The department clears unexploded bombs and artillery shells from World War I and World War II that litter the Zone Rouge and other parts of the country that suffered during the conflicts.

They weren’t killed, but they had cowbells ringing in their heads from the shell going off.” The French government actually has a special munitions-clearing agency called the Department du Deminage. “I heard several stories of where people were plowing and a shell went off. “Every year, there are farmers that hit shells, and they get tied up in the tines and the tractors explode,” Hupy says. Agriculture and “remembrance tourism” (focusing on Verdun and other battlefields) are major industries in the Meuse region. Unexploded Ordnance Unexploded shells are still a danger to the few people who visit the Zone Rouge and those that live right outside the restricted area. Unexploded shells litter the woods like oversized eggs, and the ground is cratered from the constant back-and forth-shelling of the Battle of Verdun. Today, the Zone Rouge still bears the scars of battle. Without a human presence, the Zone Rouge transformed fast. “To their surprise, they found the vegetation-trees, grasses, bushes and briars-all came back very quickly,” Holstein says. “Those villages were considered a casualty of the war,” Hupy says. The government moved people out of the area and created the Zone Rouge. Rather than attempting to remove all the shells and munitions in the area, the government ultimately decided on a minor forced relocation. “All of these villages were destroyed by these explosive munitions, and the area was abandoned.” When the war ended in 1918, the French government considered the time and cost of rehabilitating the land. Before the war, he says, the area of the battlefield was an agricultural landscape dotted with small villages. Any trees were smashed, and men took shelter where they could, in shell holes and in holes in the ground.” Joseph Hupy, a geography professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire who specializes in military geography, agrees with Holstein. “The ground was just completely churned up. “At the start of the battle, there were trenches, but as the months went by with shells falling all the time in many places, there weren’t any trenches at all,” Holstein says. “Millions and millions and millions of artillery shells were fired.” Even the trenches, where WWI soldiers famously took cover, were transformed by the constant shelling from both sides. “During that time, the shelling never stopped,” she says. Holstein says the conflict at Verdun was the first of the great artillery battles of the war.

By 1916, French and German forces had amassed significant munitions in the area-millions of rounds of ammunition and heavy, cannon-size guns. It was not heavily forested.” That changed with the onset of war in 1914. “There was a very big garrison in Verdun, a peacetime garrison with 66,000 men, so they had to be fed. “It was farmland,” says British historian and author Christina Holstein. Before World War I, the landscape of Verdun was different. The Zone Rouge is a 42,000-acre territory that, nearly a century after the conflict, has no human residents and only allows limited access. The environmental destruction left by the battle led to the creation of the Zone Rouge-the Red Zone. The battle, which lasted 300 days and cost more than 300,000 French and German lives in 1916, was also one of the bloodiest of “The Great War.” The intense fighting and shelling near the tiny town of Verdun has permanently altered the region surrounding the Meuse River in northeastern France. The Battle of Verdun was the longest sustained conflict of World War I.

Verdun battlefield