Zone Rouge & the Iron Harvest: World War One's Thousand Year Legacy of Death

 

        Completely devastated.  Damage to properties 100%.  Damage to agriculture 100%.  Impossible to clean.  Human life impossible.

This is how the French government originally defined what it called Zone Rouge (the Red Zone) at the end of the First World War over one-hundred years ago in 1919.  

Zone Rouge encompassed over 450 square miles of French countryside along the trench lines and no man’s land that had once made up the Western Front.

At the end of the war areas within what the French government had defined as Zone Rouge were considered absolutely unfit for human habitation.  The Red Zone remained littered with hundreds of thousands of tons of unexploded artillery shells, countless human and animal remains and fetid toxic soil that was the result of chlorine, phosgene and mustard gas bombardments.

Farming, forestry and human habitation were all banned within Zone Rouge.  Many of these restrictions remain in effect throughout vast areas of the Red Zone to this very day.

There are three primary areas of Zone Rouge which continue to be unfit for any human habitation even in the year 2020.  In these regions of France and Belgium the Western Front still presents a clear and present danger and continues to claim innocent lives every year.

Nearly 700 civilians have been killed by unexploded munitions from the Great War that have been dug up or discovered since 1946.  A further 250 demineurs, French personnel specially trained to dispose of unexploded munitions from World War One have also been killed, and thousands of demineurs, farmers, tourists and innocent bystanders alike have been injured or maimed by these deadly artifacts from the years between 1914 and 1918.

Stretching over 440 mile from the Swiss border to the North Sea, the Western Front was an unchanging largely static line of trenches and shell holes, a pock marked moonscape of barbed wire devoid of vegetation that was ceaselessly fought over by all the major armies of the world in the years between 1914 and 1918.

The Ypres Salient 1919

        Today, in northern France and southern Belgium centered around the ancient medieval city of Ypres tens of thousands of tons of unexploded ordinance are ploughed up by farmers in their fields each year.  Large tracts of land near Ypres, centered around a small section of land that during the war was called “the salient” because it constituted a spot where the allied lines jutted out into German occupied territory and was fought over dozens of times by Britain, France and Germany remain still off limits to visitors and the soft earth continues to bear the pock-marked scars of relentless artillery barrages.

In Ypres, it is not uncommon after a soaking rain, for the earth to still give up skulls and human bones that it has kept beneath its soil for over a century.

Further south, along the Somme River, which was the scene of the most deadly single day in the long military history of Great Britain in 1916, experts estimate that it may take specially trained teams of engineers and military personnel up to as many as 1,000 more years to clear the earth of all the deadly unexploded ordinance that still yet remains buried just below the surface.

Farmers have nicknamed this macabre harvest of deadly unexploded rusty metal and human bones The Iron Harvest.  

The Iron Harvest

During World War One over one ton of munitions was fired for every square meter of territory all along the Western Front.  Although there is no exact way to know just how much ordinance in the form of artillery shells, bombs and hand grenades was expended during the Great War, most military experts believe that as much as 1.5 to 2 BILLION rounds of artillery was fired on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918.

About five percent of these rounds were chemical shells containing deadly toxic mustard or phosgene gas which continued to seep into the soil and turn many miles of farmland in the French and Belgian countryside into hazardous toxic wastelands even years after the war ended.

Of that nearly 2 billion rounds of ammunition perhaps as many as 500 million were duds and failed to explode when they were originally fired.  All of those duds remained buried mere feet below the surface of the French and Belgian countryside, just lying there, waiting to explode and kill or maim the great war’s next victim.

Spent shell casings from the Battle of the Somme

        One hundred and sixty tons of unexploded ordinance was found near the Ypres Salient in the year 2013.  Each year a hundred tons of unexploded shells and hand grenades are discovered by farmers and visitors to the battlefields of the Somme.  

When the farmers discover an unexploded shell, or hand grenade, they either leave it where it lies, fearing that it may contain chemical agents which can still burn the skin or suffocate their victim, or they nonchalantly pick it up and place it at the edge of their field for disposal by one of the many French demineurs or trained Belgian military personnel.

Analysts and experts across France believe that it may take up to seven-hundred years until all of the dangerous unexploded shells that dot the French countryside are dug up, discovered and disposed of.

In some areas, such as the land around the historic French fortress city of Verdun where the largest and most deadly battle in human history was fought between France and Germany in 1916, the earth has been so saturated by chemical weapons and debris that it may remain uninhabitable forever.

The woodlands around Verdun are called “the forbidden forests of France” because even today these forests are so toxic and deadly that not even demineurs bother to venture into them very often.  It is estimated that upwards of 12 million unexploded shells still remain just below the surface of the desolate Verdun landscape.

Remnants of a Trench in the Zone Rouge

          In France each year when farmers plough their fields the “Iron Harvest” produces tons of reminders of the lasting legacy of the Great War.  Rusted old shells will continue to be found for generation upon generation to come, but the French government attempts to remain vigilant by keeping Zone Rouge restrictions in effect and by having dozens of teams of highly trained explosive experts, demineurs, travelling across the battlefields of what used to be the Western Front looking for munitions to defuse and innocent lives to save.

“Shells like these can lull you to sleep.  On the outside they look old, but on the inside they’re clean as a new clock.  Very, very dangerous.”

-French Demineur Michel Belot quoted from Aftermath by British author Donovan Webster written in 1988.

It is easy to forget the causes over which the First World War was fought.  Today, it appears to many of us even in the victorious nations of France, Belgium, Great Britain and the United States that what was dubbed the Great War over one-hundred years ago; the war that supposedly made the world safe for democracy; touted as the war that would end all future wars was, in reality, nothing more than a senseless slaughter of young men. World War One epitomizes the senseless loss of a now forgotten generation.

Overshadowed by the passage of time, and the much larger and in many ways even more destructive Second World War of 1939-45, World War One seems to most of us to be buried in the distant and archaic past.  With the death of the last surviving veteran of the trenches, British Private Harry Patch in 2011, the Great War has supposedly completely passed from the annals of living memory.

However, as those who dig up the Iron Harvest every year in France and Belgium know, constant deadly reminders of the Great War are being felt and discovered each and every day all across what used to be (and in some places still is) the no man’s land of the Western Front.

As French demineur Remy Deleuze said, “To this day the First War is a nightmare for France.  It destroyed our land, our homes, everything.”

All across Zone Rouge, even in the year 2020, brave men and women still put their lives on the line to try and undo just a small piece of the irreversible death and destruction that humanity wrought on itself when it fought the Great War of 1914-1918.

Demineurs dispose of unexploded WWI ordinance