Grim reaping – An Irishman’s Diary about the ‘Iron Harvest’ of France and Belgium

Across the road from a war cemetery in northern France at the weekend, I clambered up an embankment into a tilled field, looking for something. It didn’t take long to find.

Within a few paces, I spotted a rusting, 100-year-old rifle bullet. Nearby, I also picked up what looked like an oddly-rectangular lump of soil. It was in fact metal – lead, judging by the weight – another century-old relic of the war to end all wars.

Shrapnel

The bullet, at least, had never killed anyone. It was still intact, charge and all, with a small dent in the side, probably left by a plough or harrow. But I could not be so sure about the shrapnel which, propelled at high speed, would have made a very severe dent in any human unfortunate enough to be in its way.

Both items are part of what the French and Belgians call the “iron harvest” – a crop sown with reckless abandon during the years 1914 to 1918 and still yielding enormous returns, occasionally with fatal results.

The numbers are mind-boggling. According to one estimate, a tonne of explosives was fired at every square metre of the Great War’s Western Front. About two-thirds of it detonated. Much of the rest was buried, then or later, in mud.

So a century on, every year, materiel – live or otherwise – still continues to resurface, at a rate of more than 100 tonnes a season. Although it’s called a harvest, it’s as likely to turn up during the spring-ploughing as in autumn. When it does, farmers often leave it on the side of the road for collection, as their Irish counterparts used to do with milk churns.

Maybe 99 times out of a hundred, the material is discovered harmlessly. But now and again, the finder is unlucky. In the Belgian city of Ypres, the year before last, two building workers were killed and two others injured when they dug up an unexploded shell.

Explosions

The local police commissioner reassured tourists then that such incidents were rare. And indeed they are, now, unless you go out of your way to increase the risks. Of the hundreds killed by delayed explosions or gas leaks over the past century, a large majority were employed in clearance work.

Most of this unwanted harvest was accidentally buried. But in a few very notable cases, the process was deliberate. The Messines Ridge Mines of 1917, for example, were an attempt to end the notorious stalemate overground by attacking the enemy from underneath.

A major work of military engineering, and also one of the few clear-cut victories of the war, the plan involved tunnelling under the German-held Messines Ridge – a rare piece of high ground in Belgium – and placing enormous amounts of an explosive called “ammonal” in 26 different places along a seven-mile stretch.

One the eve of their detonation, a British officer told a press conference that, while the next day’s events might not make history, they would certainly “change the geography” of the area. Sure enough, the staggered explosions had the effect of an earthquake, while also leaving craters that today look like the result of meteorites.

The noise is said to have been heard in London’s Downing Street and, by one account, in Trinity College Dublin. But not all the mines were detonated. One was abandoned when prematurely discovered. Others proved superfluous after the speed of German evacuation left them behind Allied lines.

A few remained in place after the war, presumably because they were too much trouble to dismantle. One, containing 50,000lbs (about 22.5 tonnes) of explosives, was under an abandoned Belgian farm called La Petite Douve (“the Little Moat”). The farm has since been restored and reoccupied. But the mine remains in place, apparently to the unconcern of the residents.

Detonated

They may be reasoning that, after 99 years, it’s unlikely to blow now. Then again, another of the half-forgotten mines was detonated by lighting in 1955, to the great surprise of a cow, its only recorded fatality.

That you don’t see many cows in Belgium these days is more to do with factory farming than the dangers of grazing (latter-day Belgian cattle are nearly all indoors, eating cornmeal rather than grass). Nevertheless, the now-peaceful fields of Flanders remain heavily polluted with the detritus of war. It will take many more harvests, maybe another 100, before the grim crop is exhausted.