Among the most unusual objects to move through the antiques trade are pieces that were never intended as antiques, or even as art, at the moment of their making — a brass artillery shell casing hammered and engraved into a slender vase, a soldier’s aluminum identification disc reworked into a ring, a matchbox cover fashioned from a piece of downed aircraft. Collectors call this category trench art, and it occupies a genuinely singular place in the collecting world: objects made not by trained craftsmen in peacetime workshops, but by soldiers, prisoners of war, and civilians, often using nothing more than battlefield debris and whatever tools were on hand, in the middle of some of the twentieth century’s most devastating conflicts.

What Trench Art Actually Is

The term “trench art” is something of a historical misnomer, since a great deal of it was made far from any actual trench, and its production spans a period considerably longer than either World War. Broadly, the category covers decorative or useful objects made by soldiers, prisoners, and civilians from war materiel and battlefield debris, generally during or shortly after wartime, using improvised tools and whatever raw material happened to be at hand.

The largest and most recognized body of trench art comes from the First World War, when the sheer scale of industrial shell and cartridge production left enormous quantities of spent brass casings scattered across the front lines — an abundant, durable, and workable raw material for soldiers with time on their hands between engagements, or recovering in hospitals and rest camps behind the lines. A second, smaller wave followed the Second World War, and trench art in a broader sense has been documented from conflicts both before and after, wherever soldiers or civilians found themselves with access to war material, spare time, and the human impulse to make something out of very little.

Why Soldiers and Civilians Made These Objects

Understanding trench art’s appeal to collectors starts with understanding why it was made in the first place, since the motivations shape almost everything about the objects themselves. Several overlapping impulses drove production:

  • Occupation during idle time. Long stretches of waiting between engagements, convalescence in field hospitals, and the tedium of prisoner-of-war camps all created hours that needed filling, and working brass or shell fragments with hand tools was accessible, low-cost occupational therapy long before that term existed formally.
  • Income. Soldiers and, especially, civilians living near the front or in occupied territory frequently made trench art specifically to sell to other soldiers, creating an informal wartime cottage industry that persisted well after the armistice, as veterans and tourists visiting former battlefields provided a steady market for locally made souvenirs.
  • Personal memorial and gift-making. Many pieces were made as gifts to send home to family, or as personal keepsakes — a way of processing and marking an experience that was otherwise almost impossible to put into words, channeled instead into the physical act of engraving a date, a regiment’s name, or a place name onto a piece of spent ordnance.
  • Genuine artistic impulse. Some makers, soldiers and civilians alike, were simply skilled metalworkers or engravers by trade or temperament, and produced work of real technical accomplishment regardless of the grim circumstances of its material.

“What gets people, once they understand what they’re looking at, is the contrast. Here’s a shell casing — an object built for exactly one destructive purpose — and someone has turned it into a vase with a hand-engraved floral border, or a set of initials and a sweetheart’s name. It’s a small, defiant act of humanity, made out of the very material of the war itself.”

The Common Forms Trench Art Takes

Trench art collectors generally organize the category by both material and form, since the two are closely linked — the raw material available largely dictated what could be made from it.

Shell casing work is the most recognized and widely collected form, typically brass artillery shell casings of various calibers, transformed through hammering, engraving, and repoussé (raised relief) work into vases, jugs, ashtrays, and decorative wall plaques. Engraving often included regimental crests, place names and dates associated with specific battles, floral or decorative motifs, and occasionally elaborate figurative scenes.

Small personal items made from spent cartridge cases, shrapnel fragments, and aircraft or vehicle debris include rings, letter openers, matchbox covers, and pens — objects sized for a soldier to carry personally or send home easily by post, generally simpler in execution than the larger shell-casing vessels but often more personally poignant given their intimate scale.

Prisoner-of-war work forms its own important sub-category, made under very different conditions than frontline trench art — often with more limited materials but, in many documented cases, with considerable time, patience, and occasionally camp-organized workshops, resulting in some of the most technically accomplished pieces in the entire field, including detailed models, marquetry work, and elaborately carved or constructed objects using whatever scrap material a camp afforded.

Aircraft and vehicle debris pieces, more associated with the Second World War given the greater prevalence of downed aircraft, include jewelry and small decorative objects made from aluminum airframe fragments, sometimes explicitly marketed to collectors at the time as coming from a specific downed aircraft, a claim that — as with much trench art provenance — is now essentially impossible to verify with certainty in most individual cases.

Materials and Techniques Worth Recognizing

Learning to recognize the working methods behind a piece is one of the most useful skills a trench art collector can develop, both for authentication and for genuine appreciation of the skill involved.

  1. Repoussé and chasing, in which a metal surface is hammered from the reverse side to create raised relief decoration, then refined from the front with fine chasing tools — the technique behind most of the elaborately decorated shell-casing vases.
  2. Engraving, using hand tools to cut linear designs, lettering, and dates directly into the metal surface, often the sole decoration on simpler pieces and frequently combined with repoussé work on more ambitious examples.
  3. Piercing and fretwork, cutting decorative openwork patterns into flatter pieces of brass or shell material, sometimes used for objects like letter racks or decorative panels.
  4. Assembly and construction, joining multiple salvaged components — buttons, badges, cartridge cases, wire — into a single composite object, a technique especially associated with prisoner-of-war work where a wider range of small scrap materials was often available than at the front.

Collecting Trench Art Responsibly

This is a category where context and history matter more than in almost any other area of the antiques trade, and collecting it thoughtfully means engaging honestly with what these objects represent.

  • Provenance and documentation add real value, but demand real scrutiny. A piece with a documented history — regimental association, a named maker, a clear chain of family ownership — is both more historically valuable and more collectible than an unattributed example, but claims of specific battlefield origin should be treated with appropriate skepticism unless genuinely well documented, since the trench art market has long attracted embellished or invented provenance stories.
  • Condition assessment differs from most antiques categories. Because these objects were made from repurposed military material using improvised tools, irregularity, asymmetry, and rough finishing are often original to the piece rather than damage — a genuinely different standard than, say, fine silver, where the same irregularities would read as flaws.
  • Reproductions and later “trench-art-style” pieces exist and should be understood as a distinct category. Decorative shell-casing-style vases have been produced commercially for decades after both World Wars, some quite convincingly aged; learning the specific shell calibers, headstamp markings, and manufacturing details associated with genuine wartime production is the best defense against buying a later reproduction as an original.
  • Consider the object’s weight of meaning, not just its market value. Many pieces of trench art were made by men who did not survive the conflict that produced the raw material, or were sent home as a final personal object from someone who did not return. Collectors who take this history seriously tend to treat the category with a degree of respect that goes beyond ordinary object connoisseurship — displaying pieces with context, researching regimental and unit histories where markings allow, and generally treating the collection as a form of remembrance as much as acquisition.

Displaying and Preserving Trench Art

Because most trench art is worked brass, aluminum, or occasionally iron, preservation considerations differ somewhat from more typical decorative antiques. Brass pieces benefit from occasional gentle cleaning with a non-abrasive brass polish, applied carefully to avoid removing engraved detail or an aged patina many collectors prefer to preserve rather than restore to a bright shine. Pieces with any remaining paint, decal, or applied decoration — not uncommon on some later or more elaborate examples — should be handled and cleaned more conservatively, since these surface layers are both fragile and historically significant to the object’s story.

Display contexts that include some historical framing — a brief note on the piece’s likely origin, material, and period, where known — tend to serve trench art better than purely decorative display divorced from context, given how much of the category’s value lies in the story behind the object rather than in purely aesthetic terms.

Objects Made From War, Kept as a Form of Memory

What ultimately distinguishes trench art from almost every other category in this magazine’s coverage is that it was never meant to become collectible at all — it was made, in nearly every case, as an act of survival, occupation, or remembrance by people living through circumstances most of us will never have to face. Collecting it well means holding two things at once: an appreciation for the genuine skill and ingenuity so many of these makers brought to unlikely material, and a clear-eyed respect for the history that material came from. Few other antiques ask quite so directly to be understood, rather than simply admired — and that, for the collectors drawn to this field, is precisely the point.