"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!
