Trench Art with Puzzling Dedication

[Stephane]

Hello all,

I attended an auction today were I purchased two beautiful trench art shells. The first one has a dedication in the back in French, which reads as follow:

Souvenir de guerre
Douille trouvée à Visée en août 1914
À ma nièce Émilie
Alphonse

Which translate in English too:

Souvenir of war
Casing found in Visée (Belgium) in August 1914
to my niece Emily
Alphonse

[Stephane]

So far so good. However, when you turn the casing over, you find it was made at the Patronenfabrik Karlsruhe (ammunition manufacture Karsruhe) in February 1918. It a bit hard to read. I had to play with the picture.

[Stephane]

It looks like someone got its casings mixed up and made a beautiful piece of trench art for his niece out of a casing he thought he had picked up in 1914, but was manufactured in 1918. What do you guys think of this piece? I believe it is authentic, It would have taken a very confused forger to make something like that.

[Stephane]

I purchased another beautiful piece of trench art at the auction. There is no issue with this one, I just want to show it off

[Brian L.]

It looks like someone got its casings mixed up and made a beautiful piece of trench art for his niece out of a casing he thought he had picked up in 1914, but was manufactured in 1918. What do you guys think of this piece? I believe it is authentic, It would have taken a very confused forger to make something like that.

It's more likely the engraver simply put the wrong year. Maybe the customer wrote the dedication by hand and had terrible handwriting and his '8' looked like a '4'.
It seems to me that this type of esoterica doesn't have enough added value with an inscription to warrant a faker going to the considerable trouble of doing a convincing engraving.

[Stephane]

What I've read is that most trench art was not made in the trenches. Shops were set up after the war, employing skilled metal workers, especially in Britain, Belgium, France and Germany. Pieces were often custom made for veterans by these specialist firms using raw materials that the veterans provided. Maybe this is what we have here.