Friday, July 9, 2010

Zone-Rouge

French WWI trench, The 'Forbidden Zone', Bois-Hauts, Les Eparges, Lorraine, France.

The 'Forbidden Zone', where the land undulates with bisecting shell craters. The mature beech and pine forests that cover the hills above the city of Verdun are home to some of the Great War's most bitter fighting, as many as 150 shells fell for every square meter of this battlefield. 'The Battle of Verdun' as well as being the longest Battle of 'The Great War' also has the ignominy of being the first test of modern industrialised slaughter. Not for nothing was the battlefield of Verdun known to the soldiers who fought in it, as 'The Mincer', where over the entire period of the war almost a million men became casualties. Recent estimates made by The French interior Ministry state at least 12 million unexploded shells lie undiscovered in the hills overlooking the City of Verdun.

The d'mineurs work in the areas designated 'Zone-Rouge' after the Armistice of 1918. Today the forest still remains out-of-bounds to the general public due to the continuing hazzard of the explosive remnants of war. The Department for the Interior, (France), estimate that there are twelve million unexploded shells from WWI, in the Verdun sector alone.







I found this on 12oz, photographs by Jonathan Olley, 2008.
p.s. this is post 998

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

How were these photos taken??



Paul

the xarlacc said...

limited government clearance into the zone. though it is Zone Rouge, it is still a very famous battlefield and historians try and chronicle how time affects the landscape. and the unexploded shells there make it more a reason to study and document the war that was once there.

Anonymous said...

We all bang on about our wars and political ideologies and their legacies, but never the environmental impacts and legacies. These individual blogs are how I came to discover what remains from such behaviours and it is truly shocking that 108 years hence these killing grounds go on killing and contaminating only silently, that’s why we are not fully aware of Red Zones in Europe. Imagine everything you designed and manufactured you then systematically destroyed? It beggars belief BUT the First World War changed nothing.