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.
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