A century after World War I, an archaeologist exploring ancient tunnels in northeast France made a moving discovery -- thousands of scrawlings by Allied soldiers, notably Australians, as they took a break from the hell of the Battle of the Somme.
And now, the public can visit them too.
"LR Blake lieut 105t How Btry 7-1-17," reads one, with the help of a torch, carved into the vast underground network in the town of Naours, near Amiens.
Translation: Leslie Russel Blake, a lieutenant hailing from near Melbourne and fighting with the 105th Howitzer Battery who left his mark on the chalk walls on January 7, 1917.
He was to die in battle the following year and is buried nearby.
Archaeologist Giles Prilaux has recorded nearly 3,000 bits of graffiti, mostly etched by Australians from the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC).
They paint a vivid picture of young men sent to join a war far from home, something Australia celebrates every April 25 as Anzac Day to remember compatriots who served on the Western front, including the 11,000 with no known graves.
For the past two years, Prilaux and his colleagues at France's National Institute for Preventative Archaeological Research (INRAP) have painstakingly scrutinised and logged their finds, looking for clues of what life was like on the nearby Somme battlefields.
Going was slow with the poor light in the tunnels said to date back to the third century, which also served as a refuge in a much earlier battle, the Thirty Years' War from 1618-1648.
Little by little Prilaux's team found signatures, inscription dates, home towns, units and military serial numbers left by soldiers waging the bloody trench warfare that lasted nearly five months and saw more than a million casualties on both the Allied and German sides.
"Mostly (they were) done by Australians, but also Americans, British, and some New Zealanders, Canadians and, on occasion, Indians," said Prilaux.
Next came the detective work to unpick the identities and stories of the men who had left their mark in the three kilometre-long tunnels.
"Identification is a very addictive job," said Prilaux who first came to the caves in 2014 with the goal of determining their age until he started finding the wartime markings.
With help from the National Archives of Australia, Prilaux's team was able to determine that Leslie Russel Blake, for example, was born in 1890 in a suburb of Melbourne and died from shrapnel wounds to his forehead in October 1918.
