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from
The Guardian Saturday 11 November 2000
Corner of a foreign field that is
forever dangerous
More than 80 years on, a deadly
harvest of unexploded artillery shells is still being found in Flanders'
fields
Ian Black in Ypres
 It
is mid-morning in Flanders and Chief Petty Officer Marc Baelde and Master
Corporal Dirk Swertvaegher of the Belgian army are out on a routine mission
- collecting artillery shells used by the British army more than 80 years
ago.
CPO Baelde, a team leader with
explosives ordnance disposal (EOD), is crouching by the side of a cornfield
in Zandvoorde, near Ypres, tapping gently with a small hammer at the end of
a rust-streaked tube encrusted with dry earth.
"Don't worry," he says,
pointing with gloved hands to the metal band encircling the end of a
six-inch calibre shell - measured to identify the precise type. "The
copper strip is still there, so that means it has never been fired."
Half a dozen other shells are
wire-brushed clean, checked and then laid carefully in a wooden tray, filled
with sand, in the back of an EOD white and dayglo Mercedes truck, a stylised
bomb emblem emblazoned on its bonnet.
"Always sideways," explains
Cpl Swertvaegher, a strapping, slow-talking 6ft-something who does the heavy
lifting.
"To prevent detonation if
there's an accident." Crystallised explosives become unstable and can
easily go off.
Today is the 82nd anniversary of the
end of the first world war, and as poppies are buttoned into lapels and
remembrance services held, these Belgian servicemen will be out as usual
gathering the deadly harvest of an unending conflict.
Most of it was sown in the spring of
1917, during the third battle of Ypres - known as "Wipers" to
British troops - when a staggering 4.7m shells were fired into a narrow
salient protruding into the German front line.
Of those, as many as one third failed
to explode in the wet clay, notorious to the men who served and died there.
"Good God," Field Marshal
Haig's chief of staff gaped later, weeping as his car floundered through the
mud at Passchendaele. "Did we really send men to fight in that?"
Today Passchendaele is just a sleepy
village and the neat tombstones of the Tyne Cot cemetery (the name is a
legacy of the Geordies of the Northumberland Fusiliers) are the only
reminder of the terrible human cost of the fighting.
But six ordnance teams, operating
from the nearby Steenstraat barracks, still receive 3,000 calls a year and
remove hundreds of tonnes of shells, trench mortars, grenades and other
weapons left over from the world's first industrial-scale war.
A deadly collection at the
disposal unit's HQ |
Known as Dovos after their Flemish
acronym, the teams operate a daily, nine-to-five collection service, and are
booked weeks in advance through police stations.
In Zandvoorde, the farmer, a Mr
Verhoest, has even helpfully sketched directions on the back of an envelope
on how to find the shells in his field.
The detritus of battle is part of
this bleak landscape, routinely unearthed when people plough their land,
plant vegetables, build extensions - or dig graves for newly found human
remains in Flanders' many war cemeteries. Occasionally it is still deadly:
the latest victim was Luk Evinck, a farmer from Diksmuide, just up the road,
who died in his barn last month when he tried to defuse a shell.
"We are used to these things and
we are not afraid," said Els Mabesoone, who grows beets and keeps pigs
at Boezinge, and has a neat pile of two dozen or so shells - mostly British,
with a few French and German ones - ready for collection.
"Every time we plough we find a
few more so we leave them here by the cowshed and wait for the Dovos to
come."
Except in winter, when the ground is
waterlogged, the shells are blown up twice a day in special pits in a field
next to the Steenstraat base. Toxic ammunition containing poisons like
phosgene are x-rayed and treated separately.
CPO Baelde is a local lad from
Messines, and remembers happy boyhood hours collecting shell fuses. He
joined the Dovos, an all-volunteer unit, after 22 years as a navy diver.
The Dovos have a strong sense of
camaraderie forged by exposure to danger, black humour - and a special
allowance called "bibbergeld" (literally
"shaking-money") that helps buy a few beers in the camp bar after
a day's work.
But protective gear is almost
non-existent. "Body armour is just to keep the pieces together so they
can give you a decent funeral," laughs Baede. "Shit happens. If
one of those six-inchers goes bang, now ... sorry boys."
Belgian bomb disposal and mine
clearance experts operate as far afield as Cambodia, Kuwait and Kosovo. But
it is on these first world war battlefields at home that the bulk of their
work is done. And it could take 70 more years to finish.
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