There were fields of wheat, oat, barley, rye, and potatoes, with cows wandering the nearby slopes. Before it was a battlefield, Verdun was a farming region of nine villages. He hit something that gave off a metallic ping, and kept right on swinging away until he realized he was whacking away at a 155-millimeter shell.Įxplosives aside, the Verdun forest today looks nothing like it did in the years leading up to World War I. In one memorable instance, he remembers swinging a pickaxe in a crater in an attempt to locate the bedrock. Hupy knew he was supposed to report any unexploded shells to French forestry officials, but back then he just moved the shells around himself.
VERDUN BATTLE SKIN
“But the really thin metal skin wears away, so much that you could kick it with your foot, crack it open, and die on the spot.” These shells were relatively easy to identify, as each bears a distinctive stripe. “With time, the gas never gets less dangerous,” he says. Unsurprisingly, Hupy encountered many unexploded chemical weapon shells. Old bunkers provide the perfect roosting spot for bats. So he went to Verdun in 2003, where he slept at a dairy farm by night and traipsed into the dangerous forest by day. He couldn’t help but wonder about the inverse: How battles impact the environment.
Realizing he lacked the fervent mound passion of other drumlin researchers, Hupy pivoted and took a class on how environments can impact the outcomes of battles. “Throughout France there was this attitude of not giving up, but they looked at Verdun and how trashed it was and thought, ‘What’s the point?’” So the officials simply gave the land over to forest, sure that the area would be forever devastated.īefore he came to study Verdun, Hupy was into drumlins, or small mounds created by the movement of glaciers. “People were forcibly ordered not to return, not to rebuild,” Hupy says. After the battle, the site was considered a huge mass grave, and was also bedeviled by all that unexploded ordnance. When pilots flew over the battlefield, they described it as “the surface of the moon.”īut the extreme devastation of Verdun is what preserved its future as a forest, says Joseph Hupy, an aerial systems expert at Purdue University who also wrote his doctoral thesis on Verdun. New craters appeared almost constantly, sometimes filling trenches that had been dug just hours before, Cowley writes. State Archives of North Carolina/Public Domainĭuring the stalemate at Verdun, French and German forces lobbed artillery at one another, often indiscriminately, in an attempt to break morale, writes American military historian Robert Cowley in a paper in MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. It is a newborn landscape.” Verdun during World War I. “But now it is a sacred place because of biodiversity. “Verdun was always a sacred place because of its history,” says Rémi de Matos Machado, a geomorphologist who wrote his doctoral thesis on Verdun’s thriving afterlife. This all happened precisely because the land had been irreparably changed by the battle.
Many traces of the conflict remained: the bodies of as many as 100,000 soldiers and millions of unexploded shells.* But something surprising happened in the aftermath of the battle, as the orchids, bats, and toads-species that did not live there before the battle-moved in and thrived. Some 10 months later, the German army pulled back, and the conflict left the forest a scarred, muddy wasteland. And tiny toads with mottled yellow bellies stay cool in the little pools that dot the forest floor.īut on February 21, 1916, beginning with a two-day barrage of German artillery, Verdun became the site of one of the longest and bloodiest battles in World War I, and indeed in all of human history.
Small, furry bats take up residence in the many underground hollows, which are perfect for hibernation. Pear and plum trees pop up every now and then among the pines. Wild marsh orchids and white swallow-wort sprout. Today, the Verdun forest in France teems with so much charming life that it seems straight out of a storybook.
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