First of all, welcome among us!
It's reasonable to believe that they found things while digging, as well in ww2. But not when you digg with the speed of light, fearing the enemy projectiles
Thanks, Alex,
Well, they perhaps dug with the speed of light sometimes, but they also lived in these trenches more or less for years.
I quote a passage from the selfbiographical novel "Le feu" by Henri Barbusse, a
French writer who participated in the war:
"-Look, old
man," says Tulacque, as he
comes up. Look at this.
Tulacque is magnificent. He is wearing a lemon-yellow coat made out of an oilskin sleeping-sack. He has arranged a hole in the middle to get
his head through, and compelled
his shoulder-straps and belt to go over it.
He is tall and bony. He holds
his face in advance as he walks, a forceful
face, with eyes that squint. He has something in
his hand.
-I found this while digging last night at the end of the new
gallery to change the rotten gratings. It took my fancy off-hand, that knick-knack. It`s an old pattern of hatchet.
It was indeed an old pattern, a sharpened flint hafted with an old brown bone-quite a prehistoric tool in appearance.
-Very handy, said Tulacque, fingering it. Yes, not badly thought out. Better balanced than the regulation
axe. That`ll be useful to me, you`ll see.
As he brandishes that
axe of Post-Tertiary
Man, he would himself pass for an ape-man, decked out with rags and lurking in the bowels of the earth."
Henri Barbusse, "Under Fire" (1917) translated by W. Fitzwater Wray, 1965 Everyman Paperback edition, p. 10.
Regards,
Nils