Digging Hill 80 - Sixth Report

The Ypres Salient was known during the Great War for its deep, clinging, foul smelling mud.  Sometimes weary soldiers would simply be unable to move at all and would just sink out of sight. Today we got just a little taste of it.  After a night time thunderstorm that perhaps recalled a little of the artillery battles of a century ago the site was awash.

This is the line of the German trenches, the steel revetments still in place.  And remember, the Germans occupied the high ground.  Down the slope where the British lines were it was probably like this even with gentle rains.  Clearly there was ingenuity involved in surviving under these circumstances.

I was excavating a trench a bit higher up the slope.  This is probably not in the category of news you can actually put to good use, but if you are ever happily digging, say in your garden, and see something that looks like this, you should step away and summon Gerhardt the ammunition specialist.  I had carefully troweled away just enough soil to identify this as a hand grenade.   

Most of our finds today were British, presumably from their occupation of the site from mid 1917 to Spring of 1918.  Below is a brass cylinder that contains the cleaning kit for a Lee Enfield rifle.

Here is our trench nicely cleaned up.  Notice the wooden duckboards down at the bottom.   There was a drain running below it.  It might have helped some.

Here making their first appearance since 1918, wooden planks placed to keep the boots of soldiers long dead from getting as clogged with clinging mud as mine got today.