Comment by holoduke

Every year I visit various ww1 battle sites in northern France and Italy. We walk through endless farm lands to find information about certain events. We often stumble upon ammunition and steel scrap. The land is literally filled with shells, bullets, scrapnel everywhere. Some are still live and just brought to the top of the soil by farm tractor machinery. The amount of shells fired at the battle of as Verdun is so extremely high that you find layers of shells everywhere. For months millions of shells were fired in a 20 square km area. It will take hundreds of years to clean them up. 900 years in some places. A few years ago I found in the middle of farmland a lot of unexploded bullets still in their clips. After searching a bit more we found also various fragments of helmets and bajonets, leather belts and more. It turned out to be a French defense unit, completely destroyed and burried under layers of mud only to be discovered 100 years later.