I’ve been listening to the excellent Hardcore History podcast, and the current topic is the first World War, and he’s describing some of the battlefields on the Western Front (such as Ypres), and these places were absolute charnel houses, with multiple years worth of dead bodies kind of oozing out of the ground, not to mention hundreds of thousands of people’s worth of sewage, dead horses, leftovers from gas attacks, etc. Basically, really really horrific stuff.
So I was wondering… what happened next? So in November 1919 the fighting stopped, but who cleaned up the battlefields, if anyone? And what about whatever poor farmer could dig up a map showing that he owned a patch of land between some road (long since destroyed) and some village (long since destroyed)? Did the basic geography of cities and roads and stuff just end up going back to what it had been before?
Morbidly, was there a point some number of years later where all that decomposition actually made the soil noticeably fertile?
Some was probably expropriated by the government; since it would have been relatively unsafe to return anyway. I assume they went through the usual channels of compensating land owners, like any national park setup?
It returned to farmland as it was before and as quickly as practical I should think.
The north of France and Belgium is prime agricultural territory with not much to go round and farmers aren’t typically a sentimental bunch. I drive through the area on a regular basis and though war memorials are sadly plentiful and beautifully maintained, farming is King.
Verdun wasn’t much of a farmland and after the battle the treches, pillboxes, and most the shell craters made the land unfarmable anyway. Look at the picture on this page to see the effects the shelling had on the terrain:
Oh I think a few lumps and bumps are no barrier. As you say, we’ll farm anywhere. Sheep and cows love a bit of challenging terrain. No matter what the state of the ground as soon as grass grows, there’ll be animals on it.
When I was stationed in the UK in the 1980s I caught the ferry to LeHavre, France and I visited some of the WWI battlefields (some of which BTW became WWII battlefields. Nothing like recycling…). Anyway, most were just open fields or now forested areas.
If you didn’t know where to look and what to look for ( in some parts around the Somme you could still see where trenches had been dug and that in the mid-1980s, 70 years after the war) you’d probably miss most of them. The ossuary near Verdun is impressive and there are many cemeteries.
I would have liked to have seen the Masurian Lakes where the Germans and the Russians fought, However, this was during the Cold War and Poland was somewhat “off limits” to US military personnel.
That surprises me considering how well Civil War battlefields are maintained. Are the battle areas just too vast to permanently withdraw from everyday use, or are there other reasons?
The most recent find I can recall was the Carspach trench, which was where a bunch of German soldiers got buried alive from shelling. Their remains and personal items were well preserved. Even some newspapers.
One of the Passchendaele mines is still unaccounted for, with tens of thousands of pounds of explosives. The Brits planted 21, 19 detonated, one blew up in a lightning strike and killed a cow some decades back (or a farmer, reports vary). The last one…?
There was also a recent story about a battlefield way high up on a mountain in (I believe) Italy where the extreme cold preserved a bunch of artifacts very well.
This is Europe, a battlefield millennia old. I recall an episode of Time Team where they were assiduously trying to archeologise IIRC a pre-Christian battleground…and accidentally turned up a WWI trench.
Apart from one or two areas, such as Sanctuary Wood and the Vimy Ridge Memorial Park, northern France and Flanders returned to farming or coal mining as soon as the inhabitants could re-establish themselves in shacks on the approximate sites of their former homes. Several clear-up drives were launched in the postwar years and the non-ferrous metals in fuses and nosecaps found a ready market. Huge quantities of ordnance came up under the plough, and it continues to come up every autumn, perhaps in lesser quantities now. Shells are stacked up beside the road and the inhabitants know better than to mess with them. The farmers got a bounty for reporting human remains. Graves registration teams searched the battle zones multiple times over the next decade - rarely was it possible to put names to bodies and the Imperial War Graves Commission only put names to them when they were satisfied that conclusive evidence existed; good guess is not enough.
I dispute that. Chickamauga, site of a Confederate victory, was one of the first Federal national military parks. First and Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville were all relatively well-preserved, given local development pressures. I think the size of the battle, and not who won, is a better predictor of whether or not the land was preserved.