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Culture
Journal of Material
2000; 5; 43 Journal of Material Culture
Nicholas J. Saunders
Re-cycled
Bodies of Metal, Shells of Memory: 'Trench Art', and the Great War
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BODIES OF METAL, SHELLS
OF MEMORY
‘Trench Art’, and the Great War Re-cycled
◆NICHOLAS J. SAUNDERS
Department of Anthropology, University College London
Abstract
‘Trench Art’ is the evocative but misleading term used to describe a wide
variety of objects in various media made by soldiers, prisoners of war, and
civilians during the First World War (1914–18) and the succeeding inter-war
period (1919–39). The production of such objects appears as a widespread
human response to the conditions of modern warfare, with examples coming
from the Boer War and many if not most 20th century conflicts. This essay
focuses on metal ‘Trench Art’ from the Western Front between 1914 and
1939. It offers an initial categorization of types, and explores their various
symbolic dimensions as souvenirs and mementoes, objectifications of loss,
war trophies, and as materializations of the relationships between object and
maker, men and women, the warring nations, and the living and the dead.
It is suggested that ‘Trench Art’ is an important and hitherto overlooked
source for understanding the cultural memory of 20th century war.
Key Words ◆Great War ◆grieving ◆memory ◆metalwork ◆souvenirs ◆
‘Trench Art’
Sit on the bed. I’m blind, and three parts shell.
Be careful; can’t shake hands now; never shall.
A Terre, Wilfred Owen, 1993: 102
MATERIALSCHLACHT AND MATERIAL CULTURE
At the close of the 20th century, the Great War of 1914–18 stands at the
furthest edge of living memory. As the last survivors pass away, the past
43
Journal of Material Culture
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Vol. 5(1): 43–67 [1359-1835(200003)5:1; 43–67;011560]
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of 80 years ago survives increasingly as interpretations of material
culture. History becomes archaeology, inviting, perhaps demanding, a
new approach to the study of the world’s first industrialized war.
Since 1914, Great War studies have focused on the analysis of mili-
tary, economic, social, and political histories, sometimes textured by
memoirs and poetry. Almost totally absent has been any consideration
of the physicality of what – even 84 years ago – was realized to be ‘the
war of matériel’, materialschlacht (Terraine, 1996: 11).
The First World War offers significant opportunities for a material
culture approach. There is evidence already of broader, anthropologi-
cally inflected enquiries (e.g. Bourke, 1996; Derez, 1997; Liddle and
Richardson, 1997; Winter, 1995; and see Kelly, 1998). Nevertheless, there
exists little appreciation of the interconnectedness and potential of
archaeology and anthropology to inform analysis of the Great War – or
of the ability of material objects to act as a bridge between mental and
physical worlds (Miller, 1987: 99).
Apart from annual Armistice Day ceremonies, where two minutes’
silence symbolically compresses the memory of all war dead, the Great
War survives – in material form and to a considerable degree – through
the existence of and trade in a category of artefacts known collectively
as ‘Trench Art’ – a misleading catch-all term applied to objects of various
materials – made by soldiers and civilians alike between 1914 and 1939.
The voluminous literature on the Great War carries hardly a mention of
these objects known to all soldiers and their families during the war and
inter-war years. Partly as a consequence, they have remained unstudied
for over 80 years.
TRENCH ART
Definitions of Trench Art are notoriously vague, the term itself an evoca-
tive misnomer. Where the National Army Museum refers to it as ‘Dec-
orative Arts’, the Royal Air Force Museum labels it ‘Commemorative
Art’, the National Maritime Museum keeps it in the Antiquities Depart-
ment, and the Imperial War Museum allocates it to its Department of
Exhibits and Firearms. A survey of over 100 regimental museums
throughout the United Kingdom reveals similar ambiguity, with curators
recognizing the term ‘Trench Art’ while questioning its validity and defi-
nition (Saunders, n.d.a).
The problems of terminology are clearly linked to constituency. One
well-known book on military collectables regards Trench Art as First and
Second World War objects of metal, cloth, bone and wood made as sou-
venirs both during and after these conflicts (Lyndhurst, 1983: 182–5).
Strictly speaking the net should be cast more widely, to include objects
made by, for example – Napoleonic prisoners of war, soldiers in the
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Franco–Prussian and Boer wars, as well as those who fought in, or were
affected by, every 20th-century conflict (including Bosnia-Hercegovina –
see Saunders, 2000c; Saunders and Wenzel, n.d.). Any attempt to order
this material requires a working definition. That adopted here is: ‘any
item made by soldiers, prisoners of war, and civilians, from war matériel
directly, or any other material, as long as it and they are associated tem-
porally and/or spatially with armed conflict or its consequences’ (see Saun-
ders n.d.a. for detailed discussion).
To avoid problems raised by such inclusivity, and yet open a
meaningful debate, this article maintains a narrow focus – the unique
corpus of metal forms produced during the Great War and inter-war
years along the Western Front and which gave its name to the genre.
Specifically, items made from shells, shell cases, detonators, bullets,
grenades, shrapnel, numerous ship parts, aircraft wire and engine parts,
and a host of miscellaneous metal scrap. Apart from introducing metal
Trench Art to material culture studies (pace Walters, 1997: 63), I have
three main purposes here: to bring a degree of order to its heterogeneous
mass of objects, to explore the social lives of these artefacts, and, more
widely, to illustrate the potential of a material culture approach to the
study of the Great War – indeed, all war (Saunders, 2000a).
From a material culture perspective (Editorial, 1996; and see
V&A/RCA, 1998, 1999), the study of Trench Art intersects many issues
which concern archaeology and anthropology. Trench Art pieces are
objectifications of the self, symbolizing grief, loss, and mourning (e.g.
Maas and Dietrich, 1994); are poignantly associated with memory and
landscape; and with issues of heritage, and museum displays which
increasingly emphasize the common soldier’s experience of war. They
are associated also with pilgrimage and tourism – particularly as regards
their symbolic status as souvenirs – within which field their worked
forms are ambiguously situated alongside the ‘raw’ unaltered memen-
toes of war (see Kwint, 1998: 261; Richardson, 1996). In addition, such
objects are a prime example of recyclia (Saunders, 2000b; and see Cerny
and Seriff, 1996). In short, metal Trench Art is an embodiment of the
complex relationship between human beings and the things they make,
use, and recycle – in the physical, spiritual, and metaphorical worlds
they construct and inhabit.
Hitherto, ‘Great War Art’ has referred usually to paintings (e.g.
Gough, 1997; Harries and Harries, 1983; Holmes, 1918; and see Cork,
1994), and also to architectural memorials erected at home and abroad,
mainly between 1919 and 1937 (e.g. Boorman, 1988; Borg, 1991).
Although the grim, mechanical, anti-human aspects of the war were
reflected in such art as La Guerre and Cannon in Action by the painter Gino
Severini (Silver, 1989: 75–6, Figs 41,42), the war was seen by many artists
as a valueless and formless experience which could not be rendered by
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the conventions of the day (Hynes, 1990: 108; and see Nash, 1998: 29–30).
Artists and writers approached it as archaeologists sorting through some
gigantic midden – the ‘heap of broken images’ of which Eliot’s poem The
Waste Land is constituted (Hynes, 1990: 394–5).
Paintings and memorials represented war from a distance, spatially
and temporally. They connected through impressions, possessing little
or no sensuous or tactile immediacy. By contrast, metal Trench Art was
made from the waste of war, its varied forms incorporating the agents
of death and mutilation directly. Anonymously responsible for untold
suffering and bereavement, expended shells, bullets and shrapnel were
worked into a variety of forms, engaging visual, olfactory, tactile, and
sometimes auditory senses, as well as memory. For civilian buyers, these
objects also engaged the senses (though differently), often becoming an
integral part of the ‘house-world’ of the owner, articulating the ritualized
habits of domestic space in a complex working-out of personal emotions
in the inter-war years.
Rich in symbolism and irony, metal Trench Art is a complex kind of
material culture, whose physicality and nature make it a unique media-
tor between men and women, soldier and civilian, individual and indus-
trialized society, the nations which fought the war, and, perhaps most of
all, between the living and the dead.
FRAGMENTS AS CATEGORIES
Trench Art today appears a vaguely defined body of ‘lumpen ephemera’
whose classificatory limbo enables it to be regarded and sold as antiques,
militaria, bric-a-brac, ‘awkward’ museum pieces, curios and souvenirs.
Behind this façade of ambiguity, a tangled mass of symbolism reveals
changing social attitudes and cultural valuations linked indissolubly to
the Great War and its aftermath.
Hitherto, the sheer quantity and diversity of this material appears to
have discouraged any attempt at description or analysis. Nevertheless, it
is possible to disentangle some of the strands and to identify a number
of categories each with its own spatial, temporal, and physical features,
and symbolic associations. The meanings of these categories lie not only
in variable form and use, but also in the trajectories the objects have
taken (Appadurai, 1986: 6), and in what Pels (1998: 94) has called the
‘spirit of matter’ – the ability of material objects to ‘speak’ and ‘act’ on
their own (as well as through a multitude of interpreters).
Metal Trench Art is a prime example of the social nature of artefact
variability (Miller, 1985: 1) – its different kinds reflecting changes in
British (and wider European) society in the wake of war, serving to repro-
duce the society (or that part of it) which consumed them. In the quarter
century between 1914 and 1939, the various kinds of metal Trench Art
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made by the war generation – together with memorials, cenotaphs, and
remembrance ceremonies (see King, 1998) – became part of the suc-
ceeding generation’s given environment, structuring their perceptions
and constructing them as subjects. In this sense, as Miller (1985: 204–5)
says, ‘objects do not merely constitute a given world which can be thus
manipulated, but ... these same objectifying processes also have con-
sequences for the creation of the artefactual world itself’. Metal Trench
Art helps us to understand a world which it simultaneously constituted.
Although it is possible to provide ‘cultural biographies’ (pace Kopy-
toff, 1986) for several broad categories, it is unlikely that all items will
be identified or classified. There are simply too many which do not fit,
or which transgress neat boundaries to appear in more than one cat-
egory. Ubiquitous metal matchbox covers, for example, were made by
front-line soldiers, service personnel in rear areas, local civilians both
during and after the conflict, and prisoners of war (e.g. LC: PNM 26,
POW 9). While similarity of form cannot be taken to imply convergence
of meaning, it appears that classificatory ‘untidyness’ is an integral and
significant part of the nature of this material.
The three categories formulated below are an initial attempt at order-
ing a vast array of objects, and are based on a limited though broadly
representative number of examples.
PART 1: CATEGORIES OF TRENCH ART
CATEGORY 1: 1914–19
Trench Art made by soldiers – in the front-line or rear areas – is the
smallest category numerically speaking as its manufacture was restricted
to the period of war and demobilization. Nevertheless, it displays the
greatest variety of forms.
While many soldiers carved in chalk, wood, or bone in the trenches,
conditions under fire were always thought to have precluded manu-
facture of anything other than the crudest metal objects. This assump-
tion concealed a far more interesting truth. Many sophisticated items
were indeed made in ‘view of the enemy’.
In the early years of the war, French and Belgian soldiers made finger
rings from the aluminium parts of incoming German shells. These were
melted down, poured into a mould, then filed, engraved, and polished
(R.W., 1915; and see Becker, 1998: 100). Particularly revealing is the
account of a British soldier who whiled away the hours in the trenches
by buying ‘a transfer from a Belgian soldier for five woodbines ... then
transferred the design to a shell with a bent nail ...’. In this way he dec-
orated two 18-pounder shell cases with ‘nouveau style female figures and
flowers’, inscribing one ‘Souvenir of Loos’, the other ‘Souvenir of Ypres’
Saunders: BODIES OF METAL, SHELLS OF MEMORY
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(IWM, 131/89 CUP 5 Shelf 1). On returning home, he polished and lac-
quered them, keeping both on his mantelpiece for 60 years.
The bulk of this category however was made in safer rear areas
(Figure 1) by off-duty soldiers, and especially farriers, Royal Engineers,
and service battalions such as the Chinese Labour Corps. The latter
made it their business to find out which regiments were in the area, and
then made metal Trench Art items decorated with appropriate badges
and buttons to sell as souvenirs (Angela Kelsall, pers. comm. 1998). The
Royal Engineers were similarly opportunistic as revealed by an extra-
ordinary cache of half-finished and completed bullet letter-openers and
bullets decorated with badges from various regiments stored inside two
polished and lidded 4.5-inch howitzer cartridge cases (LC: S22; and see
Anon., 1998: colour illustration).
Typical examples of category 1 items include:
i. Cigarette lighters made from bullets.
ii. Matchbox covers made from brass or steel scrap (Figure 2).
iii. Letter openers made from bullets and scrap, sometimes inscribed,
and often with badges attached.
iv. Tobacco boxes and cigarette cases.
v. Military caps made from the base of shells.
vi. Pens made from bullet cartridge cases.
vii. Finger rings made from aluminium or brass.
Journal of MATERIAL CULTURE 5(1)
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FIGURE 1 Belgian soldiers decorating artillery shell cases north of Ypres
B1186 147, Collections Musée royal de l’Armée, Bruxelles
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viii. Miscellaneous
personal items
decorated with,
or made from,
bullets or shell
fragments.
ix. Decorated artil-
lery shell cases.
Apart from the
obvious functionality
of many such items,
more elaborate pieces
were also produced:
an officer’s ‘swagger
stick’ artfully made
from bullets in the
Imperial War Mus-
eum (Saunders and
Cornish, n.d.), and miniature biplanes produced from bullet cartridges
and metal scrap (e.g. Lyndhurst, 1983: 182–3). While many objects were
made ‘on spec’, others were clearly made to order, engraved with a
man’s name, and occasionally rank and regiment. This personalization
has led many relatives to mistakenly attribute manufacture directly to a
grandfather or uncle (Jane Peek, pers. comm. 1998). It is clear that most
examples were made by individuals who had the time, safe location,
expertise, and access to tools with which to cut, smooth, shape, weld,
solder, and engrave metal.
Category 1 ceased to be made in the period between the Armistice
of November 1918 and the signing of the Peace Treaty of Versailles in
July 1919, during which time the majority of servicemen were demobil-
ized and returned home.
CATEGORY 2: 1914–39
Economic deprivation and the incredible mélange of available war debris
produced a thriving civilian industry in metal Trench Art in France and
Belgium for 25 years. Partly as a consequence, category 2, sub-divided
into a and b sections, was by far the largest quantitatively speaking.
Items were mainly ornamental rather than functional, and the variety of
shapes fewer than category 1.
Differences between sub-categories 2a and 2b are important yet
paradoxically often difficult to establish. In both cases, identical forms
often were made by the same people with the same techniques. With
Saunders: BODIES OF METAL, SHELLS OF MEMORY
49
FIGURE 2 Brass matchbox cover, decorated with
two halves of a 303 bullet, and a button. The simple
style of engraving, together with the inscription
suggests it was made by a soldier in the months
before final demobilization
Photo: N.J. Saunders
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the exception of dated pieces, and those whose inscriptions implied a fin-
ished war, differences were less dependent on form and substance than
on changing relations of production and consumption associated with
the temporal shift from war to peace. While 2a was sold to Allied and
German soldiers during the war, 2b was sold to war widows, pilgrims,
and battlefield tourists between 1919 and 1939.
Typical examples of category 2 items include:
i. Brass shell cases, sometimes shaped, often decorated with floral
designs (Figure 3), and frequently engraved with the name of a town
and/or region, a date, and such inscriptions as ‘Souvenir of the Great
War’.
ii. Ashtrays made from or decorated with shell cases and bullet car-
tridges, sometimes inscribed, and often more elaborate than category
1 examples.
Journal of MATERIAL CULTURE 5(1)
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FIGURE 3 Pair of British 18
pounder brass artillery shell cases,
one dated 1917, the other 1918, and
decorated with ‘holly and berry’
design
Photo: N.J. Saunders
FIGURE 4 Brass letter-opener, made
from a 1918 303 bullet. The engraving,
in simple style, says ‘The World War
1914–18.’ Note the ‘Cross of Sacrifice’
element, and the ‘smoke plume’
crescent blade
Photo: N.J. Saunders
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iii. Letter openers, often inscribed and sometimes more elaborate than
category 1 examples (Figure 4).
iv. Bullet-crucifixes made of cartridges with Christ figures or regimen-
tal badges attached.
v. Small decorated shell cases often mounted on a tripod of British,
German, or French bullets.
Sub-category 2a: 1914–18. In a war-ravaged economy, civilian manu-
facture of metal Trench Art quickly developed into a cottage industry.
Allied and German armies were large, if shifting, markets for such items.
French and Belgian civilians often found themselves caught on different
sides of the front-line, making Trench Art which could be sold as fortune
decreed. For example, brass matchbox covers exist which depict the
typical spiked German picklehaube helmet on one side, the inscription
‘Gott mit uns’ on the other, and ‘Fabrique en France’ inscribed along the
spine (Ken Dunn, pers. comm. 1998).
A unique and intriguing aspect of this sub-category centres on the
wartime legal status of expended British shells. Officially, these were
not scrap, and, wherever possible, were collected into dumps, returned
to Britain and re-filled (Figure 5). Using them to make Trench Art was
technically illegal. In practice, different nationalities and the quantities
of shells involved meant there was always a ready supply of such raw
materials.
Saunders: BODIES OF METAL, SHELLS OF MEMORY
51
FIGURE 5 Soldiers resting on a dump of artillery shell cases fired during the
Battle of Polygon Wood, on the Ypres–Menin Road, Belgium, 30 September 1917
Photograph courtesy of Imperial War Museum, London
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Sub-category 2b: 1919–39. After the Armistice, harsh economic realities
persisted along the Western Front. Towns were devastated and a pri-
marily agricultural landscape rendered useless (and dangerous) by satu-
ration shelling. In the Ypres salient, up to five unexploded shells could
be found in one square metre, and some 5000 kilos of shrapnel and det-
onators per hectare (Derez, 1997: 443). Collecting and neutralizing this
was no longer stealing but patriotic duty in advance of reconstruction
(Clout, 1996; and see Winter, 1979: 263). Yet, an ever increasing quan-
tity of raw material with which to make Trench Art was matched by a
correspondingly rapid decrease of soldiers to buy it.
Between 1919 and 1939 however, a new market appeared in the large
(albeit fluctuating) numbers of pilgrims and tourists visiting the battle-
fields and their associated memorials and cemeteries (Lloyd, 1994). Iron-
ically, those who once sold metal Trench Art to British soldiers now sold
often identical items to the bereaved widows, sweethearts and relatives
of servicemen who had not returned. More ironic still, some of the
bereaved must have bought souvenirs fashioned from the very shells and
bullets which they themselves had produced in munitions factories
during the war.
In 1939, the advent of the Second World War stopped the flow of pil-
grims and visitors, and the market for category 2b items abruptly ended.
CATEGORY 3: C. 1918–C. 39
Made in Britain (and possibly elsewhere) mainly after the Armistice,
this is the most clearly defined category, temporally, spatially, in its dis-
tinctive forms, and in the identity of its manufacturers. Objects were
fashioned from the ‘raw’ unworked materials of war brought back as
souvenirs by returning service personnel, rather than the (usually)
anonymous finished items of category 2. Manufacture was a commer-
cial undertaking by various British firms such as the Army and Navy
Store (Figure 6), who offered to personalize soldiers’ memorabilia by
creating distinctive designs and mounting them typically on an
ebonized base.
Often more elaborate than category 2 items, these mounted (and
thus essentially ‘civilized’) forms were sometimes referred to as
‘Mounted War Trophies’. They clearly owed much to British imperial tra-
ditions of displaying shields-and-spears, lion heads and tiger skins, from
encounters in the far flung corners of empire.
Typical examples of category 3 items include:
i. Clocks made from shells and bullets.
ii. Lamps and candlesticks from shells and bullets.
iii. Inkwells, made from grenades and/or shrapnel.
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iv. Simple mounted shrapnel fragments.
v. Various size ‘cups’ made from shell parts.
vi. ‘Table gongs’ made from different size shell cases suspended from
an ornate frame.
Saunders: BODIES OF METAL, SHELLS OF MEMORY
53
FIGURE 6 Army and Navy Store advertisement for the mounting of ‘War
Trophies’
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Almost all were designed for the domestic peacetime lives of return-
ing soldiers, taming the experience of war, softening harsh memories,
and embodying the ‘swords into ploughshares’ philosophy – a phrase
sometimes engraved on such pieces. They probably functioned as visual
reminders of wartime experiences – a bullet or piece of shrapnel which
had wounded but not killed, a reminder of an all too close brush with
eternity. The manufacture of this category seems to have ceased by the
beginning of the Second World War, though possibly earlier.
PART 2: TRENCH ART BIOGRAPHY AND MEMORY
What emerges from this assessment is the existence of different kinds
of metal Trench Art – each resonating in distinctive ways with those
who came (and continue to come) into contact with it. Meanings were
not fixed in wartime or afterwards, and a single object could elicit a
variety of responses. I will now explore some of these responses
together with the wider connections and deeper issues associated with
these artefacts.
MEMORIES OF METAL AND LANDSCAPE
The emotive, enduring, and largely misleading term Trench Art origi-
nated with category 1, and is forever linked to the resonances these
objects had for soldiers. Perhaps nowhere is the object’s capacity to
embody soldiers’ experiences of war more apparent than in the account
by Sapper Stanley K. Pearl (Australian 5th Field Company Engineers) of
his making a Trench Art clock. This rare ‘unpacking’ of details offers a
glimpse of the wealth of information and associations now largely lost.
The piece was
Made at Ypres in March 1918. The case was made from two 4.5-inch shell-
cases picked up on Christmas Day 1917 at the Australian batteries at Le
Bizet. The foot support is a clip of an 18-pounder shell. The arms are
detonator wells of rifle-grenades and nose-caps. The hands are from a gun-
cotton case, while the alarm cover is an American-made 18-pounder nose-
cap with a ‘whizz-bang’ driving-band. The Rising Sun is the badge of a mate
killed at Noreuil, while a button from the maker’s greatcoat and a German
bullet surmount the whole. (AWM, 14155)
Exposed to hitherto unimaginable quantities of bombs, mortars,
shrapnel, and bullets, servicemen like Sapper Pearl developed an
ambiguous relationship with the metals of war – hardly surprising when
almost three-quarters of wounds sustained were shell wounds (Winter,
1979: 117). The confusions of battle and its aftermath mixed metal and
flesh in a grisly mosaic. As Sergeant H.E. May observed in the Ypres
salient in 1917, such a scene
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... was a vision indescribable in its naked horror. Pieces of metal that once
were cannon; and, if good Krupp steel had been so shattered, what of the
humans who served the steel? Heads, legs, arms, trunks, pieces of rotting
flesh, skulls that grinned hideously, bones cleaned by exposure, lay about in
hopeless riot. (May, 1997: 200)
The impossibility of reconstituting men’s bodies was in stark and
ironic contrast to the creation of metal Trench Art from the scattered
remains of shells, bullets, and shrapnel.
The intensity of physical and psychological experiences endured in
battle led not only to shell-shock (see Simpson, 1996), but also, possibly,
to stripping away the atomising effects of modernity, and inducing
synaesthesic experiences in some individuals. In other words, destroy-
ing the dominance of the visual (especially in trenches and dugouts), and
reinstating the olfactory, auditory, and tactile elements of sensory experi-
ence (see Eksteins, 1990: 146,150–1; and Howes, 1991: 3–5). In this way,
perhaps, new meanings were ascribed to the lights, sounds, smells,
tastes, and vibrations of war on such a massive scale – and which are
such a feature of memoirs and war poetry (e.g. Blunden, [1928] 1982;
Sassoon, [1930] 1997).
An indication of this heightened sensory experience is provided by
Private Alexander Paterson who, during his time on the Western Front,
developed
... an expert knowledge of all the strange sounds and smells of warfare,
ignorance of which may mean death ... My hearing was attuned to every
kind of explosion ... My nostrils were quick to detect a whiff of gas or to
diagnose the menace of a corpse disinterred at an interval of months.
(Paterson, 1997: 239)
In such conditions, hopelessness overwhelmed many soldiers,
leading them to believe every incoming shell was inscribed with a man’s
name (Bourke, 1996: 77) – a fate perhaps deflected in popular imagination
by having one’s name already engraved on a talismanic bullet (and see
Becker, 1998: 100). The vast quantities of ordnance fired reinforced such
fatalism on a grindingly regular basis. In the preliminary bombardment
for the Third Battle of Ypres in July 1917, the Royal Artillery alone fired
4,283,550 rounds (Terraine, 1992: 218), and, during the whole battle, the
Germans discharged some 18 million shells (Werth, 1997: 329). Soldiers
on both sides inhabited landscapes whose terrible sights and associations
yielded not only an inexhaustible supply of raw materials for metal
Trench Art – but guaranteed the finished objects themselves would be
deeply ambiguous.
The metallic landscapes of the Western Front were quickly etched
into historical consciousness as industrialized slaughter-houses and
vast tombs for ‘the missing’. Although trench warfare was largely static,
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battlefields were metaphysically unstable places. Once tilled for crops,
the fields of Picardy, Artois, and Flanders were ‘drenched with hot metal’
(Terraine, 1996: 9), transformed from rural idylls to unrecognizable
wastelands. These other-worldly landscapes were a malodorous and
bizarre mixture of ‘putrefaction and ammunition, the presence of the
dead among the living, literally holding up trench walls from Ypres to
Verdun ...’ (Winter, 1995: 68–9).
Memoirs, newspaper reports, and official accounts, describe this
desolation with words like ‘skeleton’, ‘gaunt’, and ‘broken’ – imagery
which associates landscape, village, and human corpse. The result was
‘... a close connection, an osmosis between the death of men, of objects,
of places.’ (Audoin-Rouzeau, 1992: 81). Bomb-shattered churches were
places of spiritual unease for Catholic French soldiers – in one cemetery,
the face of a shell-shattered Christ was observed ‘dripping with rain,
[appearing] to reflect an infinity of suffering and sadness’ (La Saucisse
June 1917, quoted in Audoin-Rouzeau, 1992: 85). The materiality of such
emotions was objectified in the distinctive and often talismanic kind of
metal Trench Art known as the ‘bullet crucifix’ – typically made from
several bullet cartridges with a crucified Christ attached (Figure 7) (and
see Becker, 1994: Fig. 8).
The bullet-crucifix’s wider symbolic dimensions associated its minia-
ture form variously with the pre-war roadside calvaries of France and
Belgium, their wartime use as markers by soldiers (e.g. Spagnoly and
Journal of MATERIAL CULTURE 5(1)
56
FIGURE 7 Bullet-crucifix, made
from 303 bullet cartridges, decorated
with a commercially made Christ
figure. Although the tripod bullets
date to 1916, 1917 and 1918, the
miniature plaque showing the
completed Menin Gate Memorial to
the Missing at Ypres, dates this
piece to 1927 or after, indicating it
was made as a souvenir for
battlefield pilgrims and tourists
Photo: N.J. Saunders
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Smith, 1997: 11–12; and see Becker, 1998: x), the ‘miraculous’ survival
of some – such as ‘Crucifix Corner’ on the Somme (Middlebrook and
Middlebrook, 1994: 164) – and the setting up or restoration of calvaries
and cruciform memorials after the war (e.g. Holt and Holt, 1996: 123;
Middlebrook and Middlebrook, 1994: 103). The popularity of these items
outlived the war to become a common souvenir for battlefield pilgrims
and tourists between 1919 and 1939, with object and landscape merging
with memory and loss (see later).
IRONIES OF PRODUCTION
The ambiguity and irony so characteristic of soldiers’ attitudes to metals
and metal Trench Art was also highly gendered. Trench Art began life
as ordnance in munitions factories where women were transformed
from the Edwardian ideal of pacific nurturers of the race to primary pro-
ducers of weapons of war and mass destruction (Ouditt, 1994: 77; Wool-
lacott, 1994: 7) (Figure 8). Attempts to justify this drew parallels between
making bombs and making babies, referring to the womb of the shell
being loaded with its deadly charge (Hall Caine quoted in Ouditt, 1994:
78–9) – a modern counterpart of attitudes in traditional metalworking
societies, where the creation of metal objects is explicitly associated with
Saunders: BODIES OF METAL, SHELLS OF MEMORY
57
FIGURE 8 Women and men in a shell-filling factory
Photograph courtesy of Imperial War Museum, London
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the processes of pregnancy and child delivery (e.g. Rowlands and
Warnier, 1993: 524).
Munitions work gave women social and economic independence. At
the end of 1915, 400 women worked at the Woolwich Arsenal, a figure
which had increased to 27,000 by November 1918 (Ouditt, 1994: 72). All
together, some 400,000 women left domestic service between 1914 and
1918 mainly to work in munitions factories (Braybon, 1995: 148–9). Yet,
as women emerged from ‘below stairs’ into the well-lit well-paid world
of factory work (Woollacott, 1994: 4–5), men descended into the dark
and dangerous world of trenches and dugouts. War matériel – metal
Trench Art’s raw material – stood at the crossroads of these two move-
ments, liberating women but entrapping men.
Women were often ambivalent about this new work. Some felt they
were doing their bit: ‘... every time you fire your gun you can remem-
ber I am helping to make the shells ...’ (Alec Tweedie quoted in Ouditt,
1994: 74), while others were less sure: ‘... here I was working twelve
hours a day towards the destruction of other people’s loved ones ... indi-
rectly I was responsible for death and misery’ (Peggy Hamilton, quoted
in Ouditt, 1994: 77).
The industrialization of armament manufacture produced greater
quantities of arms than ever before, and yielded dead and maimed in
industrial numbers. In this sense, we can perhaps agree with Allain
Bernède (1997: 91) that ‘the front ... [was] ... nothing but the con-
tinuation of the factory.’ Women and men had a distinctive relationship
with the metals of war – it objectified and scarred them both, maiming
men and leaving the munitionettes with the yellow skin and orange hair
characteristic of TNT poisoning (Woollacott, 1994: 12).
SOUVENIRS, LANDSCAPE, AND RE-MADE MEN
The sheer numbers of ‘the missing’, together with the British decision
not to repatriate the dead (Winter, 1995: 27), ensured a continuous flow
of visitors to the old Western Front (and elsewhere) during the inter-war
years. A significant proportion of these appear to have returned home
with Trench Art souvenirs (and see Lloyd, 1994: 131). Such objects were
often the only material reminder of the dead; in the distancing process
between rememberer and remembered, ‘the memory of the body [was]
replaced by the memory of the object’ (Stewart, 1994: 133).
Items were purchased for various reasons: as souvenirs of a visit,
as acts of worship to the deceased’s memory, and of solidarity and
empathy with local people for whom their loved ones had died and
whose economic hardships were everywhere apparent. As Lloyd (1994:
50) observes, ‘Both Belgium and France looked to tourism to help
rebuild their shattered economies.’ Above all, perhaps, pilgrims were
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spiritually re-united with the dead through acquiring Trench Art,
becoming objectified in the strange conglomerations of shells, bullets,
badges and shrapnel. Forever separated from the immediacy of war, pil-
grims ‘authenticated’ their experiences through purchasing souvenirs
(Stewart, 1994: 134).
In a manner akin to the sacred places of traditional societies (e.g.
Carmichael et al., 1994), the Western Front became a symbolic land-
scape of remembrance (Winter, 1995) – a place where personal and cul-
tural identities were explored and created (Tilley, 1994: 15, 26). Visiting
such areas was a journey beyond the killing fields, it was a voyage
through time and memory, sometimes textured by letters, war poetry,
memoirs, and regimental diaries. It is at this juncture, that Trench Art-
as-souvenir intersects with landscape, enveloping the past within the
present, creating meaning by its material yet metonymic relationship
to its ‘natural’ location (Stewart, 1994: 133, 136, 151; see also Saunders,
1999).
If, as has been suggested (Hillman and Mazzio, 1997; Stewart, 1994:
125; Tilley, 1994) – the human body is a way of relating to and per-
ceiving the world – then the fragmentation of corpses, artefacts, and
landscape, joined together to fragment reality. This is reflected in the
Historial de la Grande Guerre in Péronne, where splendidly baroque
examples of metal Trench Art are displayed in cases adjacent to graphic
instances (including a video presentation) of reconstructive surgery (see
Bamji, 1996), including mechanical limbs – a disturbing reminder and
powerful distillation of the theoretical point that objects make people
just as much as people make objects (e.g. Miller, 1998: 3; Pels, 1998:
101).
POLISHED MEMORIES, AMBIGUOUS DISPLAYS
The souvenirs which the pilgrims collected enabled them to carry home a
tangible link with the memory, or even the spirit, of the dead. (Lloyd, 1994:
185)
As an integral part of the ‘house-worlds’ of their owners (see Sixsmith
and Sixsmith, 1990: 20), metal Trench Art items played a variable and as
yet largely unquantified role in the working out of personal grief and loss
amongst bereaved families (and see Wenzel, 1980: 1,121); in the expres-
sion of personal pride in achievement and survival amongst returning
soldiers, and in their recollection of deeply formative experiences (e.g.
Methley, 1939). For women who had produced armaments and then lost
a loved one, shells and bullets were simultaneously a manifestation of
economic independence and contribution to the war effort, and – trans-
formed into Trench Art – a constant reminder of loss. For all concerned,
artefacts taken home and placed in domestic space, mediated between
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past and present lives, moving history into private time by juxtaposing
it with a personalized present (see Stewart, 1994: 138).
The object’s capacity to evoke different emotions was determined
by whether or not the serviceman had returned. Some items which
later became objectifications of loss had originally been sent home with
pride as souvenirs by a soldier who later died. The complexities of this
are illustrated by the following account written by a soldier to his
mother.
By now you may have received two shell cartridges ... They are quite safe,
as they are only the empty cartridges from which the shell has been fired,
and when engraved they make quite nice souvenirs.... If the maids have
time they might clean them with brass polish. I should suggest putting them
on the hall mantelpiece. (LC: Letter from Col. N.B. Chaffers, 19/9/15)
As a material expression of the self, metal Trench Art created a social
universe of shared experiences, emotions, and hopes (see Friedman,
1994: 115). For the bereaved, placing a metal letter opener or pair of pol-
ished shells on the mantelpiece, in the hallway, or on a bedside dresser,
was a constant reminder of the deceased. Most items, being made of
brass, tarnished quickly, giving rise to a domestic routine of cleaning and
polishing which probably had therapeutic effects for the bereaved. So
obsessive did this behaviour sometimes become that over decades
personalized inscriptions were erased almost completely (Bill Abbitt,
pers. comm. 1998).
Elsewhere, especially in continental Europe, ‘mourning’ or ‘mem-
orial’ jewellery was made from re-cycled weaponry and metals, and had
similarly therapeutic qualities (Maas and Dietrich, 1994). While one can
only guess at the emotions and memories unleashed or contained by
seeing, cleaning, or wearing these items – sometimes for upwards of 60
years – it was nevertheless ironic that objects made for killing should be
tended and regarded so lovingly.
As Whalen (1984: 37) notes for post-war Germany,
... a vast amount of the war victim’s energy was directed toward compre-
hending what death had done to them, toward enclosing the experience of
violence and death in some sort of symbolic system.
Metal Trench Art was part of that system, at least in Britain, and prob-
ably also in France and Belgium (and see Saunders, n.d.b).
CHANGING RESONANCES, RETAILING MEMORIES
The ideas and values which Great War Trench Art symbolized faded
with the Second World War for several reasons. Many soldiers who sur-
vived the First World War were killed in the Second, remembered for
the conflict which killed them not the one they survived. After 1945,
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the British public was much concerned with mourning a new generation
of the dead and in reconstructing their towns and cities. Memories of
the dead of both wars were conflated in acts of joint remembrance,
further distancing many from the unique and distinctive features of the
Great War.
The 1950s and early 1960s saw the low point of public interest in
the Great War, and in visits to the old Western Front. Trench Art became
an unfashionable anachronism, often worth more as scrap metal than
objects of Great War history. However, in the mid-1960s, with the com-
memorations (and notably, television coverage) of the 50th anniversary
of the start of the Great War, interest increased. As numbers of visitors
to Great War battlefields rose, specialist tour companies appeared
(Walter, 1993: 63, 67–9), and there was a concomitant renewal of inter-
est in Trench Art – as souvenirs from abroad, and as collectors’ items in
the burgeoning militaria trade.
Today, the personalized values of Trench Art have largely disap-
peared along with the original owners and makers. Gradations of ‘con-
nective memory’ have been stripped away, leaving only highly relative
notions of commercial value. In Britain, dealers and collectors are some-
times a repository of anonymous memories through anecdotal infor-
mation which they receive from vendors as a ‘value-adding’ proof of
authenticity. Ambiguity however remains, as dealers, collectors, and
market-stall holders are often unsure how to describe or value such
objects. Some regard them as a waste of a good ‘clean’ shell, while others
see them as interesting and valuable objects from an 80-year-old war.
Market valuations fluctuate wildly. Some believe Trench Art is so abun-
dant that the market is ‘flat’, while others see it as increasingly rare and
accruing in value. The truth probably lies somewhere in between. Today,
some objects are being made as modern souvenirs, others are being faked
and passed off as originals, and some have been stolen from regimental
museums (e.g. Gammons, 1998).
In France and Belgium – i.e. along the old Western Front – metal
Trench Art is sold alongside a miscellany of defused bullets, buttons,
medals, officers’ whistles, and pieces of uniforms – presented as a
generalized category of souvenirs at the point of sale. While some items
are inevitably bought by great grandsons and great nephews of old
soldiers, the majority appear to be purchased by school children and vis-
itors simply as curios or souvenirs, in much the same way as caps,
badges, and keyrings are acquired from nearby Euro-Disney, Parc
Asterix, or the archaeological theme park at Samara (SG.n.d.).
The whole ‘Western Front Experience’, at least in the Somme
département (see Saunders n.d.a for a comparison between French and
Belgian attitudes), is now part of an integrated tourist circuit as con-
ceived and promoted by the official tourist office at Amiens (e.g. CDTS,
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n.d.; and see AISMG, n.d.; HGG, 1997). The social worlds and symbolic
landscapes of 80 years ago which metal Trench Art objectified, are now
overlain by and integrated within a reconfigured economic and political
reality. Through the constant movement and transformation of metal
Trench Art, the Great War continues to be re-cycled, materially and sym-
bolically.
CONCLUSIONS
The broken, fragmented world which the war produced found its minia-
ture in metal Trench Art – portable pieces of war made into whole items
of peace. These artefacts can be seen as three-dimensional manifesta-
tions of Whalen’s (1984: 45) point, that the grotesque nature of the war
had not been denied but rather aestheticized. The strange conglomera-
tions of shells and bullets were modernism embodied. As Hynes (1990:
195) observed, ‘... a Modernist method that before the war had seemed
violent and distorting was seen to be realistic on the Western Front.
Modernism had not changed, but reality had’.
Metal Trench Art can be seen as a materialization of widely held
post-war attitudes which articulated notions of dislocation and frag-
mentation. The war was seen as a ‘gap’ in history (Hynes, 1990: xi, 116),
time itself ruptured by a conflict which shattered not only human bodies
(e.g. Bourke, 1996), families and relationships (e.g. Audoin-Rouzeau,
1992: 136–7), but wider European notions of society, civilization, art, and
scientific progress as well (e.g. Booth, 1996; Silver, 1989: 1–2, 8). As
Camille Mauclair wrote, ‘The war has figuratively but powerfully dug a
trench between yesterday’s ideas and those of today ... We have all been
thrown outside ourselves ...’ (quoted in Silver, 1989: 27).
Such objects embodied the confusions of war as ambiguous
weapons transformed into ambiguous art, each object retaining visual
cues to the former lives of its constituent parts. In the debate on the
representation of space and reality, metal Trench Art recalls Fernand
Léger’s belief that Cubism was particularly appropriate to portray life
in the trenches, as in his 1917 painting The Card Party (Silver, 1989: 79,
Fig. 44). Cubism’s capacity to marry modern form with wartime sub-
jects through the agency of destruction could as well be applied to metal
Trench Art. The associations are suggestive – in one sense, metal Trench
Art is three-dimensional Cubism, and Cubist paintings verge on two-
dimensional representations of metal Trench Art recyclia. ‘Disguised’
as artistic souvenirs, these artefacts are associated also with the wider
relationship between Cubism and camouflage (see Dellouche, 1994;
Kahn, 1984).
In Some Reflections of a Soldier R.H. Tawney (1916, quoted in Hynes,
1990: 116) commented how on returning home from the front he felt like
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a visitor among strangers, separated from family by a veil unconsciously
made by those who
are afraid of what may happen to [their] souls if you expose them to the
inconsistencies and contradictions, the doubts and bewilderment, which lie
beneath the surface of things.
In its strange shapes and polished surfaces, metal Trench Art sym-
bolized the poignant confusions and ambiguities of war for those who
survived. It played with definitions of materiality and intent, and
revealed how the concentrated intensities of industrialized war could
redefine social, spiritual, and material worlds. By 1918, the pre-war
European order had lost its character as a natural phenomenon (see
Bourdieu, 1977: 168–9), the nexus of cause and event (Eksteins, 1990:
211). One consequence of this was a dizzying rush of cultural, social,
economic, and political upheavals and re-alignments that characterized
the inter-war years. From car-boot sales to the Imperial War Museum,
from French flea markets to L’Historial de la Grande Guerre, few kinds
of material culture have symbolized these momentous events so well, or
have endured so long, as metal Trench Art.
Acknowledgements
For guidance, encouragement, and criticism I wish to thank the following: Paul
Cornish (Imperial War Museum), Peter Liddle (Liddle Collection, Leeds Uni-
versity), Jenny Spencer-Smith and Oliver Buckley (National Army Museum),
Jane Peek and Peter Aitken (Australian War Memorial), Marion Wenzel (Bosnia-
Hercegovina Heritage Rescue Trust), Mike Rowlands, Danny Miller, Suzanne
Küchler, Christopher Tilley, and Barbara Bender (University College London),
Jay Winter (Cambridge University), Annette Becker (Paris X Nanterre), Ken
Dunn, James Brazier, Bill Abbitt, Steve Rarity, Ralph Thompson, Angela Kelsall,
Roger Lampaert (Zillebeke), John Woolsgrove (Ieper [Ypres]), Marius Kwint (Vic-
toria and Albert Museum, London), Lt. Col. L. Deprez-Wouts (Ieper [Ypres]), and
Joe and Yvonne Lyndhurst. I am especially grateful to University College London
for financial support to undertake fieldwork in France and Belgium in 1998, and
to the British Academy for the award of an Institutional Fellowship. I remain
solely responsible for what I have made of all this generosity of spirit and matter.
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◆NICHOLAS J. SAUNDERS is British Academy Institutional Fellow at Uni-
versity College London. His current research interests include the material
culture of the Great War and inter-war period (1914–39), the relationship between
landscapes of conflict and cultural memory, and the human experience of indus-
trialized warfare. Address: Department of Anthropology, University College
London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK. [email: nicholas.saunders@ucl.ac.
uk]
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