Episode 7: Silent Witness
This is a story of hunters and the hunted. During the Great War, German officers weary from the Eastern Front sought R&R in a picturesque hunting lodge on an ancient French estate where they could turn their guns on wildlife. The estate was owned by a French nobleman and his hunting lodge became a silent witness to the war, constantly occupied and passed from French to British and Commonwealth to German forces before being reclaimed by nature.
A diary is discovered – a day-to-day account of the aristocratic owner’s life as a German hostage. And among the rubble of the lodge the Trench Detectives excavate a large stone block on which a German occupier had carved his name, an inscription that survived to lead back to identify the man who left it.
