Summer 2013
Page 13
Lethal relics from WW1 are still emerging continued
The base also houses – for identification purposes – an extraordinary ‘reference library’ of munitions containing hundreds of different shells, mortars, howitzers and grenades including British ‘Flying Pigs’ (a mortar bomb) and the first primitive bombs dropped from airplanes. These purveyors of death and destruction come in every shape and size – snub-nosed and pointed, finned and smooth, German, British, French, Polish, Russian and Italian – all testimony to the grizzly ingenuity of man. The biggest are British 15in and German 38cm shells, each the size of a very large milk churn, and Vanparys has found several of those in the fields over the years. The base is always on standby, sending out one or more collection teams every day, and responding to about 2,000 calls a year. The munitions the teams bring back are taken first to the ‘Abfikzone’, an open-sided shed surrounded by high earthen berms in case any explode. There each is given a bar code so they may be tracked. Then, rather alarmingly, men with hammers chip away the dirt and rust so the shells can be identified more easily and will eventually detonate better. Those that contain high explosives only are taken to a storage shed whose concrete floor is covered by about 70 wooden crates. Each crate holds shells containing up to 50kg of explosives, and each morning six crates are taken to a nearby clearing in the woods. An M6 anti-tank mine and a lump of TNT are put in each of them. They are lowered in to freshly dug pits four metres deep, and a bulldozer covers them in mounds of earth. At 11.30am daily a siren sounds to alert anyone living nearby, and then the crates are detonated one by one. It is an impressive sight. The explosions shake the concrete viewing bunker 200 metres away. A second later the earth erupts in flames, and a great cloud of black smoke billows skywards. For a moment you sense the terror that the soldiers of the Great War must have felt as they cowered in their trenches. After the sixth blast a second siren sounds the all-clear and a team member measures the air for traces of arsenic. The process is repeated at 4pm each day, a rate that just about allows the base to keep up with the incoming flow of munitions; the crates cannot contain more than 50kg of explosives because the ground shocks would destabilise the homes of people living nearby. The base stops the detonations in winter because the shock waves are amplified in wet ground. Shells suspected of containing toxic chemicals are harder to deal with. They are taken to another building where they are Xrayed. Those found to contain solid chemicals such as white phosphorus are blown up in a contained detonation chamber made of reinforced steel elsewhere on the base. Those containing liquid chemicals are analysed by a device called a neutron-induced gamma ray spectrometer to determine whether they hold mustard gas, phosgene or something else. They are then drained – phosgene at freezing temperatures – into blue plastic barrels containing neutralising agents, and driven to Antwerp for destruction. It is hazardous work, and becoming steadily more so as the shell casings corrode with time. The DOVO’s insignia depicts a falling shell, and its motto is ‘Pericula non timeo’ (‘I do not fear dangers’). A memorial on the base lists the names of 23 members of DOVO Company killed since 1944, including those of four men who died when shells stockpiled on the base exploded in 1986. But Vanparys finds it satisfying and fulfilling. ‘We are an army company working for civilians. We are taking the danger out of civil society and we are doing it well,’ he says. At first his work frightened his wife, Anja, but ‘now she’s used to it and knows I’m very careful,’ he adds. It is also a job with no end in sight. A century on, hundreds of millions of shells are still buried in the rich earth of Flanders and northern France. ‘The job will not be finished when I retire,’ Vanparys says. ‘Maybe in another 50 years it will be.’
Above and right: Photographs taken on our own tours of shells of The Iron Harvest
Above: Old munitions are detonated twice daily