That the last ramble ended suddenly, apparently the ghost of Steve Jobs had had enough. I also note that it is posting on some other time and date than the one here. Go figure. Anyway bear with me this may take a few posts. And yes, I promise pictures, good ones, once I move to some better hardware. Anyway...
One of the less serious side affects of this journey has been that a good number of us have ended up with what Gary the Guide calls 'Shell Fever'.. every spring the farmers of France still reap what quickly became known as the 'Iron Harvest', with hundreds of tons of shrapnel, unexploded shells, ammunition, weapons, wreckage and various other scrap being dragged up out of the fields every time they prepare to sow crops. Given there were at times literally millions of rounds of artillery being fired a week, let along rifle bullets, this is hardly surprising. The result is that even today one hundred years later, bits and pieces can still be found. On the first day the bus stopped several times so we could look at random large rusty artillery projectiles left on the side of the road by farmers for the authorities to pick up.
One of the less serious side affects of this journey has been that a good number of us have ended up with what Gary the Guide calls 'Shell Fever'.. every spring the farmers of France still reap what quickly became known as the 'Iron Harvest', with hundreds of tons of shrapnel, unexploded shells, ammunition, weapons, wreckage and various other scrap being dragged up out of the fields every time they prepare to sow crops. Given there were at times literally millions of rounds of artillery being fired a week, let along rifle bullets, this is hardly surprising. The result is that even today one hundred years later, bits and pieces can still be found. On the first day the bus stopped several times so we could look at random large rusty artillery projectiles left on the side of the road by farmers for the authorities to pick up.
Piles of fired artillery shells, Flers 1916
At first none of us were too sure of the protocols, but once Gary, who now lives in France and apparently has quite a phenomenal collecting of artefacts himself, started poking around in the dirt of fields adjacent to the sites we were visiting, all bets were off. It started off with one or two of us, the ladies with husbands rolling their eyes at we single guys off "kicking around in the dirt".. By the end their husbands were with us as well and there were about twelve guys taking every opportunity to poke at things with sticks in the freshly dug up (but not sown... Don't go tramping on a rowed or sown field unless you want shot).
But what, you ask, do you realistically find after 100 years of weather and tractors running back and forth and farmers throwing stuff away? Well, not as much as they used to obviously, but to put it into perspective, a cafe in one of the villages has a wall made from 12,000 stacked unexploded artillery projectiles (defused and safe of course).
Part of a small collection at the Ulster Division Memorial cafe
So we started poking in the dirt. I was initially sceptical myself but sure enough we soon started pulling from the dirt chunks of rusty metal, one after another. Then someone found a fired rifle cartridge. Then someone found an intact buckle, with a piece of leather strap still attached with rivets. The shrapnel in some places was sobering. A century later some fields were still so peppered that you could pick up one or two chunks of steel the size of your thumb every step or two. And that was just what was on the surface.
We soon figured out that the prize is not in the hundreds of millions of bits of unidentifiable shell fragment, but in things you can actually attribute to an object, or a unit, or a country. As Gary confirmed, the greatest treasures are things like cap badges etc, something tangibly associated. Or things, like rusted bayonets or rifle remnants. But those sorts of things are rare, and highly sought after by cynical field scavengers who sell them on EBay and the like. In many places I imagine the fields have been well picked clean, but every so often a huge tractor towing a plough still turns up something new, and that's what we were looking for. Just a little piece of history we could say we discovered.
A couple of the guys did well. Dave found a corroded German ammunition clip with three cartridges still attached. I found an unfired .303 round which I was quite happy with but which Gary immediately confiscated... They don't allow anything undischarged on the coach since an incident with a guy who found an unexploded grenade and caused a standoff with staff and several of the passengers when he insisted he was going to take it home. Gary proved his point by breaking the bullet out and igniting the 100 year old cordite propellant with a lighter. Fair call though, may have upset the airline people later. One of the guys topped the charts with the brass nose cone off an artillery round which will polish up to good as new and make a brilliant paper weight.
That is, of course, until yesterday. And yes, I am jumping ahead of the timeline here, but we will digress later. This is the way my brain works. Out on my own yesterday I returned to the ridge of Pozieres, site of a particularly famous Australian battle, to take a couple of photos I couldn't get when the tour went there, and , of course, to poke in the fields a bit more. I had a good look round in some places we didn't go previously with no luck, and walked empty handed back toward the car across ground about ten of us had kicked around before... Ground which is literally only metres from the Australian national memorial where hundreds of coach loads of people must go every year.
Just as I admitted defeat to myself I noticed about three inches of rusty steel rod sticking out of the pale churned up soil. I almost kept walking, thinking it was just another bit of unidentifiable scrap, but something in my mind clicked and I looked back. There was something identifiable on the end of that finger of steel. It was a foresight. I looked at it for a minute in some disbelief. But it was. I realised I had found the end of a rifle barrel. Unbelievable. I reached down to snatch it out of the dirt but it didn't break free. I tried again with a bit more effort, still expecting it to spring free and turn out to be a piece of old hay rake or something, but suddenly, out of the earth, I dragged an entire rifle... Certainly one with the wood stock rotted off and the barrel bent, but a whole rifle nonetheless, still with bolt rusted in place. A German Mauser.
We soon figured out that the prize is not in the hundreds of millions of bits of unidentifiable shell fragment, but in things you can actually attribute to an object, or a unit, or a country. As Gary confirmed, the greatest treasures are things like cap badges etc, something tangibly associated. Or things, like rusted bayonets or rifle remnants. But those sorts of things are rare, and highly sought after by cynical field scavengers who sell them on EBay and the like. In many places I imagine the fields have been well picked clean, but every so often a huge tractor towing a plough still turns up something new, and that's what we were looking for. Just a little piece of history we could say we discovered.
A couple of the guys did well. Dave found a corroded German ammunition clip with three cartridges still attached. I found an unfired .303 round which I was quite happy with but which Gary immediately confiscated... They don't allow anything undischarged on the coach since an incident with a guy who found an unexploded grenade and caused a standoff with staff and several of the passengers when he insisted he was going to take it home. Gary proved his point by breaking the bullet out and igniting the 100 year old cordite propellant with a lighter. Fair call though, may have upset the airline people later. One of the guys topped the charts with the brass nose cone off an artillery round which will polish up to good as new and make a brilliant paper weight.
That is, of course, until yesterday. And yes, I am jumping ahead of the timeline here, but we will digress later. This is the way my brain works. Out on my own yesterday I returned to the ridge of Pozieres, site of a particularly famous Australian battle, to take a couple of photos I couldn't get when the tour went there, and , of course, to poke in the fields a bit more. I had a good look round in some places we didn't go previously with no luck, and walked empty handed back toward the car across ground about ten of us had kicked around before... Ground which is literally only metres from the Australian national memorial where hundreds of coach loads of people must go every year.
Just as I admitted defeat to myself I noticed about three inches of rusty steel rod sticking out of the pale churned up soil. I almost kept walking, thinking it was just another bit of unidentifiable scrap, but something in my mind clicked and I looked back. There was something identifiable on the end of that finger of steel. It was a foresight. I looked at it for a minute in some disbelief. But it was. I realised I had found the end of a rifle barrel. Unbelievable. I reached down to snatch it out of the dirt but it didn't break free. I tried again with a bit more effort, still expecting it to spring free and turn out to be a piece of old hay rake or something, but suddenly, out of the earth, I dragged an entire rifle... Certainly one with the wood stock rotted off and the barrel bent, but a whole rifle nonetheless, still with bolt rusted in place. A German Mauser.
I pondered this for a bit, given I was standing next to a major historical battlefield feature, being the German fortification called Gibraltar, which much blood was shed to eventually conquer. It was one of more than a couple of moments for quiet reflection on this little trip I have to say.
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