Names are engraved in a former chalk quarry in Naours, France. (Jeffrey Gusky, The Associated Press)

NAOURS, France A headlamp cuts through darkness of a passage 100 feet underground to reveal an inscription: "James Cockburn 8th Durham L.I."

It's cut so clean it could have been left yesterday. Only the date next to it April 1, 1917 roots it in the horrors of World War I.

The graffiti by a soldier in a British infantry unit is one of nearly 2,000 century-old inscriptions that have recently come to light in Naours, a two-hour drive north of Paris. The underground city is a 2-mile-long complex of tunnels with hundreds of chambers dug out over centuries. Many marked a note for posterity in the face of the doom in the trenches of the Somme battlefields a few dozen miles away.

Etchings, even scratched bas-reliefs, were left by many soldiers during the war. But those in Naours "would be one of the highest concentrations of inscriptions on the Western Front" that stretches from Switzerland to the North Sea, said historian Ross Wilson of Chichester University in Britain.

Continue reading here:
World War I graffiti in France sheds light on soldiers' experiences

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April 6, 2015 at 3:33 am by Mr HomeBuilder
Category: Sheds