Local youth touches WWI history

One hundred years ago last July, British and Commonwealth troops stepped off into the beauty of a high summer's morning in northern France - and into one of the most horrific slaughters of World War I.

It would go down in history as the Battle of the Somme - synonymous with futile attacks at enormous cost. The British forces lost nearly 20,000 killed on the first day of the battle on July 1, 1916. The battle would grind on until November 18. The British would lose 420,000 dead, wounded, captured or missing; the French 200,000; the Germans took 400,000 to 500,000 casualties.

Christopher Lundgren of Sisters visited the site of the Somme battlefield last summer, with his father Shane. The visit to the Somme battlefield museum and the Thiepval Memorial to the dead had a powerful effect on the 13-year-old from Camp Sherman.

Christopher is deeply interested in the Second World War and had done some reading on the First World War. But, he told The Nugget, "Seeing the actual landscape where people actually fought is something different altogether."

Christopher and Shane walked through the green fields of France, still scarred by the slashes of trenches and pockmarked with deep craters. They visited the multitude of battlefield cemeteries - 430 of which dot the rural landscape, where farmers still regularly unearth artillery shells from the months-long battle.

"A lot of them are just out in the middle of somebody's field," Shane noted.

The trench systems that locked the Western Front in slogging siege warfare for most of four years fascinated Christopher. The battlefield museum showed clearly the superiority of the German trench system at the Somme - concrete reinforced and relatively comfortable - which allowed them to withstand a bombardment so massive and intense that the low rumble of the guns could be heard across the Channel and all the way to London.

When he returned home, Christopher and his friends took up their spades and dug an elaborate trench system of their own in his yard in Metolius Meadows.

The spade-work, filling of sandbags and stringing of "barbed wire" was a whole lot like work.

"I learned how hard it is to make a trench," he said.

That really brought home to him the enormous enterprise that was the vast network of trenches that snaked from the English Channel to the Swiss border.

Asked what motivated his willingness to work so hard to create a facsimile of what he'd seen in France, he said, "I don't know. I just like digging I guess."

And he's been having fun building a potato gun and lobbing taters into the trenches. On Sunday, he narrowly missed a Nugget correspondent, who hunkered down as a potato sailed overhead and landed with a thud in the adjacent trench.

But there's something deeper than simple "fun" in digging in the dirt and shooting off a potato gun going on with the Sisters youth. His bedroom is a mini-museum of Second World War, First World War, and Cold War artifacts. Some of the World War II artifacts came from his Dutch grandfather, who "barely survived the Hunger Winter" of 1944-45 during the German occupation.

He is discovering how alive history can be when you dig in and put your hands on it - dirt and all.