ABSTRACT
After almost one hundred years, as the memories of those individuals who fought in the major conflagration of the First World War fade, film and documentary evidence remain to inform our views of trench warfare (see Chapter 12). The sites of these battles have invariably been levelled, cultivated and built upon – and evidence of and from them is seen mainly in museums where artefacts and uniforms are used to tell the story. For those in the United Kingdom, these places are on foreign soil and do not provide the kind of permanent landscape reminder that, for example, pillboxes or airfields do for the Second World War. Bereft of such sites, we have become accustomed to view such encounters as events that occurred elsewhere and, until recently, archaeology appears to have contributed little to their understanding (see Schofield 2004; Saunders 2002).
