This is a funny story how history can change at one split moment of wrong interpertations.
Before I start, I have to tell you something about my background as a digger and what my interest is. For years I collect as much fired rifle cases I can find on a spot. This is most of the time a Trench we digged out. Fired rifle cases tells their own story of the man and his rifle, we do that by investigating the primer that tells alot in what condition the rifle was.
For instance if the rifle bore was clean, dirty or overheated, also the way the firingpin stroke the primer is an unique fingerprint. That way we can count the amount of rifles that were firing at that spot in the trench. At that point I was lucky because Fortin17 had one MG08 that was out of order, otherwise it will be more differcult and cost much time to split rifle cases from MG cases.
The manufacturer date (headstamps) can tell who was there in what period.
For instance:
British .303 date 1910 - 1912 and 1915 – 1917
French 8mm date 1911 - 1913
Mauser 7,92 date 1914 – 1916
These dates are not fiction and were found in Boezinge Fortin17.
We can see that this Trenchsystem was before April 1915 (2nd Battle of Ypres) in hands of combined French and British forces.
After April 1915 this became a German stronghold till the 3rd battle of Ypres end 1917 when British forces took this stronhold for their great push to Pilkem Ridge.
I was thrilled with this information, a complete history of a Trench still conserved in the ground.......this was awsome.
Till the moment a Texan friend asked me to investigate if Germany still used the old Type E ammo with roundnosed bullets in 1914-1915. As I did not found these and no headstamps were before 1908, I had to asked someone else of the group.
Aurel Sercu of the Diggers informed me that a week later on the duckboards (lowest point in the Trench) of Fortin17 roundnosed cartridges were found but that the headstamps were unreadable due by corrosian. The fired bullets were found in the neighbourhood of the International trench 75 meters away.
He send to me the picture of those cases as you can see in this article. And indeed they were very corroded with some rust traces of the clip.
But that does not matter, looking at the picture these are 100% E type ammo.........I thought!!!!
The strange thing about this ammo was the poor state of the brass, all cases I found on the duckboards were shinney brass as they felt down yesterday on the ground as you can see on the other picture. So how came these so poor as they were on the surface for 80 years????
Another problem is that the picture not show the actual size of this ammo, and the more I looked at it the more I had doubts.
I asked Aurel to measure them up and try to clean a headstamp for me for identification.
His reply was a big supprise as he measured 7,92X53.78 and the headstamp gave “VS 12 “
These cases were not German but Belgium M1889 ammo made in 1912. That was a bummer and a problem at the same time as Belgium troops were never in Boezinge, they were 5 km north at the Ijzer river/canal.
So what do we have here, a German with a caputered Belgium rifle (beutewaffen) ????
No....I don’t think so because the ammo was in a poor state, these came from the surface.
It took some time to figure it out where they came from till Tony de Bruyne told me that between 1932-1936 the Gendarmerie (Field Police) had their target practice on that spot using M1889 Carbine with pre WW1 manufactured ammo. ( I almost cried)
So during digging out that old Trench, this ammo felt down from the surface on the Duckboards as it was there all the time.
This accident almost pollute history and was a great lesson to be carefull when you dig.
Modern stuff can easily fall down, give you a totaly wrong idea or conclussions.
This happened two years ago in Ypres, and till today I can still laugh about it.
Yours
Chiel88
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