Our Lady of the Trenches

Many things surprised me about my time digging at the Hill 80 excavation.  Among them was the prominence of religion to the soldiers who were there.  Soldiers of many nations fought and died but the biggest group of casualties we recovered were Bavarians from the 1914 fighting.

Some of them still had Bibles in their packs or in the disintegrating pockets of their uniforms.  We found crucifixes and Rosary beads.  And we found this:

This was at first thought to be pre-war.  Belgium of course like Bavaria was and is a very Catholic region.  But from its find location it seems likely that it was something rather different:

This is a contemporary photo.  The text says "Mary Grotto in Company (Ubichn.) Wytichaete.  The word in parenthesis is of obscure meaning - maybe the name of the commander - but the location, Wytichaete, is the German version of Wychaete, the village where our excavation took place.  So it seems that not only were there no Bavarian atheists in the foxholes, they actually constructed small shrines to the Virgin Mary right into the sides of the trenches.
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(Robin Shaefer, who found the above photo in his archival hunts, says the word in parentheses is Abschnitt.  This means "section". And technically this is not the "German" variation of the town name but one of several older versions.  Belgium has a complicated situation with several competing official languages).