World War I battlefields fuel hobby of British brother

Published: 2003-12-02

ROME (CNS) -- When a bookish Englishman decided to join the Rosminian religious order as a brother 19 years ago, he told his superiors he was bringing along an unusual hobby -- studying the battlefields of World War I. Today, if civil authorities and the mass media need to find out what happened at a specific European combat zone, they often turn to Brother Nigel Cave. Over the last 15 years he's written numerous guide books to the battlefields and war cemeteries of France and Belgium, helped produce and appeared in a video on World War I battlefield tunnels, and helped authorities locate and defuse buried bombs. "When I was a boy, my father was a defense attache in Budapest and he took me on trips to European battlefield areas. It turned into a hobby, and at university I specialized in military history and the theory of war," Brother Cave said in an interview in Rome in late November.

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