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WWI soldiers - buried alive?

• Message 1.Β 

  Posted by Herewordless (U14549396) on Monday, 18th July 2011

  I saw a documentary on UK tv ages ago (Timewatch?) which investigated the theory that many dozens of men, suffering severe wounds and thus suspected/certified as dead, were possibly unwittingly buried alive.
  
  This almost happened to my great-grandfather.
  
  This disturbing theory was based upon exhumed British First World war graves which seemed to show alarming amounts of defined clawmarks on the inside of the wooden coffins at about chest height.
  
  From memory, I think that it was left inconclusive- perhaps the marks were caused by bodies being moved about by their innate natural gases, and the hands merely doing what they would have anyway, in such a confined space?

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• Message 2

  , in reply to message 1.

  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Monday, 18th July 2011

  Hereword
  
  Well in the mess of war all kinds of things were/are surely possible..
  
  And surely not all the dead were medically certified as dead.. And there was that strange phenomenon in the ten years or so after the war especially- featured in the film "The Awakening"- when men just turned rigid like statues as if dead.. Anyone suffering from this condition during the war one would have thought really risked getting buried.
  
  Though in fact the reference to coffins probably makes it more likely that such people were pronounced medically dead in the Field Hospitals. They were surely much more likely to be first buried in a coffin
  
  I remember the TV documantary "A Game of Ghosts" when one of the Somme veterans explained the procedure on the day after an offensive when parties were allowed into No Man's Land to rescue the wounded and bury the dead. These men had only the most basic First Aid training. But the work involved searching the body for identity tags and the all-important pocket book that each Tommy had in the pocket over his heart. Then the helmet was removed. The body was then buried in a temporary grave with the rifle (or perhaps just the bayonet) stuck in the ground, the identifying items hung on it, and the helmet placed on top to shelter from the rain.
  
  With all of this procedure to be gone through there was at least some chance that any sign of life would be detected..
  
  Of course there was the question of what kind of life-chances.. The same veteran told of how some Germans called him- "Tommy"- into their trench and took him to a wounded British soldier. He had met him in a previous unit. The man was very badly wounded with much of his bowels hanging out. He stuffed them back as well as he could, and applied a field dressing. Then he tried to carry or drag him back across No Man's Land.
  
  He had to stop frequently when the pain got too great. Eventually the wounded man said that the pain was just to great, and he had to leave him probably the night was falling too.
  
  The person recalling this said that he was haunted by that experience for over forty years, until on one visit to a War Memorial he saw that man's name- and he felt a whole heavy burden lift off his shoulders.
  
  I suppose if he had not been unarmed on that duty he might have carried out a mercy killing.. But perhaps he had a knife, a useful tool for that kind of work- searching dead and wounded. Perhaps he killed him and felt guilty. Perhaps he did not kill him and felt guilty.
  
  Surely war was/is Hell.
  
  Cass

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  Posted by Sambista (U4068266) on Tuesday, 19th July 2011

  Cass - Roger Waters included this story as "The Ballad of Bill Hubbard" on his album "Amused to Death" so people might be able to access it on the net.

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  Posted by rhmnney (U14528380) on Saturday, 30th July 2011

  What I understood after a battle the dead, before burial in a (blanket) the bottom tag of the identity discs was cut off and buried with the soldier, so when exhumed to body would be identified.

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