The trenches of World War One were a hell of barbed wire, mud, blood, human remains & just plain garbage.
Shell casings, discarded bayonets, ruined helmets, severed feet. The smear of proteins & pulped bone, left after modern artillery. An infinite horror of vileness, straddling Europe over many hundreds of miles.
Breeding disease.
Sick & foul.
Who cleaned it up? Did all the Allies help? Did the surrendered Central Powers help?
Were special departments of civilians organized?
What special problems were faced?
What was the US involvement?
I’ve heard that Chinese laborers were imported to help dig trenches during the fighting. Were they employed during the cleanup?
I haven’t found any mention of the CLC (Chinese Labour Corps) remaining in Europe post-1919, but here is a very interesting article on their work (and conditions of labour):
This article seems to imply that the returning locals did most of the work of reconstruction, with some aid from charities (at least in and around Ypres, in Belgium): http://www.greatwar.co.uk/westfront/ypsalient/ypres.htm
And a very poignant poem, written by Philip Johnstone during the war, about how the battlefields would become tourist attractions after the war, along with details of how this actually came about: http://www.uwe.ac.uk/amd/vortex/relics.htm
The page also touches on some of the post-war recovery of devastated areas.
Well, for starters, a lot of it was done as it went; they didn’t ordinarily leave corpses and body parts until the end of the fighting, y’know. They generally, y’know, buried them.
The clean-up still goes on , especially with unexploded ordinance. The Belgium Army keeps a permanent detachment near Ypres.This is because over 5 tons of the stuff is found every year just in this one battle zone . Every time a farmer ploughs a field , digs a ditch or there is new building work they come across it. It has been estimated that about a third of all the shells that were fired never exploded , they were either duds or they sank into the soft mud.
Human remains are still turning up. Where possible modern forensic techniques are used to try and identify the person. Even if this is not possible they are all given a full military funeral and laid to rest in one of the many military cemeteries that can be found in this haunted land.
There are still tens of thousands of bodies there, both buried deliberately, and where they fell. Many were buried, then the graves obliterated in later fighting over the same ground.
55,000 missing commemorated (by name) on the Menin Gate, Ypres;
11,800 missing Canadians named on the Vimy Memorial;
35,000 missing named on the Arras Memorial;
7,000 at Cambrai;
14,000 at La Tourette;
20,000 at Loos;
14,000 at Pozieres;
72,000 at Theipval;
10,000 at Vis-en-Artois…and on, and on.
I was at the burial of three unknown Canadians in June 2003, at Passendale, Belgium. Three weeks later 28 Germans were reburied in Germany (the French no longer host German war dead on their soil). Two more Germans were discovered in one of the many unexplored tunnels and dugouts under Vimy Ridge just before I arrived. http://www.diggers.be/N/Ezine/2002/canada140ENG.htm
Bodies turn up weekly; there is much economic development in northern France and Belgium these days.
The French and Belgian armies have EOD teams out of all proportion to their size; the retired Royal Engineers officer (who does the EOD for Vimy and Beaumont-Hamel) who gave me a walking tour of the Beaumont-Hamel battlefield said that they estimate there is one unexploded device for every square foot of northern France and Belgium (ranging from a rifle cartidge to shells weighing nearly 2000 pounds); at the present rate of clearance, it will be 700 years before everything is found. http://www.durandgroup.org.uk/whoweare.asp
I once read that when the new Autoroute was built between Paris and Brussels back in the 60’s or 70’s it cost three times the amount of a normal road. The reason was the extra expense of moving all the human remains in a sympathetic way , dealing with all the unexploded ordinance and the extra time all this took.
I don’t doubt you, but I’d like to see why this is, and why it’s happening now, as opposed to say, in 1946, when there was much more antipathy between the countries.
Sorry, I worded that poorly: there are no longer any burials of German war dead in France; any “new” remains discovered are repatriated to Germany for burial there. My understanding of this was that this policy originated with the German government, as being more sensitive to French feelings (any German body on French soil being, perforce, an invader).
My source for the information is the British Lt.-Col. who does the underground exploration and cleanup for the Canadian government sites in France and Belgium, and who had dealt with the two German bodies found under Vimy Ridge a few months before my visit.