So many bones, what to do with them all?
The guns of August. There’s unexploded bombs, grenades, gas canisters on that battlefield. Likely a few bones still laying around here and there.
Great editing job there.
...but how many of the shells detonate on their own?
Is the battlefield actually dangerous assuming one doesn’t go banging on rounds with a sledgehammer?
Sequestering chemical rounds is still probably a good idea.
My french wifes great grandfather died at Verdun two weeks before her grandfather was born. Her grandfather was taken by the Germans in WWII for farm labor. They don’t care much for the Germans.
A member of my Father’s platoon in WWII, had an 88mm shell hit two feet from him and not explode.
Petain was promoted to Marshal and later command of the Army as he hero of Verdun. We know how that turned out.
Question: Did they work on ridding it of explosives while they were Vichy France under the thumb of the Nazis?
Log the forest with drones. Plow up with drones. Remove bombs with drones.
The senseless slaughter of WWI boggles the mind. But goes a long way in explaining British caution under Montgomery. The Brit public wouldn’t have accepted such losses again.
Sobering.
So many bones, what to do with them all?
I read that there are at least a couple of unexploded ‘mines’ containing many tons of explosives that have not yet been found. Their locations were lost decades ago.
I visited the Verdun memorial & battlefield in 1970, 52+ years after the battle.
On the bus I could smell the mustard. Locals were given 6 month vacations elsewhere because of the mustard. Signs were posted on the road warning people/cars to avoid leaving the road because of the un-exploded ordinance.
The memorial housed the remains of thousands of unidentified soldiers killed in the battle. I could see through a small window thousands of skulls in one room. Other rooms held legs, arms, & torsos. It was morbid.
I remember seeing a row of bayonets protruding from the ground. This was a squad of soldiers who were buried alive by a nearby shell explosion.
A big problem in clearing the ordinance is that the land is essentially wild, with trees & bushes hindering the effort.
Many dead are still there as they were left where they were and covered by the dirt flung up by other shells.
Photos at the time show a moonscape of mud.
Where the heck was it that a forest started on fire and the unexploded shells started going off?
I believe it was from WW1 shells.
Trollposter JohnGalt insisted that this isn’t true.
He also insisted that “old” chemical weapons weren’t dangerous.
The old WWI battlefields, now farm fields, often turn up chemical weapons that injure farmers.
“Iron harvest” they call it.
Yes, I’m poking a dead body.
And his echo burkeman1
Makes you realize what an insignificant blip our lives here on earth are in the overall scheme of things.