Tu es fossoyeur sur la Somme — et c'est toute ta vie.

This video tells the first-person account of the reconstructed biography of Marcel, a French military gravedigger born in 1889 in Périgueux, Dordogne, the son of a coffin-making carpenter. He was mobilized in August 1914 and assigned to a burial section until the Armistice of November 11, 1918. The narrative follows all the stages of his life: a childhood in a workshop where death was a common trade, learning the logic of woodworking and measurement, mobilization and immediate assignment to the military burial service, training in the official procedures for census and individual burial, then the realities of the field in Artois from 1914 onward, and finally, one hundred and forty-one days on the Somme from July 1916. The central theme is that of the forgotten military gravediggers: men who worked at night to collect the remains of soldiers in bombarded sectors, keeping registers where some names had no grave, and applying strict rules. unwritten records to keep them functioning, and returning home without the words to explain what they had done. Neither monuments nor history books asked them how it felt. They disappeared behind the numbers. At 7:30 a.m. on July 1, 1916, seventeen British and four French divisions advanced along a forty-kilometer front on the Somme River. The British lost nearly sixty thousand men in a single day. The battle would last one hundred and forty-one days. Estimates suggest between one million and one million three hundred thousand dead and wounded on both sides. According to data from the Ministry of the Armed Forces, nearly seven hundred and seventy thousand bodies of French soldiers lie in the two hundred and ninety national cemeteries across France. Eighty-eight percent are soldiers from the First World War. Many of these burials were carried out by men whose names do not appear on any monument. Sources: Battle of the Somme — general history: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bataill... https://www.chemins-de-memoire.gouv.f... https://www.defense.gouv.fr/actualite... https://histoire-image.org/etudes/bat... French military burial service — procedure and organization : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sépultu... https://www.sepulturesdeguerre.sga.de... https://www.cheminsdememoire.gouv.fr/... https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt... (Instructions on the Burial Service, 1916 — National Library of France) National cemeteries and burial records: https://www.sepulturesdeguerre.sga.de... https://www.commonwealth-war-graves.o... (Commonwealth War Graves Commission — British Sector Somme) French military identity tags : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaque_... https://www.14-18.fr/identification-s... Photographic archives and testimonies: https://www.ecpad.fr/aide-a-la-recher... https://gallica.bnf.fr (search: military gravediggers 1914-1918)