The Last Battle Of Wwi: Unexploded Artillery Shells

YPRES, Belgium - All is not quiet on the Western Front.

Here on one of World War I's busiest and bloodiest battlefields, unexploded artillery shells stir from an 80-year slumber, rising by the thousands from the mud of Flanders.

Some are awakened by plows and backhoes. Others are simply heaved to the surface by the steady workings of frost and thaw. Having outlived nearly everyone who built them, fired them or cowered beneath their flight, the shells remain ready to kill. sometimes not even the full-time efforts of 73 Belgian soldiers and civilians are enough to stop them.

"For us, the First World War has not stopped," says Philippe Pille, commander of a bomb-disposal unit that might be called the war's last active detachment.

Based at the edge of a forest where ferns and birches hide the contours of old trenches and shell craters, his unit retrieves ordnance each day from the rolling landscape where four of the war's great battles were fought.

Each occurred in and around a bulge in the front known as the Ypres Salient, and the deadliest came in July 1917, when about 250,000 British troops died capturing a few square miles of mud around the village of Passchendaele.

The enemy then was Germany. Today it is a multinational arsenal of shells - long ones, short ones, fat ones, skinny ones, each coated heavily with rust, and about one of every 10 containing poisonous gas, a weapon that made its military debut here during a German attack in April 1915.

Each year at least 3,000 shells turn up in the area, although the totals are likely higher. There are so many that the annual haul is measured in tonnage rather than projectiles.

"We are finding more shells this year than last year, and last year we found more than the year before that," says Cpl. Bart Guillemyn. "Maybe it is because it has been a wet year and they're coming up to the surface, or maybe it's because farmers are using better and heavier equipment, and digging deeper."

Whatever the reason, the persistently heavy harvest offers a cautionary tale for every other country where artillery and land mines remain buried in the wake of recent fighting.

"In Bosnia, in Africa, in Laos and Cambodia, they will be having this problem for 50 years, minimum," says Warrant Officer Wielfried De Ryck, after morning rounds collecting shells at 30 farms, gardens and construction sites.

U.S. officers serving with peacekeeping forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina have lately been citing the lingering problems of the Western Front as an object lesson, especially when locals begin grumbling about the slow pace at which mines and shells are being removed. If De Ryck's career is any indication, they may still be grumbling decades from now.

He has been at it for 18 years, and when he came on the job in 1978, he joined soldiers who had been doing the same thing since the 1950s. They, in turn, joined veterans who had begun work in the '30s, who had in turn inherited their careers from the originals, who began clearing Flanders fields in 1919, the year after the armistice.

In those days World War I was still known as the Great War, although its true greatness was in the great number of men killed - in the millions. Fought in an era when the efficiency of weapons far exceeded the imagination of generals, it quickly turned into stalemate and slaughter along the Western Front.

The only way to break this cycle, generals figured, was to precede attacks with artillery bombardments. Each time that failed, they simply increased the duration and intensity of the next bombardment, to the point that literally millions of shells would be fired in a single day.

But about 30 percent of the shells in those days routinely failed to explode, meaning that millions sank into the mire.

Most days De Ryck and five other men drive about the countryside, answering the latest calls relayed by local police.

By lunchtime, the six soldiers have filled the sanded flatbeds of two mid-sized trucks with shells of various sizes, all of them of World War I vintage, although occasionally a newer one from World II turns up, or, rarer still, a 19th-century shell from Napoleonic times. Those must also be handled with care.

By late afternoon, the day's demands have nearly been met, although back at headquarters the faxes are already piling up with missions for the following morning. At one road construction site alone nine shells need to be retrieved.

The daily haul is trucked to the base, about eight miles northeast of Ypres, just beyond the village of Poelkapelle.

There the shells are gingerly sorted by caliber and nationality. Projectiles of a certain size and with a certain, telltale fuse almost always contain poison. Until late 1980, these were dumped into the ocean, but since then they have been set aside in growing lines of wooden trays, stacked one atop the other beneath waist-high roofs of corrugated steel.

The stockpile of poison shells now stands at about 20,000, and even if an elaborate dismantlement facility being built here opens on schedule next year, it will only be able to handle about 20 shells a day. Pille concedes that it could take years, even decades, to get rid of even the ones already collected, not to mention the thousands likely to be collected in the meantime.

The rest - some as big as fire hydrants, though most are about the size of a quart bottle of cola - are placed in wooden crates. The smaller ones go toward the bottom, the bigger ones on top, with a few old grenades sometimes filling in the gaps at the edges. A modern anti-tank mine is placed atop the pile, with a few sticks of dynamite wrapped in detonator wire its middle.

Then, twice each day, at 11:45 a.m. and 4:30 p.m., eight of the crates are loaded into eight deep holes in a muddy clearing amid the birches. A bulldozer covers the holes. A soldier in a black bunker at the edge of the woods sounds a warning siren; he then presses a green button to set off each crate, one by one.

And after waiting for eight decades, the rusty old shells roar to life at last, sending geysers of mud and smoke into the air, sometimes with a rolling burst of flame. Once again, the earth shakes and craters, and the boom of shellfire rolls out across the Western Front.