The discovery of World War I soldier graffiti beneath French battlefields offers an insight into the lives of thousands of soldiers who etched their drawings, thoughts, and names into posterity.
The graffiti was discovered in a French chalk quarry and is part of a project being chronicled by doctor/photographer Jeff Gusky.
Gusky told CNN he’s discovered about 1,821 names, 40 percent of which are Australian. Fifty-five are American, many are British, and 662 haven’t yet been traced.
The Independent reported that the graffiti, from around 1917, is located in Naours, north of Paris and near the Somme battlefields.
“The Hidden World of WWI gives us a glimpse into the individual humanity of soldiers that refused to be silenced in the face of modern mass destruction,” Gusky said on his website. “Men from both sides defied the inhuman scale of modern life and declared themselves as human beings, who could think, and feel, and express and create and who remind us today that they were here, and that they once existed as living, breathing human beings.”
The underground caverns are centuries old, CNN said, but they were sealed in the 18th century, and reopened in the late 19th century.
The Battle of Somme that occurred nearby generated about 1 million casualties, “one of the costliest in world history,” CNN said.
“When you’re underground in these places, and it’s completely dark, your headlamp shines on a particular part of the wall and there, looking back at you across a hundred years, is a signature of someone that looks like yesterday,”
Gusky told The New York Times in late 2014. "It’s a very deeply moving thing because you feel like someone wanted to be known, they wanted to say, 'I existed, I mattered, I was alive.'"
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