Helmet & Trench-Art from the Eismeer Front
- Inka
- 8 hours ago
- 5 min read
Lately both the Weather- and the Relic Gods have been mighty generous. Sun and warm weather have made everything come alive, and the plants are exploding all around us. The ground is ice free. Temperatures are between +12 and +20 Celsius. And the stinging- and biting insects have not yet begun their hunt for fresh blood, which makes this the best time of the year. It is summery, but without the hassle. The only hassle still is work, but with days off for digging ever so often it is bearable.
In the autumn I was searching through a small ditch, but which I hadn`t completed, so one of the recent mornings I brought my gear to open the ground on what was left of it. As I unloaded the backpack two hares suddenly came sprinting through the birch forest. I don`t know if they were escaping something or if they were chasing each other, but they zoomed past right in front of me and they were gone. A hilarious moment.
Lots of pebbles and rocks were layered under a web of roots but when I got that removed black, sooted soil appeared. Mixed with this were lots of broken- and partly melted glass and bits of cloth and metal.
Also half rotted pieces of gasmasks, cutlery rusted back to nearly nothing, food tins, a few bottles and fragments of different leather equipment came out of the burnt ditch.
In the category semi-interesting bits I dug up a bayonet scabbard, a lightning rod of the type that were usually mounted on top of electrical poles, a machinegun magazine I do not recognize, and a gebirgsjägers ice-/rock climbing boot cleat.
A quite nice find was a small broken compass, with on its back the owners name engraved, Viljami Korkalof.
At one point I thought I had found the bottom of the ditch, but probing a little bit more revealed that it was another, deeper layer of relics. I had to scoop out a ten centimeter layer of gravel, and on a meters depth I found what I belived was the corner of a crate. I knew it would take at least another hour of work freeing the box, so I took a short break for lunch and refreshed my energy.
The box was about a meter long, and when I finally managed to wriggle it loose and get it to the surface I felt it was something inside it. Hopefully something else than rocks and sand.
I pryed open the lid and found three medical bottles and several rusted food tins, so not the treasure that would free me forever. The dream contiunes..
Beneath the box was the bottom of the ditch, but with a bonus find though, a full gasmask
canister.
A few days later, after work, I decided to spend some hours trying to discover treasures. Into the forest I found a metal- and ant free place for my backpack to lay, and began looking around with the metal detector. Almost immediately I had a good signal. Directly under the moss, almost like a re-run of the dig two weeks ago, was a German helmet! Because of a bit
marshy ground here its rim was a bit crunchy, but I have dug out worse lids than this.
Fired up I continued the search. It was plenty of great signals around, but one after another they were all relatively modern rifle casings, with the odd wartime German ones in between.
After threehundred or so such signals I gave up and went to collect the backpack and helmet, which the ants had discovered and were crawling all over like a brown angry carpet.
So now there are ants in my car, pockets, stairs, relic pile and bathroom. Everywhere.
The next time I found my way to the woods the weather was just perfect. It was supposed to rain, but instead the clouds dispersed and it was all blue and sunny, and from early morning +15 Celsius.
I was searching around a barrack and the first signal from the Fisher F5 was a Klauenbeil, a German pioneer axe. Then I found a depot of five or six horseshoes and a bunch of ice cleat bolts. And a few meters away three Finnish 1 Markka coins lay on three-four centimeters depth.
A couple of hours in, and a half a kilometer walking, the metal detector picked up a large and fuzzy signal. I took away the top layer and began scraping the soil. Several large pieces of a crushed cast iron stove poked out of the ground, together with broken bottles. Also food tins, rusted and aluminum ones. Charcoal and melted blobs of glass. I checked if it went deep, but it looked like it was just a shallow fireplace on the surface where lots of junk from barracks had been thrown and torched.
Having gotten the top cover of broken bottles out of the way other relics popped up. The first item was a porcelain egg cup. No markings though. Then orange plastic shone through the dirt, the bottom of a soldiers fat container, the lid was there too, but it was destroyed.
More items made of early synthetic materials had survived the burning, a partly broken Zeiler field torch, bakelite losantine boxes, an ink pen, a drinking cup for a canteen, a razor and a toothbrush. The best bakelite find of the day though was a handle plate from a Leuchtpistole 43, which I also found the trigger part for. And of course lots of other junk were uncovered over the next hours, but nothing good and soon the relics seemed to dry out and disappear.
I checked around with the pinpointer and it signalled that it was metal a few places. Little did I know that the two best finds of the day were the reason behind it and lots of joy lay ahead.
We are saving the best one for last. So the next best find was the last find of the day and I have found such a tool three times before, but always broken which was of course depressing.
It was a quite nice German field kitchen can opener. Marked Reichsheer 1941. Sadly the wooden handles were gone, but they can be replaced, coz it looks like the opener could be made to work again.
The first of the two signals had a brass signature and I could feel it was a shell casing as I was dragging it out of the ground. A small caliber, 3.7 cm. But it was something else with it. The top of it was widened outwards, like on a trumpet, or a vase. The casing had been made into a vase! But that was not all. As I turned it around I saw words engraved, hammered into the metal in a beautiful font! Amazing!
When rinsing it in water it became much easier to see the words and decorations. Below the mouth of the casing I could see two reindeer heads facing eachother, and towards the bottom of the casing was an Edelweiss.
The writing on the top of the casing read Eismeer Front 41-44. And from the middle to the bottom Gruss von Deinem Gundobald.
Who Gundobald was, or who he intended this masterpiece for, will forever be a mystery, but I thank him for leaving it here between the ferns and birches for me to find.
This well made piece of trench-art might be the coolest one I have ever found. I will give it a very light cleaning, and gently try to remove the rust on the very bottom of it, and then find a nice way to display it.
I hope I didn`t spend all my luck for the season now all in one go! :)
Thanks for reading, and have a great week :)
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