Much of the rest was eventually forested. “From the North Sea to the Franche-Comté (Swiss border) we estimate that there were 150,000 hectares that were declared red zone and a large part was given back to agriculture,” he added. “All the battlefield sites where the French government thought it would be too expensive to clean the soil to have it restored back to farming land were declared zone rouge,” said Guillaume Rouard, a ranger with France’s National Forests Office (ONF). The French government’s response was to declare vast tracts of northern France off limits, creating a “zone rouge” or red zone. A postwar report on these battlefields described the land as: “Completely devastated. “The pessimistic way would be to say one in four did not explode.” That means that we probably have between seven and eight million shells that did not explode on the battlefield of Verdun,” said Guillaume Moizan, 34, a local historian and guide. “The optimistic rate is that one in eight did not explode. Some 60 million shells were fired during the 10-month battle here from February to December 1916. The front lines crisscrossed the fields of Verdun for almost the duration of WWI. But it cloaks perhaps millions of dud shells, tens of thousands of bodies and one of the most toxic sites in France. Today a forest blankets the battlefields. WWI left behind a broken landscape: shell holes, trenches and soil sown with years of unexploded bombs. Roots of trees and arms of ivy grapple with the legacy of four years of war, fighting to reclaim the landscape from the scars of a past conflict. The guns of World War I fell silent 100 years ago here, but a quiet battle still smolders on in this forest.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |