Laboratory of Environmental Archaeology.However, they have made some progress: swathes of land around the edge have been returned to the local population, and walking tours now show off the amazing variety of orchids and amphibians which have flourished on the pockmarked battlefield.Īnd there are now farmers making their living from the land - although every year their ploughs turn up more and more of the shells in the so-called 'iron harvest', which means it is not unusual to find piles of metal at the side of a field. Known as the Place-a-gaz, in the Spincourt Forest, it was the site where 200,000 unexploded chemical bombs were destroyed. In 2008, it was decided to fence off the worst-affected area for good. 'It would be another disaster for the environment, and also for the finances of the state,' Belot said simply. It is so high, only a handful of plants are able to survive in some areas. Indeed, the entire forest would have to be destroyed, and at least a metre of soil dug away to find unaffected ground.īurning: Verdun managed to survive the onslaught, but other places were less luckyĪ study, published in 2007, claimed the levels of arsenic, used in the detonators, were between 1,000 and 10,000 times the level usually found in the ground. The most recent fatalities came in 2007, when a live mine blew up as two workers tried to carry it to the munitions plant, where it would have been defused.īut attempts to clear the area of its dangerous bounty seemed doomed to failure.Ĭlearing the land of the detritus of the war in the worst affected areas is a 'near impossibility', Henri Belot, who was responsible for 'de-mining' the area, said a number of years ago. According to Le Monde, some 15 per cent of the shells shot during World War One failed to explode.Īnd they are still deadly - the sound of the poison liquids inside can still be heard. Those who did venture onto the battlefield risked stepping on a shell meant to explode generations before. Officially, it was a Zone Rouge - an area in a crescent shape around Verdun, considered too dangerous to allow people to return in the immediate aftermath of the war. The French immediately took the danger seriously: a year after the war's end, it bought 10,000 hectares of battleground, consigning the villages to history and allowing nature to take back the blighted land. It is thought as many as 65 million shells may have been fired over the course of the battle, many of these filled with poisons. Then there were the chemical-packed weapons which exploded across the once green fields, lying on the ground. The remains of the young men who fought valiantly for their countries were hidden in what once had been a peaceful idyll. Remains: The trenches can still be made out by tourists visiting the woods today What they could not have known then, as they counted the cost, was the damage they had done to the land. More than 300,000 families lost their sons in this battle of attrition have to come to terms with their loss, and nine villages had been blasted into oblivion, 'submerged in soldier's blood, crammed with dead bodies gnawed by rats', according to contemporary Abbot Thellier de Poncheville. This would continue for another 300 days: when it ended, the French victorious, they had moved only a few hundred yards from where they began, having obliterated a piece of earth larger than the city of Paris.
Blown into showers bellies turned inside out skulls forced into the chest as if by a blow from a club'. Cut in two or divided from top to bottom. The whole valley is turned into a volcano, and its exit blocked by the barrier of the slain.'Īnother remembered how the 'men were squashed. Then our heavy artillery bursts forth in fury.
'Once more our shells carve awful gaps in their ranks. One French officer recalled: 'When the first wave of the assault is decimated, the ground is dotted with heaps of corpses, but the second wave is already pressing on. The aim, said Erich von Falkenhayn, the German chief of the general, was to 'bleed the French army white'. On the first day alone, the Germans - who sent 140,000 soldiers to attack the French town at the start - had 1,000 guns pummeling the earth, and the French soldiers. Few could have imagined, when the Germans stormed the town of Verdun, near the border with Belgium, on February 21, 1916, what the repercussions would be down the generations.