‘The nightmare landscape of the battlefields’
Right across the Somme, the war left a trail of change and
destruction. The areas churned up by the passage of war
and the vast quantities of war materials all over the Somme
needed urgent attention, yet it was impossible for many
of the Département’s inhabitants to start rebuilding
their lives. Farm, factories, whole villages and towns were
uninhabitable and much of the area between Albert, Bapaume
and Péronne was completely devastated.
Rich farm soil had been blasted away, infertile chalk and
clay were visible on the surface (chalk can still be seen
in ploughed fields, showing the sites of shell craters or
trench lines). Rivers were obstructed, fields flooded. Many
thousands of buildings were partially or severely damaged,
and every single commune in the Somme had some war damage
to report.
More than a million acres needed to be cleared of munitions,
65,000 tonnes of barbed wire had to be removed, and thousands
of wells (the only source of water outside towns) had
to be restored. Many miles of railways, roads and canals
were unusable; and, by November 1918, the population of
the Somme was only 58 % of what it had been just before
the war.
Organised civic life had ceased completely in many communities;
municipal councils had to be recreated, and all ordinary
administrative services restarted – from re-establishing
the lay-out of towns, villages and farms in many cases,
to such matters as police, education and medical services.
Special services were set up to clear the huge quantities
of munitions and barbed wire and to fill in the trenches
and shell-holes so that farmers could cultivate their
fields once more. It was thought that the land was so
severely damaged in the worst areas that it could never
be won back for productive agriculture – the land
should be planted to form a forest. The returning farmers
thought otherwise, however, and as the fields were laboriously
cleared they began cultivation once more and houses were
rebuilt.
Between 1914 and 1918, a total of more than a billion
shells (including 50,000,000 gas shells) were produced
and fired by the French, British and German artillery.
Verdun and the Somme consumed the greatest number, for
ahead of the Marne and the remainder of the Western Front.
In comparison, the Second World War used two hundred times
fewer shells.
These figures reveal the scale of the task of the eight
men still employed by the ammunition disposal service
of the Somme and the Oise departments, who are responsible
for cleaning the land. They estimate that at the current
rate (between 70 and 80 tonnes of shells come to the surface
every year), shells remain in sufficient numbers to continue
appearing for another seven or eight centuries. This is
without considering the danger to the disposal service
workers: of the 127 men employed in this work throughout
the whole of France, twelve have died at work since 1986,
and every year a civilian is killed in the department
of the Somme.
Old shells and other
munitions still emerge from the ground every year:
Do not touch! They are still dangerous.
Many are unstable and still contain explosives
or gas.
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