A Long Dark Shadow

This is just a startling quote from Adam Hochschild's new book To End All Wars

More than 700 million artillery and mortar rounds were fired on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918, of which an estimated 15 percent failed to explode. Every year these leftover shells kill people-36 in 1991 alone, for instance, when France excavated the track bed for a new high-speed rail line. Dotted throughout the region are patches of uncleared forest or scrub surrounded by yellow danger signs in French and Enflish warning hikers away. The French government employs teams of demineurs, roving bomb-disposal specialists, who respond to calls when villagers discover shells; they collect and destroy 900 tons of unexploded munitions each year. More than 630 French demineurs have died in the line of duty since 1946. (Hochschild, xii)

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at the enormity or the staying power of the Great War in our lives, but I am. It is still hard to grasp death and destruction on such an absurdly industrial scale, and yet the reality of the modern mechanized war that World War I inaugurated has been with us now for almost a century. A contemporary example is useful to illustrate the relative destructive power unleashed from 1914-1918. The people of Afgahnistan, and the allied soldiers fighting there know all too well the reality of modern war, and the all the deadly detritus it leaves behind. But even Afganhistan, the "most minded country in the world" with it's 30 years of internecine conflict, currently has only an estimated 100,000 land mines (past figures have indicated numbers as high as 500,000 land mines, but the US military has helped clear a lot of mines). The unexploded ordinance remaining at the end of World War I according to Hochschild's numbers would number over 100 million. I know that land mines and unexploded ordinance are different (land mines are intentionally hidden, unexploded ordinance is not), but this gives you an idea of the extreme scale of destruction that World War I unleashed.

And even beyond the shear number of bombs and the dead they left behind, there is something terrifyingly special about the First World War's brand of mechanized destruction. Perhaps because it was the first, perhaps because so many of its participants didn't yet understand the new rules of war, the First World War has always seemed especially cruel. It murdered the innocence of the modern world, and we've lived in its shadow ever since.