THE DEADLY HARVEST
Lethal munitions found daily in battle grounds
ACENTURY ago the biggest mopping-up operation in human history across the First World War battlefields was only just beginning.
Most occupants of the Belgian city of Ypres, where the bloody Battle of Passchendaele unfolded, had fled for good.
Some Allied politicians thought the whole region should be left as it was, with ruined towns a permanent reminder of the total destruction caused by four years of war.
Instead people started disposing of the millions of unexploded bombs, little realising their work would be carrying on one hundred years later.
At the Belgian Army’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal Service barracks, Adjutant Rob Nollet shows me crates of projectiles – some containing poison gases – dug up over the past week.
He says: “There were 1.5 billion projectiles fired in the First World War, and many fired in this area. I don’t believe this work will ever be completely finished, certainly not in my lifetime.
“Sometimes in one field we will find thousands of shells. We have come across huge ammunition dumps where the armies stored their shells which were then abandoned as they retreated.”
A squad of nearly 200 bomb disposal experts receives at least 10 calls a day from local residents who have spotted ammunition in the soil.
Caked in mud, many of the British, German and French shells that the soldiers bring back are still live and dealt with safely in controlled explosions at this base.
Last year the team made safe more than 250 tons of munitions originally unleashed during the offensives that once raged across Flanders’ fields.
In Belgium, they refer to this deadly hoard carefully tilled from the forever tarnished soil as the “iron harvest”.
Rob described how a senior officer at the centre died while handling an explosive shell in 2012. And a man was killed in a nearby village while dealing with a shell he had found earlier this year. And in 2014 a First World War grenade exploded at a construction site in Ypres, killing two workers.
A German gas shell was found recently at the Tyne Cot military cemetery as graves were being dug for three soldiers whose remains were discovered at a construction site.
Rob, who has served two tours of duty in Afghanistan as an IED expert, says one of the biggest dangers are shells containing toxic mustard gas and phosgene. These chemical weapons, which killed thousands
during the war, can still burn through the skin. “The chemicals and explosives are as potent now as they were 100 years ago,” he says.
During the war, one ton of explosives was fired for every square metre of territory on the Western front. As many as one in every three shells fired did not detonate.
In the Ypres Salient, an estimated 300 million projectiles the British and the German forces fired at each other during the war were duds. Most have still not been recovered.
Many shells are retrieved by farmers in Flanders as they plough their fields in the autumn or plant seeds in spring.
Significant hauls are also discovered regularly when road and underground pipeline construction is taking place.
The barracks in Poelkapelle where Rob and his team make bombs safe is hidden away behind a screen of tall trees. It is an unlikely, serene location.
But between March and October shockwaves ripple through adjoining fields from controlled explosions almost daily.
The unexploded bombs are a constant danger, as dangerous as they were between 1914 and 1918.
For Rob and his team the First World War is still not over.