For 45 years, it sat on the First World War veteran’s desk, a rusted grenade fused to a plate and surrounded by bullets. To his family, it was junk, but to the old soldier it was a reminder of his time in the bloody trenches of the Western Front.
Today, the veteran is gone, but the rusty souvenir remains. It sits in the collection of the National War Museum in Ottawa and is a favourite of historian Tim Cook, author of several books on the First World War, including a two-volume set about the history of Canadian soldiers during the war, At the Sharp End and Shock Troops.
Cook explained that the souvenir is an example of the many pieces of trench art that survived the war. “Trench art” were mementos fashioned by soldiers from the detritus of battle. Creating trench art wasn’t a uniquely Canadian phenomenon, he said, but something that was done by soldiers on both sides throughout the conflict.
“They are memory objects,” said Cook. “They are linked to a time and place. It may seem foreign to us that these soldiers would want pieces of the battlefield that are technically there to kill them, but this soldier in question, and many others, wanted to remember the war experience and they did so in a tangible way.”
Trench art’s history predates the Great War, but it flourished during that conflict with much of the art being fashioned from the mountains of expended brass artillery shells that littered the scarred landscape. It’s estimated that the British and Dominion armies alone fired 100 million artillery shells during the First World War, enough to fire 44 shells per second for every minute of every day of the entire war.
While many pieces were fashioned from brass in the form of vases, candlesticks, rings, snuff boxes and even clocks, typically with dates and names of the war’s great battles engraved upon them, trench art was fashioned from all sorts of different materials, notes Warrant Officer Jason Yardley, general manager of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry archives in Calgary.
He said that the regiment’s own collection has examples made from the wood of rifle butts, limestone found on Vimy Ridge, chalk from the trenches and even the propeller of an enemy plane shot down in 1918 by Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (PPCLI) soldiers near Merricourt, France.
Another unique example in the regiment’s collection is a snuff box fashioned from the hooves of Sandy, the horse of the regiment’s founder, Sir Andrew Hamilton Gault, which died during the war.
Yardley says that one reason for the explosion of popularity of trench art during the war is a contest sponsored by a French newspaper, Le Pays de France, which paid prizes for the best pieces.
While many soldiers wanted souvenirs to take home or to send to their families back in Canada, not all of them had the talent to actually create pieces of trench art, said Cook.
“It’s not an easy thing to take an 18-pound brass cannon shell and turn it into a flower vase,” he observed.
He said that it was likely people who were blacksmiths, ironworkers or engravers who actually had the ability to create pieces of trench art from brass casings that they would sell or trade with fellow soldiers.
Items that were traded for trench art were typically war prizes like enemy pistols, uniforms or caps, but they were often simply sold for cash.
Cook said that numerous items in the Canadian War Museum’s large trench art collection have Chinese designs on them and were likely created by some of the 100,000 Chinese labourers on the Western front, who supplemented their income by engraving those pieces.
Lindsey V. Sharman, the Curator of Art at the Founders’ Gallery of the Military Museums in Calgary thinks that some of the popularity of trench art was a combination of creativity plus people having a lot of time on their hands. “The experience of soldiers at war is not one of constant battle and perpetual moments of heightened excitement, but there is actually a lot of boredom,” she said.
“We are spoon fed entertainment and distractions constantly. If you look 100 years ago, you couldn’t just pull up Candy Crush on your iPhone and occupy yourself for several hours. You would more actively entertain yourself and those around you,” she said.
Sherman said that while trench art was fashioned out of battlefield remnants, soldiers would also create other forms of art in the form of sketches, poems, music, comedic skits and similar expressions of creativity.
“These were the best and the brightest that Canada,” said Sharman. “The percentage of people who went into the first World War with university degrees was far greater than the general population of Canada at the time so you had these extremely intelligent, extremely creative people who are going to the front lines and it’s there that they create things to pass the time and entertain themselves and find a little bit of escape from what they were seeing on the front lines which was, of course, very horrendous.”
Trench art is something of a misnomer as most of it was fashioned behind the front lines where things were a bit less hectic, added Warrant Officer Yardley.
Souvenirs were sometimes made by prisoners of war who would exchange them for food, cigarettes or money. They were even made in the years immediately after the war was over, often as make-work jobs for horribly wounded and disfigured soldiers who could no longer hold regular employment. Trench art from old shells continues to be made today in Europe, usually to sell to tourists who come to visit sites linked to the Great War.
“You go to any kind of corner store near the battlefields and they sell this stuff, but you don’t know the provenance,” said Cook at the National War Museum. “You don’t know if it’s from the time or, more likely, if someone just happened to do this in their backyard last year.”
Most of the surviving examples of trench art are unsigned so there aren’t many stories attached to them. They are occasionally mentioned in soldier’s letters home, but the fact is, said Cook, that creating trench art was against army rules so people wouldn’t put their names on them.
“What’s kind of sad in some way about this,“ said Cook, “is that these objects, these souvenirs, these memory devices that were held by the soldiers throughout their lives then go to the families and the families sort of lose the story, if they ever even knew it. Then they arrive at a museum and then they revert full circle to become just metal shell casings.”