WWI Soldiers Messages in Bottle Found over 100 Years Later

Friday, October 31, 2025

Messages in a bottle written by two Australian soldiers a few days into their voyage to the battlefields of France during World War I have been found more than a century later on Australia's coast.

Posted by lamplighter at 07:32 PM | 3 COMMENTS | permalink | Comment on This Entry |

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... Her husband Peter and daughter Felicity made the find during one of the family's regular quad bike expeditions to clear the beach of trash.

"We do a lot of cleaning up on our beaches and so would never go past a piece of rubbish. So this little bottle was lying there waiting to be picked up," Deb Brown said.

Inside the clear, thick glass were cheerful letters written in pencil by Privates Malcolm Neville, 27, and William Harley, 37, dated Aug. 15, 1916.

Their troop ship HMAT A70 Ballarat had left the South Australia state capital Adelaide to the east on Aug. 12 of that year on the long journey to the other side of the world where its soldiers would reinforce the 48th Australian Infantry Battalion on Europe's Western Front. ...

#1 | Posted by LampLighter at 2025-10-30 01:06 PM | Reply

Those poor devils were a bit old to be privates: Malcolm Neville (27) and William Harley (37).

Global warming is thawing the ice in the Alps and now the remains of WWI soldiers are being found, amongst other relics.

www.smithsonianmag.com

www.miamiherald.com

#2 | Posted by C0RI0LANUS at 2025-10-30 01:28 PM | Reply

One of the two outbounders ended up KIA; the other survived the war, but was gassed. (As was American actor Walter Brennan, which gave him a voice that kept him in business for decades).

"If you ask where is the Picasso of England or the Ezra Pound of France, there is only one probable answer: still in the trenches."
Robert Hughes*

* ("World War One destroyed an entire generation. We don't know and we can't even guess what might have been painted or written if the war had never happened. As for the waste of minds, we know the names of some who died: among the painters, Umberto Boccioni, Franz Marc, August Macke; the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brezska; the poets Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen. But for every one whose name survives there must have been scores, possibly hundreds of those who never had a chance to develop."
shapersofthe80s.com)

#3 | Posted by Doc_Sarvis at 2025-11-01 05:59 AM | Reply