Memorium

My father in law passed away over the weekend.  He was 102, so as my Brit friends would put it "He had a good long innings".  

The family reunion I mentioned last time was from that side of the tree.  The schedule was complex, some of us had already gone home when we got the news.  But others remained.  I'm sure stories, tears and a few toasts were on order.

When you live that long your grandchildren get to know you.  And not as "grandpa", that silly mix of performance art and vague authority.  They know you as a person.

Various legacy stuff came to them when the old gent moved.  First from Indiana to Pennsylvania, then to Michigan, then to an apartment, and finally for the last few months of his life, to a nursing home.

This is Major Hoople.  It's a vintage lawn tractor that one of my sons trailered all the way back from the east coast.  When he got word of the Passing, my son took it out to the back yard and fired it up for a lap around the acreage.  It still runs, still has various warranty voiding modifications done back in the day.  It still has the dates of oil changes written inside the hood!

Major Hoople, incidentally, was a character from a comic strip called Our Boarding House.  It started in 1921 and kept going until 1984.  Not bad, but a short run indeed by the standards of my father in law.

Godspeed, George.

Icicle Gun

Military hardware set up as a memorial by local veterans groups is pretty common.  But always worth a look.

An informative plaque identifies it as a turn of the last century 5 inch coastal defense gun.

The service record of these guns was limited.  They were later developments of ordnance from the 1880's.  In the Great War a number of these were dismounted and issued to artillery regiments made up of Coast Guard personnel.  But the war was over before they could be deployed overseas.  A few of these were present when the Japanese invaded the Philippines.  They did the best they could.

A close look at the muzzle shows something odd.  At first I thought it was a bundle of sticks or perhaps a dried up batch of flowers.  Back in my much younger days it was sort of a thing to put flowers into the muzzles of guns.  Hey, 60's.  But no...

The electrical plug gives it away.  These are outdoor lights of the "icicle" sort that people use in winter holiday displays.  Or to simulate a silent cannon shot aimed in the general direction of the next town over.

Memorial Day - 2023

As a holiday Memorial Day has drifted far from its origins.  Originally called Decoration Day it got started shortly after the Civil War and was so named not because of the medals soldiers won....but because this was the day for grieving families to put flowers on the graves of their fallen. 

Now it is generally just thought of as the opening bell of Summer.  Beer n' ATVs.

Within living memory we've had wars that left their mark on every community large and small.  Everyone knew a lad who did not return from Iwo Jima or Normandy.  It would have to be a pretty small town where there were not flowers on a grave for a life lost too soon but in heroic cause.

In 2023....not so much.

From Korea onward we no longer start wars with a declaration of same.  And with no definitive commitment on a national scale we seldom finish them.  It's hard to have a victory parade when a conflict ends in a shaky truce.  It's impossible to do so when it ends in helicopters fleeing just ahead of a triumphant enemy.

In times past when you spoke of The War everyone knew what you meant.  Now we have small collections of men and women in uniform scattered around the world.  I try to follow the news and can point to a half dozen places.  More are doubtless secret but look to the obvious places.  Middle East, Balkans, Africa.  Mostly they are advisors but still decidedly in harm's way.  And for what?  ISIS, Al Queda,  Al-Shabab, the Taliban; these are not enemy armies from hostile nations.  Mostly they are bandits with ideology taking advantage of failed political systems.

I'm not ready to discuss our involvement with Ukraine other than to ask: "What's the end game there?".  We are sending our highest tech weapons, and no doubt the techs to help with it, in hopes of......?  

Were there a conservative in the White House trying to pull this stunt there would be protests in the streets and at a minimum a daily drumbeat of very appropriate questions.

In the days of my young, foolish youth the US military struggled to get qualified people to don the uniforms.  I guess everything old is new again.  The Army is projected to fall 25% short of its recruiting goals.  The Air Force and Navy are squeaking by with theirs, aided by hefty retention bonuses and by relaxing entry requirements to permit heftier recruits.  Oh, and also because those branches of service are felt to offer a good training ground for high tech with a much reduced chance of ending up in a rice paddy with a rifle.  The Marines, God bless 'em, still have enough esprit d' corps to be meeting their targets.

We once said, with some degree of sympathy, that nobody wanted to be the last man to die in a senseless war.  Now with our inept political and military leadership nobody wants to be the first man to die in one either.

None of this detracts from the valor, the honor, the heroism of those that have stepped up in times past and paid the ultimate price.  Indeed, nothing can detract from it.  Let's remember them with respect these men, and a few women, who fought and died for a country and for principals that they believed in.  May we always find those willing to do so in times of need.

Vindolanda 2022 - Memorium

A few years back excavators turned up something both dark and unexpected, the skeleton of a young child buried under a barracks floor in the 3rd century AD.  A coroner's inquest deemed it "homicide by person or persons unknown."  I missed excavating the spot myself by roughly 10 feet and three weeks.

Every time I come to dig I always leave a few flowers on the spot.  Given a tragic event in my home town it has a bit of extra poignancy this year.

Tree Shaped Tombstones - Discovery and Sadness in Randolph Wisconsin.

A couple of years back I posted on an unusual variant of "Tree Shaped Tombstones" that I'd encountered in the area of Beaver Dam Wisconsin.  And so far nowhere else.  Obviously when I'm over that way I keep an extra sharp eye out, and even route through more of the small, off the beaten track communities that are numerous in eastern Wisconsin.  Such as...Randolph.  This is a nice little village of 1,800 current inhabitants and of course has an area on the edge of town for former ones....

Here's two of the "Beaver Dam" style tombstones, one in front of the other.  They are from two individuals with the name of Davis.

David Davis, born 1857.  

And William Davis, born 1887.  Presumably two generations then?   It's a bit unusual to have His Wife be 15 years older.  And were Edith and Margaret siblings of William?  Tucked back behind is another small, tragic mystery.

Infant mortality was so common back then.  Were some children who lived only a short time not even named?  Some tragedies of course were impossible to minimize in this fashion.  Elsewhere in the cemetery...

Our babies.  Two deaths in the spring of 1884.  Age 2 days and age 4 years.  Very unusually with a memorial over a century old, there are still flowers, albeit plastic ones, being placed on it.

A Picture from (the end of?) the Road

Sometimes on a road trip you run across the most peculiar things.  

Have a happy and safe Halloween.  May all of our roads run for a great many more miles, or in the case of my UK pals, kilometers.

An American Doughboy - Still Standing....for now.

Road trips are an excellent way to discover new things.  But there are disadvantages too.  When just "passing through" you sometimes have to get your photos on a day when conditions are not ideal.  As for instance with this interesting monument adjacent to the "Janesville 99" memorial we visited last time.

It is a World War I monument, and actually the dark, swirling clouds above do a decent job of bringing to mind the smoke and hellfire of trench warfare.  The Doughboy is standing defiant, rifle in one hand, grenade held high in the other.  The detail work is very nice, notice the little touches such as the barbed wire near his feet.

I learned that this was one of a large series of such statues from the 1920s and 30s.  Here's another image of one taken by someone blessed with better equipment, eye and weather conditions.

When I got up on tiptoes to photograph the leggings and barbed wire I noticed this plaque, a helpful clue to the history of these sculptures.

As it happens there already exists a website and a related Facebook group dedicated to the history of these "Spirit of the American Doughboy" memorials as created* by an interesting character named Ernest Moore Viquesney.  In brief, these were commercially produced in the decades after The Great War, and found considerable favor as memorials that were generally placed in public spaces with the support of, and in honor of, American WW I veterans.  Approximately 140 are known to exist, although some have not survived the passage of time and perhaps a few are yet to be found in some dusty corner of a storage building.

The majority of known Doughboys, approximately 120, are made of thin sheets of bronze welded together.  Thus they are much lighter and more damage prone than what an equivalent solid bronze statue would be.  Of course this made them far more affordable, and Viquesney was very much of mercantile inclinations.  At least three were done in stone.  And in 1934 due to the economic hard times of the Depression, a version made of cheaper zinc was marketed.  At only $700 each he continued to sell a few although in dwindling numbers as the shadows of a new war grew and as memories of the last one perhaps faded.  Production ended in 1942, at a time when there was likely no extra metal of any kind available.

I do recommend the site linked above.  It is encyclopedic and a fine example of what dedicated amateur historians can accomplish.  It is in its own way a memorial to a time when a scholarly pride in our nation's accomplishments was much in evidence.

The Doughboy Monuments are mostly still in place.  But over the years a dozen or so have suffered vandalism and a few have vanished altogether.  The vandals have been a mixed lot.  The statues are not nearly as sturdy as they look, and not a few drunkards have been very sure they could swing from an arm or from that extended rifle.  A few have been more systematically savaged by people with obscure political motives or by illicit metal scrappers.  Some of the latter have been badly disappointed by the zinc composition and the thin plating of the later versions.  

But what of today?  Is there much left of that "scholarly pride" in our past these days?  Alas I fear not.  

We've had considerable unrest in recent weeks.  Peaceful protests have mutated into something uglier.  Statues commemorating Confederate leaders have been targeted widely, and with at least some logic.  From there it takes so little to throw the ropes and start pulling down figures with ambiguous status.  Columbus, Jefferson.....even The Great Emancipator himself.  And when no convenient target can be brought down by the jeering mob, well, any statue will do.  At least three Doughboys have been damaged since the Floyd protests began in May of 2020.  

Here is the best documented and perhaps saddest example.  Birmingham Alabama, May 31st.  A mob attacks the Confederate Obelisk in a public park.  It proves too sturdy for their engineering abilities, which are likely as rudimentary as other aspects of their education.  

No problem.  Here's another statue.  Let's Mess It Up.

Immediately thereafter both the Confederate Obelisk and the Doughboy were taken down by the City of Birmingham, whose Mayor had actually participated in the protests although not in the defacement of the monuments.

That the Obelisk should go is palatable.  There are mechanisms by which such decisions can be deliberated and done in a proper fashion.  No doubt there are on the one side firebrands who would advocate immediate dynamiting and stubborn obstructionists who would like to continue to enshrine aspects of our history that are no longer considered noble and good.  Our society always functions best when Progress and Conservation can meet, often uneasily, and compromise.

But the Doughboy was just a target of convenience.

I consider World War One to be our last idealistic war.  We took up arms for others, in a conflict that did not directly impact our nation's security.  We fought for the subjugated and abused citizens of Belgium.  We fought for Freedom of the Seas.  We fought because small nations should not be ground under the heel of mighty empires.  Try as I can to appreciate the peculiar mind set of our modern Visigoths I can't see much racism involved in it.  In fact we joined an alliance where black and asian colonial troops were fighting and dying for Ideals, while looking ahead to the eventual freedom that always seems to result when brave men prove they are the equal of their nominal "masters".

The Birmingham Doughboy is now safe somewhere and supposedly will be cleaned up, repaired and restored to his pedestal.  I hope you'll forgive me if the cynicism of these ignorant times has given me doubts as to whether that will in fact ever happen.

------------------

* I will by convention give Viquesney credit for these statues, but the true story of the artists and craftsmen involved is complex and best addressed by the Viquesney website.  I again recommend it.

The Janesville 99 - A Monument still standing.

Monuments commemorating our soldiers are so common that it is easy to look right past them.  This one in downtown Janesville Wisconsin is eye catching because of the tank on top.  But once you look more closely it tells a remarkable story with no need of decorative flourish.

The American war effort did not begin with Pearl Harbor.  As it was clear things were going to get difficult there were efforts to begin preparations much earlier.  In November of 1940 four companies of National Guard troops were mobilized and formed into the 192nd Tank Battalion.  Company A -with 99 men - came from Janesville.  They trained at an armory a couple of blocks from this site before moving on to Fort Knox in Kentucky.  One year later they deployed to the Philippines, arriving at Clark Field and Fort Stostsenberg on Thanksgiving Day.  They must have been barely unpacked when the Japanese attacked on December 8th, 1941.

The American response to the subsequent invasion was brave and resolute...but also doomed.  The 192nd fought during the retreat down the Bataan peninsula until their eventual surrender on April 9th.  So far they had only two dead during the actual fighting, and remarkably only lost one during the ensuing Bataan Death March.  But of the 99 men who arrived in the Philippines, only 35 made it home alive.  

They died of disease and malnutrition and outright murder at foul prison camps all across Asia.  15 were lost when their unmarked transport ship was torpedoed by an American submarine.  The remains of many were lost forever.  At sea or in unmarked jungle graves.  But their comrades, the lucky or the resolute who made it back alive never forgot them.

This is a photo of most of the survivors, posing in front of a much more modern tank than the lightweight Stuart M3s they rode into battle.  The date of the photo is not clear, probably 1946....most are still in uniform but said uniforms are not hanging loosely on them.  Of the 23 men I see only one who is smiling.  They were remembering hardships, but they remembered something else too.

"This memorial stands in fulfillment of a pledge by the tank company boys to their comrades on Bataan".

As I write in 2020 the men of Company A are all gone.  When they dedicated the monument they marked with stars the ones who had died in service.  And left room for the addition of later markers when the survivors joined the final muster.

A heroic tale, albeit one full of sadness.  But at least in times when monuments are being toppled by mobs who don't know - or worse yet, don't care - about the sacrifice of brave men and women who preceded them, surely a monument such as this will be safe?

Or will it?  Another monument and another story next time....

--------------------------

Addendum.  There were not many survivors of Company A, and some of them never spoke of their experiences.  One who did was Forrest Knox.  If you can bear it, his tale is recounted HERE

More Tombstones from the Great Depression.

A few weeks back I put up a post describing the reuse of tombstones as part of a flood control wall. This is called "spolia", the reuse of older things in new structures.

Well, when out for a walk recently I realized that there was a bunch more of this about half a mile away.  And from the look of things I'd say they came from the same source, which I presume was a mason/monument carver who went out of business in the latter 1930's.

The neighbor who has this as a boundary wall knew what it was made of.  There are no "names and dates" showing but perhaps they have been tastefully turned inward!

Spolia from The Great Depression

It has been a very good spring for extended walks, in part because we are not allowed to do much else.  On one such I visited a spot that featured in a very early entry for Detritus of Empire.   It was looking at reuse of older stones in a newer wall, a practice that in archaeology is called "spolia".  Spolia means spoils.  In excavations the big pile of debris that has been dug up is called the spoil heap and has all manner of random - if hopefully carefully screened - stuff on it.  Even before archaeologists came along inhabitants of ancient sites found nice convenient building stones just sitting around they naturally grabbed them and incorporated them into newer structures.  

In any case the original post dealt with use of older tombstones in a more modern flood control wall alongside Duncan creek in downtown Chippewa Falls Wisconsin.  On my revisit I found some new clues.

I've speculated that the stones came from a company that went out of business, and they were just handy when this project was undertaken.  I had read that it was a monument company, and indeed some of these are partially finished tombstones.  But I think there are enough plain blocks there that they might have been doing other work as well.  In a small town you only have so many "customers" for tombstones in any given year and being able to help trim assorted stores and homes around town would be a sensible business solution.

As to the date of the wall I was fortunate enough to spot this:

Absent a bit of most inappropriate stone robbing I am left to speculate.  It looks like a tombstone but other interpretations are possible.  If it is a memorial the individual would seem to have a name ending in R (although what's that little _ doing there after it?), and to have died in 1934.  The E. is enigmatic.  Many local worthies were members of a fraternal lodge called the Benevolent Protective Order of Elks, and their notation B.P.O.E. is sometimes seen on tombstones.  But shouldn't that be centered rather than off to the right side?  Unfortunately the local historical society is not open for in person visits just now and the online archives of the local paper do not cover this year.  I expect to have more substantial theories down the road a bit.

And of course there is always this one:

August 16, 1895.  Nothing more.  So many questions.  Did the carver make a mistake? I'd expect you would carve the name first.  Did somebody not pay their bill?  And if so what was the procedure for this?  A finished tombstone would be of no value to the carver nor would its absence be much noted by the deceased!  You can lean on the family of course but maybe this was a mean old cuss that nobody liked in real life.

Questions, questions.  At least I can more accurately date the age of the wall, which I'm sure was one of many successive efforts to control floods along this unruly creek.  It can't be before 1934.  Probably it was a Depression era project, possibly a W.P.A. effort?  And a business failure in a company that likely needed both funeral and commercial customers to make ends meet would make sense.  Time to clean out the warehouse.  Hey, you can even toss in that old stone we were using as a doorstop....

Dubious Infection Control

Perhaps one of the less useful public health measures during the Covid Crisis.  And an obstacle on my morning walk.

Nobody on the inside is at risk to either transmit or receive the disease.  And anyway, by definition they are all six feet away even if you are indelicate enough to stand right on them.

I suppose a charitable explanation would be that it would be bad if there was a death in one of the big families that live in our area.  It would not look good to have a hundred people gathered around a gravesite ceremony.  This naturally ignores several key concepts.

- If literally staring death in the face does not persuade you to take precautions, nothing will.

- funeral directors and clergyfolk  do have some discretion, and don't have to schedule such a service.

- those families, and if you are local you know 'em, would probably have a big Wake the night before.  With alcohol.  In an enclosed space.  

The vehicle gate on the other end of the cemetery was naturally open so this the sort of response to the Current Unpleasantness that grates because it is ineffectual as well as petty and lazy.

In Potter's Fields

I'm not sure the concept of a "Potter's Field" is well known these days, although some Covid related stories have touched on it.  Simply put it is a burial place for the poor.  The name and concept are very old.  In the Book of Matthew it is said that Judas had remorse after betraying Christ.  He tried to give back the 30 pieces of silver but the High Priests would not accept it as it was "blood money".  Eventually they used it to buy a patch of waste ground, previously used for potters to dig up clay.  It's lack of suitability for agriculture and the pits already present made it an obvious, and probably economical, choice.  It was used to bury "strangers", likely a catch all term for the poor, the infidels, and the unknowns.  The spot tradition associated with the original Potter's Field was actually used to bury non Jews until the early 19th century.

Potter's Fields are pretty common in the US.  Here in my little town of Chippewa Falls there are two of them.   Naturally the stories associated with them are rather sad.

The older one is on the site of the former County Poor Farm.  This institution goes back to 1877, and ironically the first resident of it was Jean Brunet, the founder of Chippewa Falls.  The site had a batch of the best farm land in the county, now sadly a mostly failed development with "Shovel Ready" signs standing in weedy fields next to unoccupied streets.

This cemetery is near my former office but I had no idea it was there.  Until a tidy up a few years ago I think you'd really have to be looking to find any trace of it.  It's hard to reconcile the age of the Poor Farm with the first recorded burial there in 1901.  Jean Brunet for instance died there soon after his arrival.  Likely the earlier burials were just poorly marked or perhaps in a now unknown location.

Certainly some of the simple grave markers reflect this uncertainty.  Probably from the cemetery restoration, this is a bit modern and would have been pricey back then.

Although others like early this one don't tell you very much more....

The other Potter's Field in town is on the expansive grounds of The Northern Wisconsin Center.  It's actually just across the river from the Poor Farm.  The Northern Center began operation in 1897 as one of two facilities in the state to house what we would now call Developmentally Disabled individuals.  Early names of the facility use less kind descriptive terms that I feel no need to repeat.   Like the Poor Farm it's population grew during economic hard times.  When jobs are scarce and families just scraping by the added responsibilities of caring for the less able sometimes became severe.  At its peak it had 2,203 residents.  Basically a small town's worth.  Some of them are buried here:

The markers are mostly plain, and give just the basics.

Notice the little touch of ornamentation in the form of colored gravel pressed into the cement.

The Poor Farm cemetery seemed like a forgotten place.  It is back behind the 1970's era nursing home that replaced it, and dumpsters and a forlorn picnic table for exiled smokers hardly makes it seem contemplative.    But the Northern Center is still a going concern.  Sort of.  With the trend in recent decades towards community based living for the developmentally disabled the population there has aged and contracted.  Only a few buildings of the vast campus are now in use.  But there are a few newer gravestones to be seen, done in a more modern and less severe granite.  And even among the older memorials, modest though they are, you see signs that sometimes somebody remembers the people buried in a Potter's Field.     

                 

Time and Space Capsule - Astronaut Cards

Another set of peculiar artifacts from our fall attic cleaning.  This is a series of trading cards from 1963 that celebrate the astronauts of the Mercury Program.  It took me a while to figure out why I found them so fascinating.  I decided that they were from such a different time for us culturally.  We once had Heroes who became celebrities based on their accomplishments.  In these lesser times we mostly just have Celebrities trying to pose as heroes without accomplishments.

There were seven astronauts in the initial group.  They were referred to as "The Mercury Seven".  Here are the three most famous ones.

Of course John Glenn became the household name.  Fighter pilot in WWII and Korea (where he shot down 3 Migs), he made the first US orbital flight.

Virgil (Gus) Grissom was another Korean War fighter pilot.  After flights in both Mercury and Gemini spacecraft he was scheduled to command Apollo I.  But died in the tragic launch pad fire of January 27, 1967.

Alan Shepard was a WWII veteran of the surface Navy, later a test pilot.  He took up the first manned Mercury flight, a suborbital one.  He then had to wait ten years as an inner ear problem grounded him.  It seems as if it was worth it, as the Commander of Apollo 14 he became the fifth, and oldest man to walk on the moon.

There is a separate card that indexes the 55 card set.

The series comes in two versions.  One has a sort of 3D picture on the back.  The other, less common one, was a give away with Popsicles.

This seems to be one of the more valuable ones.  I guess everyone loves monkeys.

It's hard to imagine in these later and lesser times that anyone could become famous and admired with a visibly receding hairline and irregular teeth.  Its another facet of Celebrity sans Accomplishments.  There's nothing wrong with looking good.  It's just that in a sturdier era your looks were really not a deciding factor.

Alan Shepard 1923-1998

CCC Camp Taylor Lake

I've visited the sites of several CCC camps "up north" in the general vicinity of our cabin.  They are always fascinating.  So when I heard about one that was said to be in such good condition that the baseball backstop was still intact I was quite optimistic.

In one sense this site, Camp Taylor Lake, was a disappointment.  But in examining the reasons why the CCC remains were so minimal I did, as a sort of historical consolation prize, come across another nice little story.  More of a tribute really.

The sense of something being not quite right began with that baseball backstop.

It is in way too good a state of preservation to be from the 1930s.  It still has chicken wire on it.  And there was a basketball back board in even better shape.  The things that looked "too new" were everywhere.

Even the floor surfaces I came across were well preserved.  Usually CCC camps were tossed together with whatever was on hand and by recruits who had at best a vague idea of how to build things.  Crumbling concrete and foundations made of round boulders are the norm.

To understand this let's just meander through the history of this camp.  As it indicates on the sign, this was a camp that was established early in the CCC era....and with operations continuing to 1942 it would have been one of the last ones to exist in Wisconsin.  It appears to have been a fairly major camp, one that was a sort of hub for others.

With the usual fragmentary histories available I have been able to puzzle out that it was established by a "junior" CCC Company.  A group made up of World War One veterans - note the V designation on the sign - arrived in 1936.  The work was of course appropriate to the area.  Forestry and fire fighting.  A picture of Company V1676:

You can't tell much about the camp from this.  Just that there was at least one whoppin' big barracks type building there.

With the onset of WWII the CCC was disbanded, most of the young and not so young men exchanging one uniform for another and joining the armed forces.

The camp on Taylor Lake was presumably vacant during the war years but in 1951 it was leased by Northwestern University who operated a surveying school there for the next five years.  The University of Wisconsin took it over at about that time and for the same purpose.  It was said that there were..."about 20 permanent metal buildings, many of which remain from the days when it was a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp in the 1930's.  Previously the University of Wisconsin's Engineering department had run their surveying camp near Devil's Lake, but pesky tourists had become too much of a problem there.

The new camp on Taylor Lake was very much the project of one man.  He is remembered at the site:

On his passing one of his students, later a colleague penned a very nice memorial to Professor Eldon Wagner.  It mentions prominently his love of the Camp Taylor site, the quality of the engineering knowledge passed along there, and the role his wife Roselyn took in the practical running of the camp.  The softball field apparently was the site of annual student vs. faculty ball games.  I found some photos of the program and the site HERE.   

The engineering camp specialized in surveying technology and ran until 1972.  By that point the old CCC buildings must have been getting a bit run down and apparently everything was razed.

There's a lesson here for me.  Not all history of importance is a thousand or even a hundred years old.  I went to Taylor Lake just looking for another collection of picturesque CCC ruins, remnants of the Greatest Generation's younger days.  In that I was disappointed. Taylor Lake CCC camp was built to a higher initial level of quality and then well maintained.  But what I found instead was a neat little story.  Of Professor Eldon Wagner and his colleague and biographer Dr. Paul Wolf.  Here they are posing - I think - on the ball field, backstop behind them.  They are both gone now but I'm delighted to help keep a bit of their story alive.

Soldiers of the Great War. Peace a Century Late.

It's been a year and a half since my stint helping excavate the World War One battlefield at Hill 80.  The site has now been developed and if there were any additional surprises found when the bulldozers rolled through I have not heard of them.

A major motivation for the excavation was to spare the many lost soldiers buried there an unworthy fate.  Human remains are found all the time on former World War sites. Generally the bones are at best put off to one side for the police to come and collect.  Since many of the remains are scattered and fragmentary, it is likely that a large number are not noticed at all, just ground into dust under the treads of heavy equipment.  And even the occasional intact burials get separated from artifacts that might have shown their nationality or - the best outcome - their identity.

In the end a minimum of 110 fallen soldiers were found.  The passage of time combined with four continuous years of artillery fire make an exact count impossible. In fact I consider it miraculous that so many of the early war casualties were quite nearly intact, buried in two mass graves.

On Thursday of last week 13 soldiers of the British Army were buried.  Three French and  one South African are to be interred at a later date.  

The photo below shows representatives of the Royal Navy, Army and RAF.  All three of these folks worked on the excavation, I had the pleasure of getting to know two of them.

And on Friday the German casualties were put to rest in their own cemetery.  In this much larger group there was one possible and one definite ID.  17 year old Albert Oehrle a gardener from Bavaria who volunteered at the outbreak of war.  He would never see his 18th birthday.

Soldiers of the Great War, finally at rest.  Too late for living family to remember, they were casualties of a foolish war that the world would like to forget.   But we still remember the men, their bravery and sacrifice in the service of their various nations. And finally, if a century too late, they rest among their countrymen in a place dedicated to their memories.