On September 22, 1914, the First World War was less than two months old. On that day, two companies of the 288th Infantry Regiment went to scout out a wood in the village of Saint-Remy-la-Calonne, in the Lorraine region. Their comrades who had stayed behind heard shooting in the forest and saw the wounded surging back. But 21 men did not return, and their bodies were never found. Among them was 27-year-old Lieutenant Henri-Alban Fournier, better known by his pen name Alain-Fournier. What happened to the author of Le Grand Meaulnes and his companions?
In 1990, after 13 years of research, a group of amateurs located the mass grave where the Germans, who held the area for most of the war, had buried the French soldiers. And on November 4, 1991, a month-long government-ordered excavation began, led by a young 26-year-old archaeological anthropologist, Frédéric Adam, now with the National Research Institute of Preventive Archaeology (INRAP). "It was a tomb in the middle of the forest, a rectangle measuring 5.2 meters by 2.6 meters," he recalled. "There were two rows of 10 soldiers head to toe, and the 21st laid across the other bodies."
The excavation was complicated by snow, hail, rain and cold, but also by the arrival of dozens of journalists when news of Alain-Fournier's skeleton was revealed. The site had to be guarded by the army. The archaeologists found small personal objects that had belonged to the soldiers – pencils, pipes, wallets, pocket knives – and parts of their uniforms. Above all, they noted the sites of all the bones before proceeding to "disassemble" the skeletons.
A very precise protocol was followed to try to return an identity to each of the deceased, as Adam explained: "We identify the sex (a female civilian or nurse could have been buried with the soldiers). We calculate stature. We identify age at death. We note traces of pathologies and war traumas. So we have a biological map of the person, to which we add the work on the objects that accompanied him. And we compare all this with military documents." Of the 21 skeletons, 19 were able to be identified in this way. For Alain-Fournier, there were his lieutenant's stripes. But not only those. "The stature matched, the age matched, the shape of the face too," Adam said. "The family had entrusted me with a letter from Alain-Fournier saying that he had just had his 10th tooth treated. And this skeleton had 13 fillings in 10 teeth."
The study of bones shattered by bullets showed that the French, surrounded, had been caught in several firefights (and not executed, as rumors had claimed). Above all, Adam pointed out, this excavation opened up a new era: "It is considered to be the cornerstone of archaeology for the contemporary era." Since then, archaeologists have no longer been limited to the most remote times, but can now take on yesterday.