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. Then I see it: a rusty brown cylinder, half buried in the earth, uniform and solid and immovable.
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. Guy Momper has been with the
Déminage since leaving the French Navy over >fteen years ago.
He’s a tall, lithe man, obviously >t with a stamina and ?exibility
that belies his real age, his only concession to which is his almost
completely gray hair, cropped short in a military fashion. The
other démineurs stop their search and crowd around the shell,
?attening nettles, brambles, and wire with their boots.
I detect a sudden change of mood from one of enthusiastic
adventure to one of seriousness and reverence. 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 can tell it has been >red by the grooves
gouged into its copper driving band, a device designed to spin
the shell as it shoots out of the gun barrel. The shell appears to
be in good condition despite a thin patina of orange rust. Ninety-odd years ago this shell smashed into the ground at over a thousand miles per hour; it’s been lodged here ever since, waiting to
be discovered.
“This is the type of bomb that killed our friends in December,”
Guy says in English without looking up. Continuing to stare at the
shell, he adds, “A very di;cult fuse, one wrong move and . . . pop!”
With a deep sigh, he moves deliberately toward the shell and
ends up positioned with a foot on either side and both hands
clasped >rmly around its nose, in much the same way I’ve seen
people chastise a naughty pet dog. A colleague stands by, a crow
bar in hand, utterly trans>xed by this ancient remnant. No one
else moves. With a gentle but determined tug Guy has released
the shell from its earthly slumber and now has it cradled gently
like a newborn. The shell is placed gingerly and expertly onto a
special rack in the rear of a Land Rover.
British, French, American, and German armies >red approximately 720 million shells and mortar bombs on the Western
Front between 1914 and 1918. Military experts estimate that as
many as one in >ve rounds of ammunition >red by either side
failed to explode. As a direct result of land contamination by
unexploded ordinance, 16 million acres of France were cordoned
o= at the end of 1918, including the 2 million acres around
Verdun. Known as the Zone Rouge, they remain forbidden territory to this day. The Département du Déminage was created after
the end of the Second World War to >nd, remove, and destroy
shells and bombs from both wars. This activity has cost the
department 630 démineurs to date, all killed while clearing
unexploded munitions. At the current rate of clearance it is a
conservative estimate that the Département du Déminage will
still be >nding these weapons nine hundred years from now.
Many of the shells >red contained toxic gas, and for the most
part it is di;cult for even the most experienced démineurs to distinguish which ones, excepting the rare occasion when the red,
white, or yellow bands or crosses indicating that the munition
contains gas are preserved. Often, with toxic shells held close to
an ear, one is able to hear the bone-chilling swish-swish of the
liquid gas as the shell is gently rocked from side to side. Shells
suspected of containing gas are treated with extra caution and
eventually delivered to a special bunker at the bomb depot near
Pont-a-Mousson. The gas shells and bombs are particularly prone
to leaking and are considered by the démineurs their most feared
type of ammunition to handle, though perhaps fear is the wrong
word, as the démineurs seem pretty fearless to me. In fact, I am
utterly humbled by their sel?ess activities.
December 2007: Laurent Flauder and Dominique Milesi from
the Département du Déminage take a German 155-millimeter
shell from the forest and place it in their Land Rover in exactly
the same manner as Guy had during our tromp through the
L EF T: Remy Tabary and Guy Momper attempt to defuse
a thousand-pound World War II–era bomb found on a
building site.
A B O V E : Christian Cleret, chief of the Moselle District
Département du Déminage, collecting unexploded ordnance.
