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. And we found a gas mask near his skull, a French-issued M2 gas mask.The guns of World War I fell silent 100 years ago here, but a quiet battle still smolders on in this forest. On his left side he carried a wallet that contained two French coins. But they’re not proof of his nationality. “The boots are those that were on his feet when he died, and they are French army boots. “A tag is the only item that would have allowed us to formally identify him,” said Fremont, acknowledging the sadness and frustration of not being able to make an identification. A DNA test is useless without a known relative to compare against. What’s missing is the soldier’s ID tag.įor months, Fremont has searched for clues as to the identity of the soldier, whose remains were found in March by workmen resurfacing a road. Laid out on a white sheet are the combatant’s near-complete skeleton, many of the bones blackened, and his leather boots, the laces tied tight. French forensic pathologist Bruno Fremont and forensic assistant Manu Robas work on the identification of the remains of an unknow soldier, killed during World War One, found during road construction work near the battlefield of Douaumont, during an interview with Reuters at Verdun hospital, eastern France, November 5, 2018.
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