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Burial in Flanders fields - 1

Cement House Cemetery, near Langemark in Flanders. Burial of three unknown soldiers, November 2005

A cold November morning in Flanders fields where between the crosses, row on row, fresh graves wait. It is burial day. A few times a year corpses and parts of corpses, recently found, are given back to the earth.

Here, at Cement House Cemetery near the village of Langemark, the day starts with the burial of three unknown soldiers, whose remains were found by the Boesinghe Diggers in an industrial zone near the canal at nearby Boesinghe.

These Boesinghe Diggers are Flemish archeology amateurs, all fascinated by the Great War, all devoted to dig up as much as possible, while it still can. The industrial zone is expanding and the diggers excavate sites where soon modern factories will soon be built.

In 1915 the whole area near the canal at Boesinghe was battlefield, Patrick explains. He is one of the Boesinghe Diggers. Every Saturday he and his friends dig up the former trenches. They use old trenchmaps to locate Nomansland and the frontlines.

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