BEXHILL, ENGLAND—BBC News reports that the site of Cooden Camp, a World War I training camp that opened in 1914, is being investigated ahead of a construction project in southeastern England. Soldiers from the 11th, 12th, and 13th Battalions of the Royal Sussex Regiment trained at the site before many of them were killed while fighting The Battle of the Boar’s Head in France on June 30, 1916. “[They] ended up being trained here and then they did the typical pals thing, they joined up together, they trained together, and a lot of them died together,” said Simon Stevens of Archaeology South-East. Later, Cooden Camp trained soldiers from South Africa and Australia, and then in 1918, became a Princess Patricia’s Canadian Red Cross Hospital. The hospital closed in 1919. Stevens said that the excavation in the northern area of the site uncovered plates, bowls, bottles, boots, and fired rounds. To read about traces of a wartime POW camp in Scotland, go to "The Marks of Time: WWI Military Camp."
