From: Norman Bassett, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The Times article Rusty indicates was of great
interest.
Presumably people digging foundations for factories
rarely dig deep enough - the usual maximum depth of
the shell-disturbed ground was about 12 feet. Though
mines - bombs in tunnels under enemy lines - might
well disturb the earth more deeply.
I understand military mine-detecting loops can pick up
steel down to 24 feet under the ground. I also recall
my uncle mentioning that seismic surveys of the
battlefields had been done, indicating extensive
underground cavities.
The problem of exhumation appears to be a political
one - governments don't care to be reminded about the
Great War's casualties and what they were attributed
to at the time by the soldiers involved - stupidity,
callousness, overly-rigid obedience and death
penalties for Colonels who didn't move at the time
ordered. Then we get to the political side of it - why
did Britain get involved in the war at all was the
interrogated German officers' line and they pointed at
the German colonies as the object of colonial greed.
Siegfried Sassoon seems to have been hinting at that,
also, in the letter he got read aloud in Parliament.
And finally we come to the criminal side of it - the
bribes from munitions-makers to Cabinet members,
senior civil servants and senior officers. None of
this would look any better exhumed than it smells
buried by 82 years of the British government's efforts
to conceal their various guilts.
On a lighter note, both Allies and Germans were in
effect doing "de facto" archaeology on a part of the
historic Franco-German Marches and a lot of older
military artifacts were thrown up or exposed by the
shelling and mining. My uncle attributed the excellent
state of preservation of the arms, armour, even
metal-hooped wooden-barrelled cannons to the removal
of the oxygen from the ground water by iron ore. The
archaeological consequences are interesting because of
course vastly more military materiel and human remains
were being buried than were being exhumed by the war.
Regards
Norman Bassett
drakenfels.org
Cybershooters website: http://www.cybershooters.org
List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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