﻿"If you haven't seen Verdun, you haven't seen anything." So wrote a French soldier from the
front in 1916. It was in fact just outside Verdun that one of the bloodiest battles in
human history and one of the decisive acts of World War I was fought. A carnage said by
many to be unnecessary. The French believed that the network of fortifications around Verdun was
invincible and unconquerable and had deployed much of their artillery elsewhere, while the Germans
intended to take advantage of this mistake and force the enemy to concentrate the bulk of their
troops here and bleed them dry under the blows of their own artillery: more than a thousand guns
of various calibers including the fearsome "Big Bertha," supplied by 2 million shells. Verdun was
of vital importance to the French and they would defend it at great cost. It is believed that every
French soldier employed in World War I fought, for at least one day, at Verdun. Bad tactics,
intensive bombing and the use of gas weapons did the rest. Even today, we still don't know for
sure how many soldiers took part in the fighting that saw the French and German armies face each
other for three hundred days, from February 21 to December 19, 1916. Not to mention the casualties:
between injured, dead, and missing, the number could easily reach a million. As would later
happen in Stalingrad, Verdun became a symbol of resistance and heroism, but also of suffering,
death and madness One had to have passed through Verdun to truly understand the horrors of war,
argued the unknown French soldier, and Verdun still has much to teach us today. If we want to
get a taste of what the world might be like at the end of a world conflict always just around
the corner, a trip there can give us some answers, even one hundred and six years later. At the end
of the war, despite the victory and triumph, a real scar remained on that slice of northeastern
France: the bombing had destroyed villages and devastated the landscape, many unexploded
bombs still undermined the land, and somewhere underground there must still have been bunkers
loaded with weapons, gases and chemical compounds. And among those fields and forests still lay
buried the remains of untold numbers of fallen men and animals, in quantities and conditions
that made all recovery and burial impossible. The French government, in the aftermath of the end
of the war, merely isolated some one thousand two hundred square kilometers of death and destruction
and proceeded with the first superficial reclamation works, hoping that nature would take
its course. The few residents who remained after the war were moved out, and all agricultural use
was prohibited on that land. Villages still intact were abandoned and those destroyed by bombing,
such as Douamont, never rebuilt. It was clear that the total reclamation work would take years,
if not centuries. It was called Zone rouge, red zone: a non-contiguous wasteland extended
between Lille and Nancy, passing, of course, through Verdun. The Zone rouge is in other
words a land poisoned by the chemical waste of unexploded ordnance, by lead, mercury and arsenic,
by the toxic refluxes released by animal càrcasses and buried human remains. The Zone rouge basically
corresponds to what was the front line, that is, the area where the fighting and with it
the destruction was total. All life is all but denied in this zone. Vegetation doesn't grow,
and if a human being even managed to escape the detonation of some unexploded ordnance he or she
would be immediately infected by a lethal mix of chemical and toxic agents. Think that the arsenic
levels recorded within this area are around one hundred seventynine milligrams per kilogram,
when in Italy the maximum allowable limit is just twenty milligrams. However, the French government
has carried out remediation works over the years, at least in the least compromised areas,
so much so that as of today the zone rouge is restricted to only one hundred square kilometers.
Some areas are no longer off-limits, but according to experts, at this rate,
it will still take seven hundred years to fully secure the area. On the other hand, however,
the gradual reclamation of land considered now cleared and handed back too quickly to
the population has ended up exposing farmers and entire communities to the slow action of the
remaining chemicals, this is because the cleanup work was often conducted rushed and superficial.
Nature has not helped as recent surveys have found even higher amounts of arsenic in the soil
than those recorded in the past. Despite this, farming and hunting have returned to the recovered
territories. The French government and the European Union monitor products from the region,
but it’s clear that stricter controls would cause damage to the local economy already suffering from
a century of living with the poisons of war. Of course, man's reckless actions have also added to
the situation. In fact, one of the most dangerous and "poisoned" areas of the zone rouge is located
north of Verdun and is known today as the "place à gaz," the gas place. This is where, in the 1920s,
Department du Deminage officers detonated any unexploded ordnance they could locate.
In doing so, however, they made the situation worse, because these detonations in turn released
their own toxic charges into the ground. Just imagine the effects that the mass detonation of
thousands of ordnance and munitions may have had on a once verdant, wooded landscape. Today, the
place à gaz looks like a piece of tundra in the middle of the forests of northeastern France. The
soil is now so polluted with ammonium perchlorate and arsenic, whose concentration is 1000 to 10000
times higher than natural levels, that only a few lichens and mushrooms manage to grow in this area.
What's more, only since 2004 has a scientific study highlighted the danger of the area. First,
it was found that the surface layers of this soil, for at least 20 centimeters, consist only of the
burning debris. The analyses then found large traces of Copper (16 mg/kg), Lead (26 mg/kg),
Arsenic (175 mg/kg) and Zinc (133 mg/kg). The place à gaz was only fenced off in 2005, and in
2012 entry was formally banned. But the zone rouge is only the innermost and most dangerous part of
the areas involved in World War I fighting. Even larger is in fact the so-called yellow zone,
an area that is certainly less dangerous but still has a number of unexploded ordnance:
an estimated 900 tons of ammunition and bombs are recovered each year by French and Belgian
authorities. And not only by them, because it also happens in fact that these devices are found by
farmers at work in the fields. In those parts they call it récolte de fer, the iron harvest.
The problem is that under pressure from local communities, a clear distinction between yellow
and red zones wasn't often made, and as a result, as we said, some contaminated land was restored
to its agricultural use too soon. In short, some stretches of yellow zone may have red-zone levels
of pollution and hazard, and when abnormal concentrations of toxic substances turn up,
authorities always remain vague about the possible causes. And this often happens even beyond the
boundaries of red or yellow zones. It happened, for example, that in 2012 in 500 municipalities
in the Nord and Pas-De-Calais departments, that is, those regions located further north of Verdun
along the Belgian border, drinking water was banned because of high concentrations of
ammonium perchlorate. No one has ever provided an explanation, but the location of the contaminated
aquifers corresponds to the places where the most intense fighting took place during the war, which
leaves little doubt that these municipalities far from Verdun also suffer from the same problem,
even though they don't fall into any red or sometimes even yellow zones. After all,
it wasn't only in Verdun that fighting took place. In Metz, farther east of Verdun,
the local "deminage" team in charge of clearing the territories of three departments belonging to
the old front line registers some 900 to 1,000 requests for action a year, with a total of 45
to 60 tons of ammunition collected. As long as they are conventional ordnance, all it would take
is a little caution and a safe place to detonate them. But about 2 percent of those collected turn
out to be gas weapons loaded with mustard gas and phosgene. Until 1997, such armaments were
collected and stored at a specialized site, at Suippes, in the Marne department, not far from
Verdun. Given what had happened to the place à gaz, it was thus preferred not to detonate them,
at least for the time being. But when France signed the convention prohibiting the possession
and use of chemical weapons, those weapons had to be dismantled somehow. Thus the SECOIA
project, "site d'élimination des chargements d'objets identifiés anciens," was initiated.
The dismantling site was established at the Mailly-le-Camp military base, where the ordnance
would be detonated in special chambers starting in 2016, marking the beginning of the toxic waste
treatment program for an expected duration of 30 years. What happened in and around Verdun and the
heavy legacy that has fallen on generations a century after the battle is just one emblematic
and tragic case, in numbers, of a certainly more widespread problem that is often ignored. After
the war, in fact, almost all belligerent countries hid and stored unused armaments,
including chemical weapons. The problem is that many of these locations are unknown, whether
they are top secret locations or long forgotten secrets. Staying in France, for example, it was
discovered that thousands of tons of armaments and munitions were stored in a submerged chamber under
the waters of Lake d'Avrillé, or in the caves of Jardel, used as a veritable dumping ground.
And the more years passed, the more fragile the casings that retained the toxic charges became.
Today in the parts of Verdun everything tells of the war. From memorials and charnel houses,
such as the one in Douamont, to the private collections of farmers who have recovered
ammunition and relics from their fields over the years. Many activities revolve around the macabre
remembrance of the war; tours are organized that come dangerously close to the red zone, maybe even
crossing it. Trenches are reconstructed for the delight of tourists. Unfortunately, it is when
we think we have left the nightmares behind that we should pay more attention, and in Verdun the
horror of the war is still embedded in the ground. The zone rouge in some parts fools us under the
appearance of a lush forest, albeit a poisoned one. In other parts, such as the place à gaz,
it seems instead to have come straight out of the pages of Thomas Eliot's Wasteland, the poem of the
post-war fall of man and his land: a barren wasteland where life no longer grows, camped
with dead trees, where not even the many buried corpses have been able to sprout. Well also today
we have finished our story. Thank you all for your attention and see you in the next video. Ciao!