Shadows Beneath the Somme

They left their names beneath a French village. More than a century later, those names are revealing the men who went to war.

Beneath the French village of Naours, thousands of First World War soldiers left their names on the chalk walls of an ancient underground city. Among them were hundreds of Australians, resting behind the lines before returning to the war.

More than a century later, archaeologist Gilles Prilaux and fellow researchers have used those inscriptions to trace the men who made them, connecting names scratched into the walls with service records, photographs, diaries and family histories.

In this second volume, Shadows Beneath the Somme unearths individual and unique stories of a further 40 Australian men who went to war and wrote their names on cave walls under the village of Naours. Some were decorated for bravery. Some survived the war and returned home. Others were killed on the Western Front. Each had stood in these same underground passages and left behind a simple, unmistakably personal record: I was here.

Drawing together archaeology, military history and painstaking biographical research, this remarkable book restores the faces and stories behind the names and reveals an intimate record of Australian soldiers in the brief intervals between battle and whatever came next.

The inscriptions give us their names. The research gives us back the men.