Summer 2013
Page 12
Lethal relics from WW1 are still emerging continued
Last year alone the Belgian military collected 105 tons of munitions, many containing toxic chemicals, and the French police, who run a similar collection service out of a base near Arras, 80 tons. The year before the combined total was 274 tons. Sometimes, when a longlost arms cache or depot is discovered, the total is higher still. In 2004, for example, 3,000 German artillery shells were found at a single site in Dadizele, east of Ypres. Such large volumes are not quite as surprising as they sound. Between 1914 and 1918 the opposing armies fired an estimated 1.45 billion shells at each other, of which about 66 million contained mustard gas or other toxic chemicals such as phosgene or white phosphorus. As Vanparys says, ‘The three richest countries in the world at that time [Britain, Germany and France] went bankrupt in four years through producing so much war material.’ A century on the casualty figures also continue to rise. Every year or two a farmer detonates a shell while ploughing his fields and destroys if not himself, then at least his tractor. More would be killed or wounded were it not for the fact that they almost always plough in the same direction, giving the buried shells glancing blows that gradually nudge them into line so their noses are less likely to be hit. The Belgian government has paid out nearly €140,000 in compensation over the past three years for damage caused to tractors, ploughs and combine harvesters by WWI munitions. In the Ypres area 358 people have been killed and 535 injured by First World War munitions since the guns finally fell silent in 1918, and the victims are certainly not all farmers. In March this year seven labourers, policemen and firemen were taken to hospital when a German gas shell exploded during cable-laying work in Warneton, south of Ypres. In October 2007 Jozef Verdru, 58, from Loker, was killed when a shell exploded while he was having a bonfire in his garden. Luc Ervinck, 40, a collector of militaria, was blown up in 2000 when a shell he was examining in his garden shed in Essen exploded, detonating several others in his collection. Vanparys and his team recount numerous stories of close shaves in recent years: of five gas workers who ended up in hospital after striking a shell while laying a pipe; of a shell that was brought into a food factory in a load of turnips and which then exploded inside a processing machine; of a farmer they found choking on phosgene gas after cracking open a shell while laying irrigation pipes near Ploegsteert; ‘I saved his life,’ Vanparys says. On another occasion, in the town of Zonnebeke, he found a utility worker staring in horror at the great yellow blisters erupting on his hand and arm after he had picked up a shell with a black liquid seeping out of it. The worker had not realised that mustard gas was liquid. Vanparys is part of the Belgian army’s 63strong Dienst voor Opruiming en Vernietiging van Ontploffings-tuigen (DOVO), or Explosive Ordnance Disposal Company, which is responsible for the collection and destruction of the munitions since the Belgian practice of dumping them at sea was banned in the 1980s for environmental reasons. Its fencedin base near the town of Poelkapelle covers 280 hectares of former battlefield that are heavily wooded now, but remain riddled with old German bunkers and the clearly visible indentations of craters.
Above: Farmers have become accustomed to uncovering unexploded shells as they plough their fields
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