The shell appears to be in good condition despite a thin patina of orange rust. I can tell it has been fired by the grooves gouged into its copper driving band, a device designed to spin the shell as it shoots out of the gun barrel. We are all looking down at a German 155-millimeter high-explosive artillery shell about a hundred pounds in weight, as long as your arm and as thick as your thigh. I detect a sudden change of mood from one of enthusiastic adventure to one of seriousness and reverence. The other démineurs stop their search and crowd around the shell, flattening nettles, brambles, and wire with their boots. He’s a tall, lithe man, obviously fit with a stamina and flexibility that belies his real age, his only concession to which is his almost completely gray hair, cropped short in a military fashion. Guy Momper has been with the Déminage since leaving the French Navy over fifteen years ago. My heart pounds, and in bad French an octave higher than usual I call out to Guy, ex-navy, ex-special forces, now second in command of the local Déminage. Then I see it: a rusty brown cylinder, half buried in the earth, uniform and solid and immovable. I had begun by treading as lightly as possible on the soft leaf litter, but I can’t keep up this way and resign myself to crashing through the undergrowth like a Friday night reveler drunk on testosterone and cheap lager. The French Interior Ministry estimates that at least 12 million unexploded shells reside in the hills and forests that rise above Verdun. I’m being led by a small band of démineurs from the Département du Déminage through territory honeycombed with a myriad of trenches, tunnels, and mines. I walk inexpertly on uneven soil, the edge of one crater intersecting another, snagging my boots on what at first I assume are brambles but quickly recognize as copious strands of needle-sharp barbed wire camouflaged by sprigs of new growth. In the forest, in among the ruin, unexploded bombs lie everywhere. Over 60 million shells were fired into this area between February 21 and December 18, 1916, killing 305,440 men out of 708,777 casualties. This is a place where the world changed,” says Christina Holstein, a British historian. Not for nothing was the battlefield known as “The Mincer.” As well as being the longest battle of the Great War, the Battle of Verdun also has the ignominy of being the first test of modern industrialized slaughter. The mature beech forests that cover the hills were home to some of the Great War’s most bitter fighting as many as 150 shells fell for every square meter of this battlefield. During the First World War, these hills and gorges were cratered by a continuous ten-month-long artillery bombardment more intense than any before and any since. The vast area around the French city of Verdun remains suspended in the year 1916.
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