The Battle of Verdun began on the 21st February 1916 and ended on the 16th December 1916.Companies contracted by the French authorities burned unused poison gas shells here after the war.Let’s know more about the Battle of Verdun! That’s what locals call this site – a hunter’s shack in a forest clearing, nondescript but for the surrounding rings of razor wire – which has a toxic legacy. In the outer reaches of Verdun’s forests where the trees begin to mingle with open fields lies La place a Gaz. It’s not something really shocking for us.”Īlthough bombs may no longer hold great risk to life, ironically probably the most dangerous legacy of WWI comes from events that followed the war. “We try to explain to them that it’s forbidden,” she added. “We have lots of students who dig around all the time to find old shells and grenades,” said Fanny Burillon, 41, a history teacher from the Somme region – another WWI battlefield – visiting Verdun with her family. It’s a sentiment echoed by those who live alongside these dangers. “The old have seen so many, they moved many from their fields and so on, it doesn’t move them any longer.” “Those people, they have ‘shell culture,’” said the demining chief. The regional demining service deploys a team every day to make safe legacy munitions that locals find. “In a good year we collect 50 tons from 1,000 callouts,” Momper said. The bodies of between 80,000 and 100,000 men remain lost in the forest. So savage was the fighting that no one knows for sure how many soldiers were laid to rest in the imposing white ossuary at Douaumont. One of them, Fleury, changed hands 16 times during the battle. The stony ruins of the area’s nine villages, devastated during the war, lie dotted around the forest. Bunkers and trenches hide among the trees, jutting out of the undergrowth, paying silent witness to the 300,000 French and German men who died here. The objective was more to give a sense of production to this landscape destroyed by war.” “That wasn’t really the objective right after the war. “It’s allowed us to conserve all that’s around you, the holes, the trenches – we’re in one of the rare zones in France where you can walk like it was in 1918,” Rouard said. Planted with German pine from the Black Forest as part of war reparations, the forest of Verdun was, from its inception, a symbol of healing and commemoration. 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.
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