘Within the first 15 minutes we found a skull and then it went on from there,’ said Verdegem. ‘By the end of the second week, we had 50 l ocations with human remains and that number went up and up. We had one mass grave with 25 Germans and another with ten to 15 Germans. In the end we had 135 locations with human remains and a minimum number of individuals was 110.’

Thousands of photographs and drawings were made of the site so that archaeologists would know the precise location of each human bone or artefact that was discovered. Archaeologists cleaned the bones before handing them to anthropologists and other experts,