Major war find threatened by motorway in Belgium

By JOHN LICHFIELD in Ypres

A maze of nearly intact trenches covering the area of half a football field has emerged from the mud of World War I battlefields in Flanders after 86 years.

The discovery, together with that of the bodies of seven soldiers, provoked calls from British politicians and local historians yesterday for the Belgian Government to reconsider plans to build a motorway over the site.

They said the trenches - on the site where chemical weapons were used for the first time and at the starting point for one of the bloodiest battles in human history - should be preserved as a reminder for future generations.

At first glance, the mournful, featureless and mud-brown archaeological dig, just northeast of Ypres in Belgium, could itself be a Great War battlefield.

Out of the raw, moist earth, largely undisturbed since the third battle of Ypres in 1917, there have emerged seven bodies, an immense treasury of war-time artefacts and - most significantly of all - the most complete pattern of preserved 1914-18 trenches to be found for many years.

A mound of earth on one corner of the site was heaped with poppies by British and Belgian visitors to mark Remembrance Day and to record the discovery at the spot last week of the body of an unidentified, but probably British, soldier of the Great War.

Only the lower half of his skeleton was found. Another of the bodies discovered near the trenches several weeks ago has been identified, provisionally, as that of a 20-something member of the 5th Battalion of the Northumberland Fusiliers.

The unearthing of the bodies of World War I soldiers, in this case six British and one French, is moving but not unusual.

Something like 60 bodies are uncovered each year on the 1914-18 battlefields in France and Belgium - an annual "harvest of bones".

The significance of the site near Pilkem Ridge, north of Ypres, is the revelation of such a large area of shallow, but otherwise intact, trenches. They criss-cross the ground like a maze of sunken garden paths, no more than 1m deep at their lowest point. In places, the duck-boarding which carpeted the bottom of the trenches, and the corrugated iron which reinforced their sides, are still standing.

Some of the dug-outs - the living quarters scooped out of the trench sides - are intact.

The trenches are shallow because of the notorious marshiness of the ground in this area, which was the starting point for the third battle of Ypres in 1917, better known as the battle of Passchendaele.

A punctured canal and broken land-drains turned most of the gently undulating Flanders landscape into a quagmire in which 70,000 British and Commonwealth and German soldiers died.

The fortifications are believed to have been built in 1915 after British troops fled to Pilkem Ridge from the first gas attack in military history during the second battle of Ypres.

Originally, the trenches would have been extended above ground level with parapets of sand-bags and barbed wire.

Within and near the trenches, archaeologists have found what they describe as enough artefacts to fill a shipping container, ranging from ammunition and guns to rum bottles, tea-kettles and mess cans.

The maze of trenches represents a major historical find, says Marc de Wilde, 49, head of the team which has uncovered the site progressively over the past six months.

"We have found what we predicted we would find," he said. "That, here, just under the surface of the ground, only a few tens of centimetres down, there is a place where the battlefield of the Ypres salient, one of the most terrible battlefields of the war, remains virtually intact."

De Wilde and his team have been given permission by the Belgian Government to excavate nine sites in the path of a projected extension of the A19 motorway from the Lille area to the Belgian coast. Only four of them have been excavated so far.

The Belgian Government and the Flanders regional government must decide next year whether to go ahead with the extension of the motorway through the newly uncovered battlefield sites.

British veterans' groups and local pressure groups in Ypres have criticised the A19 project from the start.

"Surely they cannot go ahead now. It would be a great desecration, not only of the memory of what happened here but also of an important historical site," one local historian said yesterday.

"It would be possible, with a detour of 1.5km at most, to take the motorway in another direction and preserve this site for the generations to come."

Between 1914 and 1918, and especially in 1917, Ypres, known to the British troops as "Wipers", entered the lexicon as a term for slaughter and futility, alongside names like Verdun and the Somme.

More than 55,000 British soldiers who died in the Ypres area have no known grave.

Lord Faulkner of Worcester, who chairs the All-Party Parliamentary War Graves and Battlefield Heritage Group, visited the dig recently.

"It is quite astounding how well preserved the trenches are in places," he said yesterday. "It is, of course, for the Belgian authorities to decide what to do next but we would urge them to declare this site at Pilkem ridge a protected area."

In Flanders' fields

* There were five great battles in the Ypres area in the 1914-18 war.

* The trenches discovered near Pilkem are believed to have been built by the British Army in 1915 after they were pushed back by a German chlorine gas attack - the first big gas attack of that or any war.

* The trenches remained the front line for British and Commonwealth troops until July 31, 1917, when 12,000 soldiers died in one day on Pilkem Ridge.

* It was the first attack of the battle which ended in Passchendaele, 8km to the east, just over four months later.

* More than 35,000 British soldiers and 35,000 Germans died in the battle for Passchendaele - a failed attempt to break through the German lines and reach Bruges and Brussels.

- INDEPENDENT